on promises to act in collectively beneficial ways to the extent that their immediate personal incentives to defect
are high and their faith that the other parties will keep the promise is low. If the immediate material incentives
to defect are kept stable, experiments show, compliance to the promise will be improved to the extent that actors
increase their trust in each other through repeated games in which they both learn the terrible consequences of
defection. In other words, moving away from impersonal self-seeking rationality, the actors have to develop
relationships with each other that are mediated by trust. While trust may have a rational basis in past experience,
at any given moment the pattern of trust among actors exists as a patterned network in society that is not reducible
to self-interest. Therefore, as ways to control the self-destructive dynamics of a group, along with reducing the
short term material incentives for defection, there also exists the possibility of building and intensifying the
networks of trust conducive to cooperation toward the long term among the actors. While we know this much
from experiments on small groups, though, we have no sure knowledge about how to apply the same principles
to bigger, more diffuse groups, such as nations or global society. The indication of relevance, though, presents
us with a fundamental hypothesis to structure research on the dynamics of larger-scale social interaction in
general, as in this case as applied to the dilemma of global climate change. At the national and global scale, social
dynamics become enormously more complex and difficult to adjudicate, and global climate change does not give
us the luxury of repeated games.
What do we need to know: What are the major sociological research questions?
To respond to climate change, we need to know about more than the final binding decisions taken by authorities
or the ecological effects of individual and social behavior. We need to probe more deeply, into the social demands
and their representation that so strongly condition decisions and behavioral practices. Only by grasping these
deeper social processes can we hope to devise ways to channel them in more beneficial directions. Yet, our
understanding of them remains fallible at best. Different disciplines see social demand and its political effects
through distinct paradigmatic glasses. Where economists and political scientists attribute social and political
behavior to rational choices and formal institutions, sociologist see patterns of relationships at work. To explain
the emblematic Prisoners’ Dilemma, rational choice and formal institutionalism may suffice for the incentives
and rules, but the emergence of trust and cooperation requires the relational perspective of sociology. There lies
the distinct contribution of sociology to the study of these social processes. Because of its relational orientation,
sociology is well prepared to study the networks and flows of interaction among social actors, sectors and
institutions (structural analysis) and social categories of meaning (discourse analysis) as constituent inter-actor
processes that construct macro-outcomes. For instance, sociology’s relational perspective has sparked the study
of: 1) large-scale social change; 2) social constructionism; 3) social movements; 4) social networks; 5) power
structures (fields 2, 3 and 4 have recently started to spread to political science).
When we look at the problem from this perspective, many lines of inquiry open up. The crucial concern
is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of national societies. For this macro problem, two alternative theories
present themselves: the Treadmill of Production and Ecological Modernization. The Treadmill argues that a
powerful interest bloc of producers, workers and consumers drives continual economic growth and heedless
environmental exploitation. In contrast, the Ecological Modernization school argues that even such self-interested
actors, when they become aware of the long-term destructive consequences of their behavior, can learn to adopt
new sustainable practices. The Treadmill view assumes the primacy of conflict and the imposition of the winner’s
goals. But the Modernization view assumes the possibility of social learning through persuasion to cooperate
toward collectively beneficial long term goals. Either process could potentially be effective for GHG reductions.
The potential conditions of their effectiveness present a number of hypotheses for investigation.