Climate change – what economic sociology has to offer

Anita Engels
Welcome to crisis mode. Anthropogenic climate change is not only globally recognized as a well-established scientific analysis of what is currently happening to planet Earth, but it even seems to be accelerating recently. While governments are trying to contain the Covid-19 pandemic and struggle with its dramatic short- and long-term effects, the global climate crisis is building in the background with maybe even more far-reaching consequences.

with Andy Hoffman
What is your motivation for teaching climate change in business classes?
I have a very clear answer to that question: If business does not solve the problem of climate change, it won’t be solved. The market is the most powerful institution on Earth, business is the most powerful entity within it. So the market has to shift to address climate change. Many blame the market for climate change and the emergence of the Anthropocene, some call it the Capitalocene, and that’s a fair criticism, but if we are going to address these issues, the market has to shift.

with Benjamin Sovacool
What was your motivation when you started thinking about a new journal on social science research on energy?
I wish I could give you an elegant grand answer that the motivation was to create a better world or to convince policy makers. But actually, it was a very strategic move of people in the energy studies field – people who study energy supply, energy use, energy demand. We had a whole family of journals that we could publish in, but even the so-called social science journals which had names like Energy Policy weren’t very social science-oriented.

with Simone Pulver
What was your motivation to engage in the ASA Task Force on Sociology and Global Climate Change?
I first got involved in this a very long time ago. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and American Sociological Association (ASA) co-ran a workshop in 2008, titled “Sociological Perspectives on Global Climate Change,” which was a precursor to the ASA Task Force on Sociology and Global Climate Change, launched in 2010. You remember how it was back then; for a long time, climate change was an issue of interest in other disciplines.

Eve Chiapello
The aim of this article is to suggest certain avenues of reflection on the growing importance of finance when imagining a new stage in environmental policies that systemically accompanies the financialization of capitalism. We then show that the alignment of green finance with the economic-political regime from which it emerged condemns it, for the time being, to impotence. Yet criticism might result in the reform effort shifting towards more ambitious proposals.

Mitchel Abolafia  · 2020
Stewards of the Market: How the Federal Reserve Made Sense of the Financial Crisis
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Reviewer: Julian Jürgenmeyer

Stefan Ouma  · 2020
Farming as Financial Asset. Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes
Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing
Reviewer: Alexander Dobeson

Sarah Quinn · 2019
American Bonds. How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation
Princeton: Princeton University Press
Reviewer: Jeanne Lazarus