R Gunderson
Biographic Data
| ID | 31642 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Gunderson |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Gunderson |
| SIGNATURE | GUNDERSON R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Miami University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3837-0723 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 72 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 320 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 72 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Coal industry senior executives on climate policy and coal futures
Is a New Economic System Necessary to Address Climate Change
An increasing number of leading scientists have stated that societies must transition away from a growing economic system to address climate change. Other scholars have called for general “system change” or specifically transitioning to a postcapitalist economy. Yet is a new economic system necessary to address the climate crisis? Answering this question requires examining the relevant research and empirical evidence about the relationships betwe…
Global Capital and Amphibian Extinctions: Ecologically Unequal Exchange with Colonial and Neocolonial Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka has the highest number of recorded amphibian extinctions and most of the island’s remaining amphibian species are threatened with extinction. From a critical political-economic perspective that integrates previously disconnected lines of analysis in herpetological conservation, development, land use change, and colonial and neocolonial histories, we argue that these extinctions and extinction risks should not be understood as a localize…
Derailed and Denaturalized: The Case of East Palestine, Ohio
This study analyzes public discourse on the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment through online interactions in a community Facebook group. Using a critical discourse analysis framework, we explore how residents framed the disaster, engaged with competing narratives, and navigated scientific and political information. Our findings challenge the assumptions of moral panic and risk society perspectives, which often depict the public as irrational …
Addressing the Irrational Drivers of the Climate Crisis: Surplus Repression and Destructive Production
An increasing number of scientists have illustrated how economic growth is an underlying driver of the climate crisis. This article examines how associated levels of excess work, production, and consumption repress human flourishing and drive global warming. Drawing from the work of Herbert Marcuse and André Gorz, we discuss the irrationality of a system of excess work, production, and consumption in terms of unnecessary human repression and envi…
Post‐Legitimate Society
We explore the role of moral, cognitive, and pragmatic legitimacy in reproducing the organization of two on‐demand labor platforms for couriers. Labor platforms are ideal cases to explore questions of legitimacy and institutional reproduction because they aspire towards automaticity. Since the 1970s, with the emergence of new production technologies and organizational forms, labor and work scholars have predicted a shift from the use of direct, c…
The technicization of knowledge: Georges Gurvitch’s warnings applied to the case of nudge
For over a century, social theorists have analyzed how technical thinking and knowledge have colonized forms of thinking and knowledge for which they are unfit, and become valued for their own sake, rather than being treated as a means to an end. Georges Gurvitch made important contributions to this line of thought. This paper explicates Gurvitch's sociology of knowledge, focusing on his argument that managerial-capitalist societies have a struct…
Revisiting Marcuse's Technological Rationality: Nuclear Fusion Advancement in the Age of Climate Change
In December 2022, a scientific breakthrough in fusion energy resulted in widespread media attention with a focus on fusion as a key strategy to mitigate climate change. In this article, we draw from Herbert Marcuse's work on technological rationality to examine fusion technology in this context. We explore if fusion is seen as a way to master nature, if it protects current power relations, and if a focus on fusion might detract attention and reso…
A sociology of “climatage”: The appeal and counterproductivity of property destruction as a climate change strategy
Calls for the use of property destruction as a climate change strategy are understandable given social conditions that make such ‘climatage’ appealing, including the chronic failure of institutions to address climate change and the widespread sense that these institutions are illegitimate and will continue to fail to act (post-legitimacy); the inability of atomized individuals to successfully transform the forces driving climate change (real help…
Is ideology critique worthwhile? A defense of writing for an absent audience in a cynical, warming world
There are at least five obstacles to the viability of ideology critique as a method of analysis in current conditions: (1) there is no ideology-free, God's-eye view through which the critical theorist can analyze other ideologies; (2) few people really believe in explicit ideological justifications for exploitation and domination today, a widespread skepticism that could annul the warrant for ideology critique; (3) conspiracy theories and identit…
Articulating system change to effectively and justly address the climate crisis
Activists and world leaders increasingly call for bold climate action. Yet proposals remain far from the transformative systemic changes required. While many remain in denial that system change is necessary, others who call for system change fail to articulate what that change would entail. It is critical that the climate movement identifies and promotes specific strategies for change. Identifying synergistic proposals associated with ecosocialis…
Human–Computer Interaction Research Needs a Theory of Social Structure: The Dark Side of Digital Technology Systems Hidden in User Experience
Powerless, Stupefied, and Repressed Actors Cannot Challenge Climate Change: Real Helplessness as a Barrier Between Environmental Concern and Action
There is a gap between concern about environmental degradation such as climate change and effective action taken against the forces that drive degradation. This paper argues that real helplessness , a social condition producing powerless, stupefied, and repressed actors, is a fortified barrier between climate concern and effective climate action. Political‐economic analysis has theoretical and methodological implications for environmental social …
Better poison is the cure? Critically examining fossil fuel companies, climate change framing, and corporate sustainability reports
Are fossil fuel CEOs responsible for climate change? Social structure and criminal law approaches to climate litigation
Shared pretenses for collective inaction: The economic growth imperative, Covid-19, and climate change
This paper examines how the economic growth imperative not only drives climate change and created the conditions for the development and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic but is also the context for climate change inaction and ineffective responses to the pandemic. Focusing on the United States, the paper identifies pretenses for collective inaction on COVID-19 that are similar in content to familiar justifications for delay in climate action: (1) …
The Political Economy of Climate Change Litigation: Is There a Point to Suing Fossil Fuel Companies
This paper examines the social-theoretical assumptions and assesses the potential effectiveness of holding carbon-intensive corporations legally accountable for climate change harms. We argue that the structure of private corporations operating in a growth-dependent capitalist social formation is the problem, not concrete companies. Ignoring social structure has practical consequences. Assuming favourable court outcomes in the future – a question…
How Do Social Structures Become Taken for Granted? Social Reproduction in Calm and Crisis
In search of plan(et) B: Irrational rationality, capitalist realism, and space colonization
Must cognitive sociology heed capitalism? Attention and marginal consciousness in political‐economic context
Aron Gurwitsch's four‐domain model of consciousness is placed in political‐economic context to theorize how social forces influence perception. Along with clarifying key concepts in cognitive sociology like “relevance” and “the taken‐for‐granted,” the model explains the processes through which social structures—despite being vaguely understood, ignored, or unknown by the typical subject on a typical day—condition thematization and what items are …
Things Are the Way They Are: A Typology of Reification
This project clarifies the notoriously ambiguous concept of reification through analytical descriptions of reificatory modes of experience in social context. The experience of social constructions as fixed and unchangeable ('subjective reification') is manifest in four interrelated experiential modes: (1) doxa, taking the social world for granted; (2) identification, experiencing abstractions as realer than particular objects; (3) enframing, the …
Climate Change Solutions: Beyond the Capital-Climate Contradiction
Climate Change Solutions represents an application of critical theory to examine proposed solutions to climate change. Drawing from Marx's negative conception of ideology, the authors illustrate how ideology continues to conceal the capital-climate contradiction or the fundamental incompatibility between growth-dependent capitalism and effectively and justly mitigating climate change. Dominant solutions to climate change that offer minor changes …
Overconsumption as Ideology
In response to climate change projections, scientists and concerned citizens are increasingly calling for changes in personal consumption. However, these calls ignore the true relationship between production and consumption and the ongoing propagation of the ideology of overconsumption. In this article, we draw from Western Marxist theorists to explain the ideology of overconsumption and its implications for addressing global climate change. Draw…
Building energy democracy to mend ecological and epistemic rifts: An environmental sociological examination of Seoul’s One Less Nuclear Power Plant initiative
This paper brings together metabolic rift theory and discussions surrounding energy democracy. Energy democracy is interpreted as a political program and social movement to alter the social order in ways that mend the ecological, knowledge, and epistemic rifts of energy systems. The ecological rifts of conventional energy systems refer to material separations between sites of energy production, refinement, generation, consumption, and disposal th…
How farmers “repair” the industrial agricultural system
From Cattle to Capital: Exchange Value, Animal Commodification, and Barbarism
In the past half-century, massive structural, geographic, and technological changes have occurred in livestock production. This 'livestock revolution' has raised considerable environmental, public health, and ethical concerns. The majority of analyses concerning the negative outcomes associated with these transformations usually condemn industrial technologies as the root of the problem. This article argues that the force behind technological dev…
Climate Change and the Polanyian Counter-movement: Carbon Markets or Degrowth
In the midst of a wave of market expansion, carbon markets have been proposed as the best way to address global climate change. While some argue that carbon markets represent a modern example of a Polanyian counter-movement to the environmental crisis, we adopt a structural interpretation of Polanyi to refute this claim. Carbon markets represent a further expansion of markets that fails to address the underlying contradictions related to the comm…
Techno-optimism as a barrier to overcoming herbicide resistance: Comparing farmer perceptions of the future potential of herbicides
Social conditions to better realize the environmental gains of alternative energy: Degrowth and collective ownership
Ideological obstacles to effective climate policy: The greening of markets, technology, and growth
In light of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, this project synthesizes and advances critiques of the possibility of a sustainable capitalism by adopting an explicit 'negative' theory of ideology, understood as ideas that conceal contradictions through the reification and/or legitimation of the existing social order. Prominent climate change policy frameworks - the 'greening' of markets (market-corrective measures), technology (alternative energy,…
Problems with the defetishization thesis: Ethical consumerism, alternative food systems, and commodity fetishism
Extending Social Theory to Farm Animals: Addressing Alienation in the Dairy Sector
We extend social theory to farm animals in an attempt to illustrate how non-human animals embedded in social systems can be examined using sociological concepts. Inspired by efforts to include the freedom to express natural behaviour in farm animal welfare standards, we applyMarx's conception of alienation to dairy cows. We first examine industrial dairy farm conditions and find that these systems result in the distortion of life and the suppress…
A political‐economic theory of relevance: Explaining climate change inaction
Why have societies failed to effectively respond to climate change? We address the question of climate change inaction by (1) examining how an unambiguously ominous report about climate change (IPCC 2018) was made palatable by news media and (2) explaining why climate change is typically unthematized in everyday life. Drawing on Adorno and Schutz, we develop a political‐economic theory of relevance. The imperative to accumulate capital is not onl…
The Political Economy of Geoengineering as Plan B: Technological Rationality, Moral Hazard, and New Technology
Geoengineering would mask and reproduce capital’s contradictory needs to self-expand, on the one hand, and maintain a stable climate system, on the other. The Plan B frame, which presents geoengineering as a back-up plan to address climate change in case there is a failure to sufficiently reduce emissions (Plan A), is one means to depict this condition to the public and is a product of, and appeals to, a prevalent ‘technological rationality’. Des…
Better poison is the cure? Critically examining fossil fuel companies, climate change framing, and corporate sustainability reports
The sociology of technology before the turn to technology
Environmental sociology and the Frankfurt School 1: Reason and capital
In a two-article project, I demonstrate that the first-generation Frankfurt School’s critical theory can conceptually inform sociological examinations of societal–environmental relations and address contemporary debates and issues in environmental sociology. This first companion article explains why Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse persistently tied the domination of nature to the domination of human beings in the context of two interrelated proce…
Powerless, Stupefied, and Repressed Actors Cannot Challenge Climate Change: Real Helplessness as a Barrier Between Environmental Concern and Action
There is a gap between concern about environmental degradation such as climate change and effective action taken against the forces that drive degradation. This paper argues that real helplessness , a social condition producing powerless, stupefied, and repressed actors, is a fortified barrier between climate concern and effective climate action. Political‐economic analysis has theoretical and methodological implications for environmental social …
In search of plan(et) B: Irrational rationality, capitalist realism, and space colonization
Making the Familiar Strange: Sociology contra reification
This book examines the meaning and implications of the sociological maxim, ‘make the familiar strange’. Addressing the methodological questions of why and how sociologists should make the familiar strange, what it means to ‘make the familiar strange’, and how this approach benefits sociological research and theory, it draws on four central concepts: reification, familiarity, strangeness, and defamiliarization. Through a typology of the notoriousl…
Environmental sociology and the Frankfurt School 2: Ideology, techno-science, reconciliation
In a two-article project, I demonstrate that the first-generation Frankfurt School’s critical theory can conceptually inform sociological examinations of societal–environmental relations. This second article clarifies and systematizes the theories of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse in the context of current debates and issues in environmental sociology: (1) the constructionism/realism debate and its relation to the critique of ideology; (2) the r…
The First-generation Frankfurt School on the Animal Question: Foundations for a Normative Sociological Animal Studies
Well before the now flourishing field of animal studies, the thinkers associated with Frankfurt, Germany's Institute of Social Research theorized and problematized society's troubling relationship with animals. Early critical theory explored the various manifestations of 'unrelenting exploitation' animals have experienced in human societies and maintained that the domination of animals is intimately linked to the domination of human beings, espec…
Habermas in Environmental Thought: Anthropocentric Kantian or Forefather of Ecological Democracy
A number of environmental scholars have argued Jürgen Habermas' communicative theories contain important insights for developing discourse-based models for making decisions about environmental risks and problems. Others have criticized Habermas for his anthropocentrism and split with the first-generation Frankfurt School's social ecology. By repositioning these assessments into Habermas' theories and their development, I argue the dissimilar inte…
Shared pretenses for collective inaction: The economic growth imperative, Covid-19, and climate change
This paper examines how the economic growth imperative not only drives climate change and created the conditions for the development and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic but is also the context for climate change inaction and ineffective responses to the pandemic. Focusing on the United States, the paper identifies pretenses for collective inaction on COVID-19 that are similar in content to familiar justifications for delay in climate action: (1) …
The Political Economy of Climate Change Litigation: Is There a Point to Suing Fossil Fuel Companies
This paper examines the social-theoretical assumptions and assesses the potential effectiveness of holding carbon-intensive corporations legally accountable for climate change harms. We argue that the structure of private corporations operating in a growth-dependent capitalist social formation is the problem, not concrete companies. Ignoring social structure has practical consequences. Assuming favourable court outcomes in the future – a question…
Carbon Geoengineering and the Metabolic Rift: Solution or Social Reproduction
Using the concepts of metabolism and metabolic rift as a framework, this paper examines carbon geoengineering technologies as a solution to climate change and explores if it is possible to mend an ecological metabolic rift without fundamental changes in the social metabolic order. Carbon geoengineering technologies have become a key component of scenarios to limit the extent of global warming and are being discussed as a means to sequester carbon…
Dialectics Facing Prehistoric Catastrophe: Merely Possible Climate Change Solutions
The Frankfurt School formulated a negative dialectics that keeps open the possibility for alternative social futures by explaining and diagnosing the non-existence of 'real possibilities' to actualize a better world. Ernst Bloch's category of 'mere possibility' makes a 'warmer' negative dialectics viable, a form that faces a grim reality head on yet loosens the prohibition against identifying pathways toward alternative social futures latent in s…
The problem of technology as valuation errors: The paradox of the means in Simmel and Scheler
Marx's Comments on Animal Welfare
Karl Marx has been charged by some to have been “speciesist” or “anthropocentric,” radically favoring human emancipation at the expense of animals. This assertion stems in part from his critical comments concerning animal welfare. This essay concisely reviews Marx's remarks on animal welfare, arguing that they are a critique of bourgeois hypocrisy and social reformism and should not be interpreted as negative comments against concern for animal c…
How farmers “repair” the industrial agricultural system
The Metabolic Rifts of Livestock Agribusiness
Massive structural, geographic, and socioeconomic transformations have taken place in livestock production since the mid-20th century. Drawing from Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, as developed by John Bellamy Foster and others, this article examines the recent structural changes in relation to global carbon, nitrogen, and water cycling. The authors argue that the environmental consequences of large-scale, intensive, industrial livestock producti…
Marx's Comments on Animal Welfare
Karl Marx has been charged by some to have been “speciesist” or “anthropocentric,” radically favoring human emancipation at the expense of animals. This assertion stems in part from his critical comments concerning animal welfare. This essay concisely reviews Marx's remarks on animal welfare, arguing that they are a critique of bourgeois hypocrisy and social reformism and should not be interpreted as negative comments against concern for animal c…
Meat and Inequality: Environmental Health Consequences of Livestock Agribusiness
Large-scale, intensive, industrial, corporate livestock production has increased steadily in all livestock sectors in the last half-century. Many humans suffer from various physical, social, and mental health problems resulting from corporate food animal rearing practices—namely through their environmental pollutants. The global poor, workers, and marginalized rural communities are the most susceptible to the environmental and general public heal…
Recovering a disillusioned modernism: The enlightened pessimism of classical sociology
Problems with the defetishization thesis: Ethical consumerism, alternative food systems, and commodity fetishism
Animal Epistemology and Ethics in Schopenhauerian Metaphysics
Within Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy he set aside a special place for animals. Not only did Schopenhauer show great affection for other species and repeatedly criticize Western anthropocentrism, but he also argued that we could know a great deal about animals by intimately knowing ourselves. Although currently underdeveloped, Schopenhauer’s introspective methodology sheds light on how we can begin to mend the epistemic human-animal…
Extending Social Theory to Farm Animals: Addressing Alienation in the Dairy Sector
We extend social theory to farm animals in an attempt to illustrate how non-human animals embedded in social systems can be examined using sociological concepts. Inspired by efforts to include the freedom to express natural behaviour in farm animal welfare standards, we applyMarx's conception of alienation to dairy cows. We first examine industrial dairy farm conditions and find that these systems result in the distortion of life and the suppress…
From Cattle to Capital: Exchange Value, Animal Commodification, and Barbarism
In the past half-century, massive structural, geographic, and technological changes have occurred in livestock production. This 'livestock revolution' has raised considerable environmental, public health, and ethical concerns. The majority of analyses concerning the negative outcomes associated with these transformations usually condemn industrial technologies as the root of the problem. This article argues that the force behind technological dev…
Social barriers to biophilia: Merging structural and ideational explanations for environmental degradation
Erich Fromm argues that the only reliable way to solve the environmental crisis is to alter current social formations in a way in which biophilia can flourish, so humankind can solve its existential dichotomy as well as meet survival needs in an ecologically sound way. However, society's preoccupation with the non-alive—elements such as technique, the mechanical, gadgets, and commodities—shows that the modern social character is far from biophilo…
Erich Fromm’s Ecological Messianism: The First Biophilia Hypothesis as Humanistic Social Theory
Revisiting Erich Fromm’s works provides a theoretical foundation for a comprehensive and normative theory of human–nature relations that contains psychical, social, economic, and ethical components. Fromm’s system of thought was rooted in understanding humanity’s effort to establish meaningful relations with the natural world and how socioeconomic systems mediate this endeavor. His normative theory maintained that society must develop a nondestru…
Industrial Animal Agribusiness and Environmental Sociological Theory: Applications and Areas for Development
Studying the consequences of industrial animal agribusiness provides an ideal entry point for environmental sociologists to begin incorporating animals into their analyses. To explore the contributions that environmental sociology can make toward understanding the effects of industrial animal agribusiness, we (1) review selected applicable environmental sociological perspectives, and (2) examine how they have been applied and/or could be applied …
The First-generation Frankfurt School on the Animal Question: Foundations for a Normative Sociological Animal Studies
Well before the now flourishing field of animal studies, the thinkers associated with Frankfurt, Germany's Institute of Social Research theorized and problematized society's troubling relationship with animals. Early critical theory explored the various manifestations of 'unrelenting exploitation' animals have experienced in human societies and maintained that the domination of animals is intimately linked to the domination of human beings, espec…
Habermas in Environmental Thought: Anthropocentric Kantian or Forefather of Ecological Democracy
A number of environmental scholars have argued Jürgen Habermas' communicative theories contain important insights for developing discourse-based models for making decisions about environmental risks and problems. Others have criticized Habermas for his anthropocentrism and split with the first-generation Frankfurt School's social ecology. By repositioning these assessments into Habermas' theories and their development, I argue the dissimilar inte…
Environmental sociology and the Frankfurt School 2: Ideology, techno-science, reconciliation
In a two-article project, I demonstrate that the first-generation Frankfurt School’s critical theory can conceptually inform sociological examinations of societal–environmental relations. This second article clarifies and systematizes the theories of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse in the context of current debates and issues in environmental sociology: (1) the constructionism/realism debate and its relation to the critique of ideology; (2) the r…
Environmental sociology and the Frankfurt School 1: Reason and capital
In a two-article project, I demonstrate that the first-generation Frankfurt School’s critical theory can conceptually inform sociological examinations of societal–environmental relations and address contemporary debates and issues in environmental sociology. This first companion article explains why Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse persistently tied the domination of nature to the domination of human beings in the context of two interrelated proce…
A defense of the 'Grand Hotel Abyss: The Frankfurt School’s nonideal theory
The menace of pessimism in early critical theory is often criticized for being antithetical to Marxism's emancipatory vision and/or implicitly conservative, a position memorably illustrated in Lukács' appraisal of Adorno as a resident of Schopenhauer's 'Grand Hotel Abyss,' where one enjoys a nihilistically detached yet aesthetically pleasurable stay without mounting any real challenges to the miseries of the real world. This stance, reworked in n…
The Will to Consume: Schopenhauer and Consumer Society
Consumer society has negated Freud's thesis presented in Civilization and its Discontents. The hindrance of desire affirmation is no longer the foundation of discontent. The inverse is now true. A seemingly limitless number of desires have been manufactured and administered with a solitary route to their affirmation via consumption. Because of this, consumer society's members find themselves in a lifeworld of aimless striving, dissatisfaction, di…
Techno-optimism as a barrier to overcoming herbicide resistance: Comparing farmer perceptions of the future potential of herbicides
The sociology of technology before the turn to technology
Anomie's Eastern origins: The Buddha’s indirect influence on Durkheim’s understanding of desire and suffering
Durkheim's claim in Suicide that humanity's 'inextinguishable thirst' ( soif inextinguible) causes suffering was adopted from Arthur Schopenhauer's argument that the will-to-live's 'unquenchable thirst' ( unlöschbaren Durst) causes suffering, which was previously adopted from the Buddha's argument that 'ceaselessly recurring thirst' ( tṛṣṇā) causes suffering. This article retraces this demonstrable though seemingly unlikely history of ideas and r…
Commodification of Nature
The commodification of nature refers to the process of incorporating biophysical entities and/or information about them into economic systems for the purpose of exchanging the good or service for a profit. Current emphases in the literature include examinations of (i) the way commodification processes function and adapt in different domains of nature; (ii) the socioecological consequences of, and barriers to, nature's commodification; and, more r…
Ideology Critique for the Environmental Social Sciences: What Reproduces the Treadmill of Production
Environmental social scientists should analyze ideologies that reproduce ecologically unsustainable societies through the method of ideology critique. Ideology refers to ideas and practices that conceal contradictions through the legitimation and/or reification of the social order. Ideology critique is a method that allows the researcher to unmask systemic contradictions concealed by ideology. While the primary purpose of this project is to revis…
Environmental Knowledge, Technology, and Values: Reconstructing Max Scheler’s Phenomenological Environmental Sociology
The problem of technology as valuation errors: The paradox of the means in Simmel and Scheler
Sympathetic introspection as method and practice: Cooley's contributions to critical qualitative inquiry and the theory of mind debate
In the work of Charles H. Cooley, sympathy is (1) a central subject matter of sociology and social psychology (as the faculty humans use to acquire knowledge of other humans), (2) a descriptive and explanatory method similar to “interpretive understanding,” and (3) an evaluative method used for social critique and arguments for social reforms (as the basis for making moral judgments). The latter feature of the value‐orienting qualitative method o…
Political science (57 works) · Sociology (49 works) · Law (41 works) · Politics (37 works) · Economics (36 works) · Epistemology (35 works) · Ecology (28 works) · Law (28 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Environmental ethics (27 works)