Abstract
Due to their view of the constitution of the ‘social’, social sciences tend to exclude the biophysical environment from their subject matter. In order to prevent naturalistic explanations, only social explanantia have been taken up in explanatory approaches to social facts. However, increasing environmental problems and the discourse on sustainable development cast severe doubts regarding the exclusion of the biophysical environment. Accordingly, several approaches strive to integrate biophysical aspects into existing social theory. Most of these theoretical approaches are, however, limited to either focusing upon the level of individual action or on the macro level. The institutional level largely remains underexposed. In respect of this research desideratum the paper presents the concept of “ecological regimes”, which provides an innovative contribution to integrate the biophysical environment into existing social theory on level of aggregated action.
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Notes
- 1.
Gross (2001) reminded us that Max Weber already discussed topics such as scarce resources or nature’s exploitation and that these topics motivated social movements and initiatives around 1900.
- 2.
“Environmental” crisis has become a very popular locution these days. Although there can be no doubt concerning the different risks, we would like to appeal for a more cautious handling of the term “crisis”. As it is rather doubtful to treat the past 40 years as a continuously ongoing environmental crisis, we prefer to talk in terms of risks and challenges.
- 3.
This methodological postulate is normally understood as an exclusion of any biophysical aspect in an explanation of social structure, i.e. that social facts must exclusively be explained by other social facts. An alternative reading of Durkheim will, however, easily find these parts in his work, where he was confronted with the relation between social and biophysical aspects while describing the social facts. Besides characterizing social facts he also coined the term ‘social morphology’, meaning all things and material objects of society. For him, society is composed not only of individuals but also of material objects (Durkheim 1984: 93; Gross 2001; Jahn and Wehling 1998).
- 4.
We kindly remind the disputants of the fact that the meaning of a term is given by a definition. In the same way as ‘societal metabolism’ doesn’t have the same meaning like ‘physiological metabolism’, ‘ecological regime’, defined in terms of human action, it may look like the same locution as used by hydrologists or biologists, but has a fundamentally different meaning.
- 5.
Weichhart (2003) followed a related approach in action-setting theory. The theory describes how subjects in a certain context orientate in relation to biophysical conditions to realize their aim. In terms of systems, action settings consist of actors, material structures and a program setting.
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Acknowledgment
This paper presents a theoretical result from the research project “Biophysical World and the autonomy of the Social. Ecological Regimes – a contribution to a conceptual integration of ‚environment’ into social theory,” financed by the Swiss Science Foundation.
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Baerlocher, B., Burger, P. (2010). Ecological Regimes: Towards a Conceptual Integration of Biophysical Environment into Social Theory. In: Gross, M., Heinrichs, H. (eds) Environmental Sociology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8730-0_5
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