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♪ Music ♪ In this lecture, Dr. Tom Rudel overviews three classical sociological theorists - Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. He notes that all three are structuralists, but that each identifies a different force as structuring economic activities and outcomes. He describes Marx's focus on the factory as the site of production and consumption and he notes that contemporary theories of the treadmill of production and world systems derived from Marx's theories.
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He then summarizes the theories of Weber who sees the rationalized state structuring production and consumption and highlights ecological modernization and notions of a world society as updates of Weber's theories. Finally, he discusses Durkheim's ideas about occupations and the Division of Labor as structuring economic activity and notes the theoretical assumption that stability and technological development are generated by economic specialization.
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Okay, so what we're going to be doing is talking about Marx, Weber, and Durkheim and what I'm going to give you is a brief sort of synopsis of their theories. We're not going to cover the entire oeuvre of each one of these people because they wrote tremendous amounts of stuff on very diverse topics. Okay, so the first thing about these theorists is they've been taken to task, properly so beginning 35, 40 years ago for ignoring the role of the environment in their
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general discussions of society and that critique is, it's well-grounded; there's no question about it. What I want to do today is sort of alter the intellectual agenda a little bit and talk about the utility of their theories as a heuristic tool for exploring environment society relations, so this is a somewhat different kind of intellectual agenda than the one that has typically been undertaken in looking at the three of them. Okay, so let me talk a little bit about what the three of
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them share in the way of intellectual points of departure.
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One is that they're all, all three of them were preoccupied by what Polanyi calls the great transformation, in other words, the massive industrialization and urbanization of European societies, in particular, somewhat in the 19th century, basically all trying to explain it, but from somewhat different points of departure. All three of them applauded Darwin's work and so and actually, reading back into them, you can see co-evolutionary kinds of strains of thought and
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where the ecology and the society, the economic sociology, it to some degree parallel one another. They, we talked about the amount of work that they did and then finally all of these people in somewhat, census are examining the context within which market changes occur, so if you're thinking, trying to relate this to what the economist had to say last time you guys met, this is largely about the context within or the structures around market exchanges.
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Okay, so let's say if we call them all structuralists the, one of the key ways of differentiating the three Marx, Weber, Durkheim is the type of structure that they focus on, so if you're talking, thinking about Marx think about factories, factories that convert natural resources into commodities through human labor; that's really the focus of most of his analytic work. If you're talking about Weber, you want to think about norms, but you also want to think about
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offices that contain bureaucracies that enforce norms and these are not just a public offices, but private enterprise offices as well. And with Durkheim, you want to think about norms too, but here you also want to think about cities which house different kinds of occupational specialists with distinct set of norms. Okay, so let's start with Marx and then we'll do Weber and then we'll do Durkheim and they we'll try to sum up and draw a couple of lessons for how
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one might look at environment society relations using their theories, so with Marx it's factory owners engaged in an insatiable drive for profits which they earn by exploiting both workers and natural resources okay, so the owner is in somewhat senses the central human figure in at least understanding what how this process works. Technological changes are there, these are the forces of production that interact with the relations of production to produce changes
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in output and in structure of factories. The, one crucial concept, which we're going to spend a little bit of time, fair amount of time talking about involves this idea of a metabolic rift, which as industrialization occurs this metabolic rift opens between city and country, so basically what happens is the, with the improvement in transportation the, these various entrepreneurs, owners of the means of production, strip, manage to strip rural areas of their natural resources and
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feed them into factories which produce a growing stream of commodities and increasing amounts of pollution, so what this means is that if you think about cities and countryside the, what's going on in these places actually begins to diverge. In cities you get this massive buildup of natural resources which are transformed into commodities increasing, by increasing numbers of workers and increasing, and in the process they generate more and more pollution, so you should think about cities
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as places where resources pile up - crash - and
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pollution builds up and natural areas or excuse me rural areas is becoming places that are stripped of their natural resources, so think cut, if you're thinking forests, think of cutover districts and you'll get a, so the, what emerges here is a, this something of a rift between rural peoples and rural societies, on the one hand, and urban peoples and urban societies, on the other hand. There's also a, and this is what Marx referred to as the metabolic rift, there is a social psychological
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component of this, Marx doesn't talk about it much, but the, basically urban dwellers become sort of estranged from their natural world there the two are no longer, they're no longer interacting on any kind of daily basis with the places that are producing the resources that they work with every day, so you get this rift has, this rift that we were talking about has a sort of an experiential dimension to it. So what is the metabolic rift? So this is this, this is a notion that actually derives
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from the work of a German soil scientist, Justus von Leibig and the essential notion is that, okay in normal properties of soils, you have all kinds of metabolic reactions going on okay, it builds the organic matter in the soil amongst other things. With the industrialization and increasing demand, intensification of agriculture and in some senses the industrialization of agriculture, this, these metabolic processes breakdown. In other words, the increasing use of chemical fertilizers,
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you get soil exhaustion and in a desperate search among other things for fertilizers that work, so if you're trying to think of the guano rage in, you can recall it in the mid-19th century, due in part to this desperate search for fertilizers to rejuvenate or rehabilitate soils that have been exhausted by an indust-, increasingly industrialized agriculture and so this is the kind of, this kind of soil mining in rural areas is part and parcel of
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this larger metabolic rift that Marx was talking about. Okay, so what, how would you, how would Marx heal the metabolic rift created by capitalism? Well he's not really very clear about this. He talks about, well somehow the producers will become associated in this post capitalist phase and that will lead to a more kind of precautionary or a more environmentally friendly kind of soil manipulations, so if you're talking about actual socialist regimes,
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there's really none of them in the 20th century with the possible exception of the Cuban regime in the 1990s, makes much of a commitment to doing any sort of take the goal of sustainability with regard to soils or otherwise very seriously. Okay, so new theoretical departures from using Marx's theories sort of as its point of departure. There are a fair number of them and there, they've been quite productive in, meaning that they've, written a lot of articles, they've gotten cited
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a fair amount, they definitely made a difference. So the first one, that I'm going to talk about here is, involves Alan Schnaiberg, whose name came up just a few minutes ago, and when we were talking about the treadmill of production, Lori talked about it, so this is this idea that, it's consistent with the notion of this insatiable drive for profits on the part of the owners of the means of production, that one needs to keep continually spewing out of commodities out that
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factory door, you know, and so there's this is kind of, owners and enterprises and workers get caught up on this treadmill of, think assembly lines and it, this is necessary to keep on generating the profits, okay. The, in recent years there's been more reference made by Neo-Marxists to this notion of Jevon's paradox - his paradox is essentially one where you would think with increased technological advances and increased efficiencies, for instance,
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in the case of coal, that was his example, Jevon's example, that what that would lead to is less use of coal, but what in fact was historically observed was in fact coal effic-, more, there was more efficient use of coal made, but rather than a reduction in the amount of coal that was being used, it was in fact an expansion, as people found new uses for now cheaper raw materials meaning coal, so that was Jevon's paradox, instead of getting a decline in
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the amount of coal being used, you got an increase with increased efficiency in coal use and this is in part probably due to this persistent kind of treadmill of production and his constant search for new markets on the part of capitalists involving advertising that is part and parcel of this treadmill of production. Okay a second line of development again that's Marxist in origin involves world system theory and Andrew's going to be talking about this later on today in much more detail.
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And this is this idea, basically I think it, maybe others would disagree, but that it takes basically the metabolic rift, that division between urban, the city and rural area and expands it to a world systemic terms and talks, incorporates for the first time colonial relations between a metropol and its colonies into it, so if you, in a world systemic point of view, the metropol becomes the factory, the place that consumes the natural resources and
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generates the pollution levels and the peripher-, the rural area becomes the periphery, rural area meaning the colonies; they're stripped of resources to feed the factories back in the metropol, at least in its initial carnation in the 19th century, a large number of the colonial empires could be understood in those terms and so what you have in this kind of process is what is, was called vertical trade, is called vertical trade by economists from of unprocessed raw materials from
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a colonial setting to a urban industrial setting in Western Europe or the U.S. and in exchange for manufactured goods, okay, at terms of trade that were declining throughout this period meaning it was advantage for the producers or the manufacturers, disadvantage for the producers of the natural resources and this kind of exchange is sometimes referred to as unequal ecological exchange in part because what's going on here is an exchange which does not take
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into account the environmental degradations going on in the places of production, in the places where the natural resources are produced and if you're think, if you want a contemporary classic example of this, it would be a situation where a European Union country imports oil palm from Indonesia. Well oil palm in Indonesia is devastated large areas of the outer islands and have been fires related to its massive production. At the same time, if France one of, a fairly big consumer
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of oil palm has shown gradual sorts of reforestation, so what you get in this setting is a quite different trajectories environmentally based on this unequal ecological exchange. Okay and then finally Polanyi's double movement theory, this is a notion that comes out of his book <i>The Great</i> <i>Transformation</i> and again what it, its premised on this sort of sequence that Marx envisaged here of exploitation and despoliation environmental, but also social meaning
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exploited labor that leads to a second movement, a kind of popular uprising against this unjust social order, but also unjust environmental order, so in some senses the double movement theory can be applied to the emergence of the environmental movement. Okay, now there's you can go on longer, there's other kinds of Neo-Marxist initiatives from Marx, I'm not going to go into some of them because I'm, but there are certainly, there are some other initiatives.
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This list though of Neo-Marxist work is pretty impressive in the sense that it's attract, they've attracted wide intent, wide attention, lots of this work has been done, it's a real source for contemporary environmental sociology. With that here's some references on Marx, these are just some very basic ones. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about Max Weber. So first of all again a vast array of work. There's a whole slew of books out there, he does
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this comparative historical work on India, on China, on the ancient Middle East, that wasn't enough. He kept on going; he did the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, basically an argument about the origins of capitalism in 1905 and then he, after his, posthumously his wife published <i>Economy</i> <i>and Society</i> in 1920, shortly after he died and this is a, an argument again about the spread of capitalism, so in that sense the touch, his point of departure is
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similar to Marx's okay, but he sees different drivers and the environment does figure in this work, sometimes as a container meaning he says well it's you're in an area environment, so it's going to be this kind of society, but sometimes as a driver, so in other words sometimes a drought for instance plays a role, at least in some of the Middle Eastern work. One of the arguments we're going to, one of the, probably his chief argument in <i>Economy and Society</i>
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again <i>The Great Transformation</i> kind of argument is that there's a kind of progressive rationalization of human societies that is going on as capitalism sort of takes over and so if you're thinking capitalist here, think of somebody with eyeshades on and somebody who wants, is calculating efficient reduces uncertainty increases predictability and uses increasingly amounts, increasing amounts of non-human technologies, so technology, technological change definitely shows
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up here and the calculations here is always, okay, one of increasing profits, so in that sense this is a there's a somewhat similar emphasis here or a place at least where Marx and Weber meet.
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The state also grows along with the, these capitalist enterprises, it's sort of like a parallel growth and it to exhibits these similar qualities of increase the spread of rational sort of deliberations and in this case to maybe manage or manipulate or at least order social relations as they change during the course of the capitalist expansion. Okay, so from our point of view one of the important, most important sorts of legacies that Marx has, it, I
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mean, excuse me, that Weber has is that he's really the first theorist to accord an independent role of, to the state in the process of capitalist development, so Marx certainly has a role for the place, for the state, but oftentimes the state is seen as an instrument for the owners of the mean, means of production, okay, and there's some vigorous debates that went on in the 20th century amongst Marxist about this, but none that, point is that Weber really puts the state front and center.
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What this means is that if you are in your work, are thinking about environmental reforms, most likely Weberian sorts of analyses are going to be front and center in your analysis at least you're going to bump into some Weberian ideas even if they're not called that during the course of doing that work on environmental reforms in whatever particular domain you're talking about. Okay, so, but Weber does talk about, so for instance in his work on the state he talks about
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traditional sort of authority and, meaning which, where essentially the authority of the structures state relations is drawn from the family analogically from the family, so that the head of state is viewed like a father, okay, and what this means is that relations within the state are, I take on what are, he sometimes referred to it, refers to it as a patrimonial kind of aspect, one talks about the patrimonial state. During the course of modernization, there is this
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rationalization process that goes on and increasingly state's policy and in state personnel decisions are made in a more meritocratic kind of basis and oftentimes democracies develop at the same time, so this kind of, with this kind of spread of rationalization, the state changes its form in a fundamental sort of way. So let me just take some of the Weberian, take this sort of core Weberian analyses and run you through quickly some of the strands of Weberian analysis that
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you can see in environmental sociology, so you, actually the first one is not so visible, but it's sort of there. One is the use of the notion that development is, involves the spread of meritocratic bureaucratic structures in, across states, okay, and so this is a kind, line of analysis that retains as much to environmental regulations as to any regulations in any other domain that the state is engaged in and so if you have to explain, for instance, high levels of corruption that
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make it virtually impossible to enforce environmental regulations in a developing country, you sort of have to go back to what are now referred to as Neo-patrimonial political structures that are at the core of those states which involve people getting positions and then using the positions for private, for personal benefit and in the case of say air pollution in Mexico City, that can lead to a slowing of the implementation of air pollution control
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laws, okay, so neo-patrimonial states are key here. Okay, so then there's something, a variance, people who call themselves world society theorists these are people who to some degree see the spread of similar political structures across state lines, in other words states, new states tend to imitate old states in terms of their structure; well, you know, if you want to be called a state you need to have a department that regulates the environment, so let's do what the folks down,
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you know, a couple of islands over did and have it and develop an environment department. This and similarly one might expect to see, you know, people were talking about post Paris, the idea that there might be global peer pressure, in other words, that countries which came up with significant plans to cut GHG emissions would generate a kind of pressure to create similar sorts of plans in other countries. This is the, this dynamic is driven arguably at least by, in this kind of argument, by this
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process of rationalization to some extent okay, so it has a Weberian sort of notion to it. Then, environmental state encourages processes of ecological modernization again because they were, they, it's a rationalization, they reduce the amount of the environmental damage that the new machines create, so ecological moderningzation; it basically involves the cleaning, basically the substitution of a dirtier technol-, of a cleaner technology for a dirtier technology and one could make the case that
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it's part of a rationalization process okay. And the, you know, there's all kinds of examples of a substitution of cleaner fossil fuels for dirtier ones certainly is just one of them, but Weber would see this as a rationalization process, okay. And then finally one more example of it, this time it's a different agent of control, it's these roundtables of sustainable commodity producers, sustainable oil palm, I'm just going to stay with that, the oil palm example here.
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The governance of these global flows by these commodity producing associations would be another examples of this kind of rationalization process at a global scale. Regimes theory in political science which I guess maybe you won't be hearing about is a similar kind of argument about the development of these rational institutions to govern the use of resources or commodities; it has a Weberian cast to it. Okay, so couple of other little segways about Weber and then we'll talk about Durkheim.
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One of the things, most planning processes are interpretable in Weberian terms, in other words it's, planning processes are rationalization, the attempt to use rationality to come up with distribution of resources or commodities that meet a variety of goals, some of them environmental, some of them social, okay, that kind of argument that kind of process is something that Weber was right on okay and so if you want to go back to kind of get at some of the
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for how these planning processes work, Weber would be a good intellectual point of departure. And Lewis Mumford actually in the mid-20th century made these points about planning processes and the degree to which they can be understood in a Weberian sort of framework.
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So if you're talking about planned reductions in GHG emissions in many ways what's going on there is a process that Weber would have understood very, you know, he would have understood almost intuitively it fits into his, his intellectual framework. It also suggests and this is me speaking not anybody else that some of these emerging social formations that drive processes of environmental reform might end up taking a corporate, corporatist form.
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By corporatist I mean a, institutional structures that link the macro with the micro okay, and run through things like inter capitalist enterprises, but also labor unions and are sometimes coordinated right at the top sectorally okay, and then, some of these corporatists frameworks they have the intellectual, the history of these things is a little bit ugly, I mean it's the first places to introduce them in the 20th century were Fascist enter, Fascist states in the 1930s Spain and
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Italy as well, but you do see them, the same sort of social formation in France post-world war II, so it's not exclusively the sort of thing that shows up in these nasty first examples of it, but this corporatist frame as a way to facilitate micro macro interactions seems to me to be where we're going, it's also something that I think Weber would pick up on and say yeah this is more of the same. So a couple of references for Weber. Okay, so Durkheim, again a wide array of studies,
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probably the most famous one is his study of suicide and its variations from Catholic to Protestant and rural to urban populations in France, but there's a sociology of religion, there's the rules of the sociological method. Lori did a great job of running through them real quickly. What we're going to focus on here today is the first thing that he published which is this Division of Labor in modern society which was his doctoral dissertation; it's quite a start to a career.
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Okay, so sorry for the text here, but, so basically the theory is that when you can, when competition intensifies, when you increase populations and put them in the same place and that that kind of increased competition leads people to specialize and to trade the products produced through the specialties. So occupations emerge as people become specialists in particular activities and so you get this more pronounced division of labor, so think late 19th,
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early 20th century which more or less coincides with the emergence of modern professions. Weber, I mean Durkheim was on to that. He's the, interestingly enough, he's the only one of the three classical theorists to assign a prominent role to population growth or population change in at least, and again remember their focused on the great transformation, but population is a relatively insignificant variable in all three of these theoretical constructions, less so
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though with Durkheim than with the others.
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The, and, there again, there's technological change, but this time mostly by specialists that plays a role in this overall dynamic, drives urbanization and industrialization. Three decades ago, a prominent environmental sociologist, now deceased, Fred Buttel noted that there's a kind of coincidence between Durkheim's Division of Labor theory and land use patterns and in particular the point being that just as people become more specialized, landscapes become more specialized.
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So one quick way to kind of see this, if you look at U.S. agri-, U.S. farms, one of the things that's dramatic about them is over the last 30 to 40 years has been the decline in mixed livestock-crop operations; virtually all farms now either produce crops or most and most animals come out of feedlot operations of one sort or another, so that's a circumstance where people have specialized the agricultural tasks okay, and so the notion here is that as occupations specialize, landscapes
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specialize, so a couple of lousy examples, probably from California, but one is the Yosemite National Park. The parks are very specialized uses of land and they, the people in those parks are organized to deliver a particular kind of service to visitors okay, a very sort of specialized kind of service recreation, right near there. There are these places in the Central Valley, which are organized around the production of almonds okay, they have organizations which are, of almond producers.
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These specialists are, to some degree, they really rule how land use occurs at least on a daily basis in these sorts of settings okay, you can this level of specialization goes on and on and on; I mean you can talk about arts districts in cities, you can talk about residences in, of single-family home owners in suburbs, and the crucial point would be that this specialization of these land uses has an impact on landscape change and in particular they're,
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are drivable kinds of impacts again from Durkheim. So the point is, when you talk about these specialists producers, they sometimes have unusual reactions to prospects for change and a couple, I've just put a couple of them up here on the board, but and I'll talk about some more tomorrow when we talk about spatial analyses, but, so, you know, ranchers opposed to the Keystone pipeline or homeowners opposed to fracking are both specialists or mobilize specialists are pushing
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against a very, a landscape change that is being advocated by capitalists okay, so the politics of these sorts of processes are to some extent derivable from Durkheim's original kind of work on division of labor. Okay, so a couple more things just, so this division of labor work can be combined with other work some of it subsequent to some of it more or less contemporary to Durkheim. Central Place Theory in many respects is a, can be understood as a kind of setting in which
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specialists are going to thrive, at least you'll find more land use is possible within a particular context where there's more people and in part this is a derivable from Durkheim's work. But the point being that central place theory and Durkheim's division of labor can be complemented in some pretty effective sorts of ways. In many respects the classic kind of human ecology produced by the Chicago School people in the 1920s is a, is another example
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of this kind of specialization, the creation of warehouse zones outside the city of Chicago. The concentration of financial and transactions in distinct districts in the center of Chicago; all that is in some ways a, an application of Durkheim and then I would make the case that the creation of some of these growth machines, this is a more contemporary kind of theory, urban growth machines that produce housing or produce some sort of activity and do it iteratively,
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in other words over and over and over again cause they can make money doing it, every time a new interstate is built, they do it, it's a specialized sort of social formation that works very well in a particular kind of context okay, and is again derivable, to some degree, from Durkheim's original work. There's less work here incidentally than with Weber or Marx, so if you're thinking classical theorists and an opportunity, think Durkheim.
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Okay, so conclusions; well first of all, I mean, I and this again this is me speaking about just my own sense of things, but if you're if what you're running into in your work is inequalities or unevenness in terms of environmental impacts with environmental degradation as being part of the story, most likely the fruitful kind of theoretical touchstone for that work at least with regard to the human component is going to be Marx okay, he's just a, he, he's, his notions on
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metabolic rift and the work of his successors have provided a really wide array of concepts, a useful array of concepts for looking at various sorts of looking at impacts, unevenness in terms of impacts okay. If your focus is more restorative, in other words how do we get reform, how do we somehow improve these sorts of situations, it seems to be very difficult to avoid using Weber, in some sort of way because his rationalization notion seemed to be crucial to most
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efforts at environmental reforms and to the extent to which you think of corporatist kinds of arrangements as something that we're going to have to go to in order to get thoroughgoing declines or large scale declines in GHG emissions, it seems to me that, yeah, one needs to sort of start with his Weberian and Durkheimian kinds of analyses and work our way through to the shapes that those corporatist arrangements will take. ♪ Music ♪
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