Ken Frank
Michigan State UniversitySocially Embedded Environmental ActionWhat do we know: What does Sociology bring to the table for studying the human dimensions of global
climate change?
It is individuals who take the actions that cumulatively contribute to climate change. These individuals might be
the CEOs of major industrial businesses who are responsible for their company’s contribution to pollution or rural
farmers who, en masse, decide how much fertilizer to use, how to contain biogas, etc. Therefore to modify the
human impacts on climate change we must understand individual motivations for action.
Our understanding of human decision making might start with economic theories of how people respond
to incentives to pursue resources, psychological theories of why people take actions for their well being and
theories from political science about how people respond to local institutions (Ostrom 1990). This would include
such areas as risk management, rituals and local norms, and logical fallacies behind seemingly irrational behavior.
To the economic, institutional, and psychological base the sociologist can help us understand how the
social contexts in which people are embedded affect their decisions. Members of our immediate social contexts
provide support, resources, and information that contribute to our well being and help us pursue our goals (see the
literature on social capital Coleman 1988; Lin 1999, 2001; Portes 1998). Therefore, people fundamentally want
to take actions to at most gain status, and at least to avoid being ostracized by members of their immediate social
contexts.
While Granovetter (1985) makes the embeddedness argument for economic action, I would extend the
theory to environmentally impactful action which is often a function of trade-offs with immediate economic
benefit. This embeddedness argument applies to CEOs who may take actions to conform to the norms in their
immediate social circles. Critically, these norms may emphasize environmentally friendly behavior or immediate
economic returns. I and my colleagues also observed how Vietnamese farmers responded to their social contexts
in deciding whether to use organic or conventional techniques, the former becoming the norm, but requiring the
forgoing of immediate gains to acquire the knowledge to successfully employ organic techniques.
What do we need to know: What are the major sociological research questions?
It is one thing to say that action is socially embedded, but it is another to empirically examine how embeddedness
works. To my mind, a key limitation of the work on embeddedness has been to identify the relevant social
contexts. For example, economists who have minimized the influence of peers on adolescents have defined peers
as all members of a school (see Akerlof and Kranton 2002 for a notable exception). But sociologists have long
been aware that peers can be more narrowly, and saliently, defined by social categories, course taking or direct
social relations. In fact, new sociological theory suggests that adolescents may be more influenced by those with
whom they would like to be friends than by their already existing friends who accept them for who they are
(Giordonno 2003; Frank et al 2008). Just so, we must identify the relevant social contexts for the range of actors
who impact the environment. This will likely draw on various applications of social network theories and tools.
For the CEO is the relevant social context the board of directors, social relations, members of the
family, members of community, or members of the church. For the rural farmer, is the relevant social context the
community, kin, or others outside the community who offer new economic opportunity? Of course, members of