Culture, ideology and the public debate over climate change

The social debate around climate change is no longer about carbon dioxide and climate models. It is about values, culture, worldviews and ideology. As physical scientists explore the mechanics and implications of anthropogenic climate change, social scientists explore the cultural reasons for why people support or reject their scientific conclusions. What we find is that scientists do not hold the definitive final word in the public debate on this issue. Instead, the public develops positions that are consistent with the values held by others within their social networks. In this context, efforts to present ever increasing amounts of data, without attending to the deeper values that are threatened by the conclusions they lead to, will only yield greater resistance and make a social consensus even more elusive.

Andy Hoffman is Holcim Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan; a position that holds joint appointments at the School of Business and the School of Natural Resources & Environment. He also serves as Director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise. Professor Hoffman's research uses a sociological perspective to understand the cultural and institutional aspects of environmental issues for organizations. In particular, he focuses on the processes by which environmental issues both emerge and evolve as social, political and managerial issues. He has written extensively about: the evolving nature of field level pressures related to environmental issues; the corporate responses that have emerged as a result of those pressures, particularly around the issue of climate change; the interconnected networks among non-governmental organizations and corporations and how those networks influence change processes within cultural and institutional systems; the social and psychological barriers to these change processes; and the underlying cultural values that are engaged when these barriers are overcome. He has published over ninety articles as well as nine books, which have been translated into five languages.

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