We analyze the relationship between legitimation, resource mobilization, and political opportunity and the founding rate of national environmental organizations between 1895 and 1994. We address recent criticisms that organizational ecologists' reliance on the density dependence model—which treats legitimation as an unmeasured intervening variable—has failed to capture the active sociopolitical character of this process. We advocate a more historical approach to legitimation which relies on print media to construct direct measures of legitimation. Specifically, we use the yearly count of environmental books published as a measure of the legitimacy of environmentalism in the U.S. This count remains statistically significant and positively related to foundings even when other variables are added to the model. A negative second‐order effect of total books suggests that the recent proliferation of state and local environmental organizations is beginning to depress the founding rate of national organizations. Variations in resource mobilization and political opportunity also have affected foundings, though variables measuring the latter were not significant in the full model.
Three decades after Dunlap's (1978, 1980) pioneering work, the promise and potential of environmental sociology remain unrealized. Despite the proliferation of theoretical frameworks and empirical foci, a "new ecological paradigm" capable of theorizing the interactions between social structures, human agency, and biophysical environments has yet to emerge. I explore this impasse by tracing the parallels between the Darwinian revolution and recent shifts in metatheoretical assumptions within environmental and mainstream sociology and related disciplines. These parallels suggest that the social sciences are in the midst of a second Darwinian revolution. A fuller appreciation of this intellectual convergence can provide the first steps toward a new evolutionary environmental sociology.
Ecological modernization theory (EMT) has emerged as a major theoretical and policy-making perspective. Despite its growing influence, EMT has significant limitations both as a descriptive and as a prescriptive theory. Taking the Darwinian revolution’s rejection of essentialism and developmentalism as the touchstone for ecological thinking, the author argues that EMT is premised on a nonecological foundation. The nonecological underpinnings of EMT preclude its elaboration into a descriptive theory capable of conceptualizing the interactions between social structures, human agency, and biophysical environments. As a prescriptive theory, these same assumptions marginalize people and projects that depart from EMT’s restricted vision of modernization. The author concludes by contrasting EMT with an evolutionary perspective on social change, premised on the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape, which combines population thinking with moderate constructionist insights into agency and culture. From the latter perspective, EMT’s prescriptive claims can be interpreted as a form of strategic essentialism.
This article reconceptualizes current analyses of adaptation and vulnerability to climate change within an evolutionary theory of social change premised on the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape. The latter describes a negotiated and contested fitness terrain. Individual and corporate actors simultaneously adapt to and actively manipulate this terrain by using alternative collective action frames, mobilizing resources, and creating or exploiting political opportunities in order to legitimate or delegitimate social structures and their associated technologies at various levels of analysis. Adaptation is conceptualized as occurring through homeostatic, developmental, rational choice, and populational mechanisms. Vulnerability results from the adaptive failure of social structures sustaining individual and collective health, livelihood, and well-being. This framework combines organizational sociologists’ insights into structure–environment interaction; constructionists’ attention to agency, language, culture, and values; and political ecologists’ concerns with power, inequality, and processes of marginalization.
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