Ecological Concepts in Sociological Theory: The Chicago School, Political Ecology, and the Environment

Joshua Silver, University of Chicago

In this paper, I track the use of ecological concepts in the social sciences during three periods (Turn of the Century – WWII, Post-War – 1978, and our contemporary period). I focus on the epistemic and textual practices by which researchers generated ecological knowledge and formed boundaries between various “ecological” schools with distinct problematics and epistemological foundations. Among these approaches to “human ecology,” “social ecology,” “political ecology,” “urban political ecology,” “socio-ecological systems,” and several other putatively human-ecological categories, the signifier “ecology” and associated ecological concepts have been used in many ways, though largely either 1) analogically, as an analogy between natural and social orders that allows for productive, though fundamentally incomplete, use of natural scientific concepts to help theorize and investigate social phenomenon or 2) holistically, as a way of theorizing humanity within the web of life, often with political goals of both achieving balance with the non-human environment and also achieving human liberation in some form, as in the case of the various “political ecologies.” While I conclude that the second usage is desirable, we have to remain clear that the first approach has produced a considerable body of methodologically rigorous research on social dynamics, especially in the study of institutions and organizations, but also micro-sociological interaction, urban sociology, and socio-spatial dynamics. That is, these two approaches need not be mutual exclusively, as they are often depicted. Ultimately, we must rigorously theorize how institutions-as-ecologies and ecologies-as-webs-of-life are themselves “linked ecologies.”

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 72. Ecosystems as Case and Concept