The Environment – A Terra Incognita for Most Sociologists in Serbia

Abstract

The issue of future societal development has captured the attention of scientists and experts from different fields and it is increasingly associated with environmental capacity and quality. The reach and the topicality of the issue were identified more than 40 years ago, while the solution materialized years later as a new paradigm of societal development – sustainable development. Considering the subject of study of sociology and its significance for steering societal development, this author was faced with the question of how and to what extent Serbian sociologists deal in their theoretical and empirical studies with the nature-society relationship and with sustainable development as a globally accepted development model. The discussion in this paper is based on the articles published in leading Serbian national journals in the fields of sociology and multidisciplinary sciences. The first findings reveal that sociologists less frequently deal with the environment and sustainable development than other social scientists, such as jurists, economists, psychologists, pedagogists, or andragologists. In this author’s opinion, one of the reasons for the relative marginalization of sociological research on the society-environment relationship is the relatively belated inclusion of specialized sociological disciplines such as social ecology or environmental sociology in the curricula of sociology academic programmes.