The measurement of the environmental concern: A critical review of Riley E. Dunlap's work

Abstract

After a promising beginning in the 1970s, environmental sociology faces a series of problems, derived mainly from its inability to link people's environmental behavior with the values they express in surveys (the environmental gap). This stagnation is due to inadequate theoretical and methodological reflection in the discipline. Applying the archaeological method, this article analyzes the work of the environmental sociologist Riley E. Dunlap, a prominent figure and a representative of the crisis of the discipline. Methodological individualism, the preference for the use of surveys of the general population, the lack of a strong theoretical frame, or of attention to structural and historical factors - all these are faults in the work of Dunlap and his followers. It is these faults that are arguably the main causes of the impasse in which environmental sociology now finds itself.