Moving Ahead: Environmental Sociology’s Contribution to Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research

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Authors

This volume's goal is to further scholarship within the intellectual tradition of environmental sociology and its inter- and transdisciplinary connections. That it is time for sociology to generally move away from its purely internal debates has been pointed out by many sociologists in the last 4 decades, who have lamented the low impetus of sociology in public forums and policy issues and have uttered a general crisis of the discipline (see e.g., Gouldner 1970; Lemert 1995; Lopreato and Crippens 2001; Clawson et al. 2007). It is our contention that many of these critical assessments of the current state of sociology are also a crisis of sociology's potential for trans- or at least interdisciplinary collaboration. And indeed, it appears to be unclear as to what extend sociology is able to deliver relevant knowledge to the solution of pressing societal questions in cooperation with other disciplines. The editors of this volume believe that environmental sociology, unlike many other sociological subdisciplines, has taken up the challenge of interdisciplinarity since quite a while. In Europe, the term transdisciplinarity is most often used to describe integrative forms of research that comprise different methods for relating scientific knowledge and extra-scientific practice in problem-solving. In this way, the research topics of many streams of European environmental sociology are not mainly driven by self-referential disciplinary theory building, but they are inherently problem and solution-oriented and therefore necessarily inter- and also transdisciplinary.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEnvironmental Sociology : European Perspectives and Interdisciplinary Challenges
EditorsMatthias Gross, Harald Heinrichs
Number of pages5
Place of PublicationDordrecht u.a.
PublisherSpringer
Publication date2010
Pages347-351
ISBN (Print)978-90-481-8729-4
ISBN (Electronic)978-90-481-8730-0
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010