Climate Change: What Role for Sociology?

Abstract

In a previous issue of this journal, Constance Lever-Tracy called on sociologists to become more involved in the debates about anthropogenic climate change. In this response to her article, the authors support her general argument but query four of her tenets: (1) they see other reasons for the lack of interest in climate change among sociologists; (2) they argue that the true challenge to climate change research is interdisciplinarity (as opposed to multidisciplinarity); (3) they emphasize the virtues of constructivism; and (4), while Lever-Tracy argues that climate change should be at the heart of the discipline, in the authors’ view, unless this is to be mere wishful thinking, there is a need to carefully consider the prospects of such an enterprise.