ABSTRACT
The social science tradition Most historical treatments (e.g., Flyvbjerg, 2001) point to the rise of positivism in the mid-nineteenth century as the wellspring of the social sciences. Simply put, positivism and its philosophical descendant, logical empiricism, holds that society operates according to general laws in much the same way as does the physical world wherein verifiable empirical evidence is the coin of the realm and more introspective or
intuitive knowledge is suspect. As such, the actions of individuals, groups, and institutions can be reduced to a logic-system that captures quantitative variances among people and organizations facing different kinds of social and physical forces. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, many scholars (e.g., Giddens, 1974; Masterman, 1970) came to argue that a variety of cultural and social processes were not amenable to purely objective empiricism, that the relative superiority of quantitative analysis was illusory, and that positivism failed to account for the fact that value-laden social norms and processes of symbolic exchange among people rendered moot most law-like generalizations. Hence, a range of qualitative methods and research designs began to flourish and what we find today is a plethora of theoretical and methodological commitments-positivist and constructionist, quantitative and qualitative-pointing to the disciplinary richness of the social science academy. Though likely just a coincidence, the 1970s also saw the social sciences begin to turn their attention toward the environment. In an era of environmental awakenings, as it became increasingly apparent that society was significantly altering the natural world in an unsustainable onslaught of environmental carnage, scholars carved out a number of sub-disciplines to use social science in hopes of altering human behavior (for a general review, see: Moran, 2010). Here, again, the approaches taken to make sense of environmental issues were quite varied and generally reflected the tradeoff between seeing causal relationships at play versus approaching the richness of a person’s lived experience. As Brewer and Stern (2005) observe, the social sciences are today seen as adding pragmatic value to the work of those in the hard sciences when it comes down to deciding how humans can and should live on Earth. And even a cursory review of the major environmental specializations in those fields reveals a number of relatively unique vantage points for understanding the role played by communication processes in “The Drama of the Commons” (Dietz, Dolšak, Ostrom and Stern, 2000).
