Political economy and climate change

Neil D. Fligstein is the Class of 1939 Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Sociology. His main research interests lie in the fields of economic sociology, organizational theory, political sociology, and the sociology of work. His research has focused on developing and using a sociological view of how new social institutions emerge, remain stable, and are transformed to study a wide variety of seemingly disparate phenomena including the history of the large American corporation and the construction of a European legal and political system.

His book with Doug McAdam, titled of A Theory of Fields (Oxford University Press, 2012), is a theoretical work that tries to combine insights from institutional theory, social movements theory, and organizational theory to create a general set of understandings of how new social spaces are constructed, maintained, and transformed. At the core of the book is a distinctly sociological view of social action based on symbolic interactionism. Fligstein and McAdam believe such a theory can prove useful to understanding strategic action by individuals and groups across a wide variety of social settings, including the organization of markets, politics of all kinds, and social movements.

Recently, Fligstein has collected a database consisting of more than 12,000 projects on behalf by governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations designed to mitigate the effects of climate change. With Janna Z. Huang, he is arguing that a new field has been created: one focused on science-based tools to make greenhouse gas emissions at the corporate level transparent. That field has come into existence as financial institutions have pushed corporations to make their greenhouse gas exposure transparent. About 2,000 companies worldwide have pledged to measure their CO2 emissions. Fligstein and Huang are interested in measuring the significance of these pledges and if they have any impact on the strategic behavior of corporations.