The Social Specificity of Societal Nature Relations in a Flexible Capitalist Society

Abstract

Based on analyses of a 2016 German survey, this article contributes to debates on ‘societal nature relations’ by investigating the systematic differences between socially specific types of social relations with nature in a flexible capitalist society. It presents a typology of ten different ‘syndromes’ of attitudes toward social and environmental issues, which are then grouped to distinguish between four ideal types of social relationships with nature: dominance, conscious mutual dependency, alienation and contradiction. These are located in Pierre Bourdieu's (1984) social space to illustrate how social relationships with nature correspond to people's positions within the totality of social relations. Understanding how people's perceptions of and actions pertaining to nature are shaped by their positions in these intersecting relations of domination – both within social space and between society and nature – is an important precondition for developing transformative strategies that will be capable of gaining majority support in flexible capitalist societies.