Economy, ecology, society: the importance of class for the sustainable development agenda

Paddock, Jessica ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4950-2517 2009. Economy, ecology, society: the importance of class for the sustainable development agenda. [Working Paper]. School of Social Sciences Working Papers Series, vol. 125. Cardiff: Cardiff University.

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Abstract

This paper draws on a wider programme of work that explores the efforts of the sustainable development agenda to realise an equal balance of interaction between ecology, economy and society, and indeed, how such a balance may be achieved in light of the social diversity exhibited across regional, national and international contexts. More specifically, this paper addresses the continued relevance of class in contemporary British society and what this means for the accomplishment of equitable sustainability. To do so, I provide an outline of this ongoing theoretical and empirical project in which places of alternative food networking in South Wales are seen to represent sites for the distillation of different ‘capital’ resources within the wider social field as a means of maintaining boundaries of ‘distinction’. Crucially, I argue that there is a need – perhaps against dominant intellectual trends – for the social sciences to pay continued attention to the sociology of class if there is to be any coherent response to the weighty environmental challenges that face ‘our common future’. Indeed, I posit that there is a need to build a solid bridge between the sustainable development agenda and sociological class analysis and that doing so offers the possibility of subtle and nuanced approaches to global environmental problems. Essentially, for such a nuanced understanding of global environmental problems to be realised, I suggest that greater theoretical and empirical attention be turned to the ‘classed’ citizen-consumer.

Item Type:	Monograph (Working Paper)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Publisher:	Cardiff University
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	28 Oct 2022 10:24
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/78187

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