Scott Frickel

A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements

The histories of all modern scientific and intellectual fields are marked by dynamism. Yet, despite a welter of case study data, sociologists of ideas have been slow to develop general theories for explaining why and how disciplines, subfields, theory groups, bandwagons, actor networks, and other kindred formations arise to alter the intellectual landscape. To fill this lacuna, this article presents a general theory of scientific/intellectual movements (SIMs). The theory synthesizes work in the sociology of ideas, social studies of science, and the literature on social movements to explain the dynamics of SIMs, which the authors take to be central mechanisms for change in the world of knowledge and ideas. Illustrating their arguments with a diverse sampling of positive and negative cases, they define SIMs, identify a set of theoretical presuppositions, and offer four general propositions for explaining the social conditions under which SIMs are most likely to emerge, gain prestige, and achieve some level of institutional stability.

Undone Science: Charting Social Movement and Civil Society Challenges to Research Agenda Setting

‘‘Undone science’’ refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politics of knowledge, wherein multiple and competing groups struggle over the construction and implementation of alternative research agendas. Overall, the study demonstrates the analytic potential of the concept of undone science to deepen understanding of the systematic nonproduction of knowledge in the institutional matrix of state, industry, and social movements that is characteristic of recent calls for a ‘‘new political sociology of science.’’

Understanding Environmental Governance A Critical Review

This article presents an historical sketch of the insights and applications provided by social science scholars on environmental governance. The authors begin with a review of the conceptual developments during the past 50 years characterized in terms of six conceptual perspectives: pluralism, agency capture, ecological Marxism, ecological modernization, social constructionism, and global environmentalism. This section is followed by an empirical analysis of academic journal coverage of research on environmental governance from 1963 to 2001 listed in the database Sociological Abstracts. The authors conclude that an understanding of the potential for environmental improvement could be advanced by the treatment of works that fall within the conceptual typology described herein, as a cumulative body of interdisciplinary knowledge. Advancements in this area could, furthermore, be facilitated through a broadening of empirical and methodological treatment of environmental governance and a greater attention to macro-structural relations among state and societal forces and environmental phenomena.

The Historical Nature of Cities A Study of Urbanization and Hazardous Waste Accumulation

Endemic uncertainties surrounding urban industrial waste raise important theoretical and methodological challenges for understanding the historical nature of cities. Our study advances a synthetic framework for engaging these challenges by extending theories of modern risk society and classic urban ecology to investigate the accumulation of industrial hazards over time and space. Data for our study come from a unique longitudinal dataset containing geospatial and organizational information on more than 2,800 hazardous manufacturing sites operating between 1956 and 2006 in Portland, Oregon. We pair these site data with historical data from the U.S. population census and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to examine the historical accumulation of hazardous parcels in relation to changing patterns of industrial land use, neighborhood composition, new residential development, and environmental regulation. Results indicate that historical accumulation of hazardous sites is scaling up in ways that exhibit little regard for shifting neighborhood demographics or existing regulatory policies as sites merge into larger, more contiguous industrialized areas of historically generated hazards, creating the environmental conditions of urban risk society.

Evaluation of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons Using Analytical Methods, Toxicology, and Risk Assessment Research: Seafood Safety after a Petroleum Spill as an Example

Background: Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are abundant and widespread environmental chemicals. They are produced naturally and through man-made processes, and they are common in organic media, including petroleum. Several PAHs are toxic, and a subset exhibit carcinogenic activity. PAHs represent a range of chemical structures based on two or more benzene rings and, depending on their source, can exhibit a variety of side modifications resulting from oxygenation, nitrogenation, and alkylation. Objectives: Here we discuss the increasing ability of contemporary analytical methods to distinguish not only different chemical structures among PAHs but also their concentrations in environmental media. Using seafood contamination following the Deepwater Horizon accident as an example, we identify issues that are emerging in the PAH risk assessment process because of increasing analytical sensitivity for individual PAHs, and we describe the paucity of toxicological literature for many of these compounds. Discussion: PAHs, including the large variety of chemically modified or substituted PAHs, are naturally occurring and may constitute health risks if human populations are exposed to hazardous levels. However, toxicity evaluations have not kept pace with modern analytic methods and their increased ability to detect substituted PAHs. Therefore, although it is possible to measure these compounds in seafood and other media, we do not have sufficient information on the potential toxicity of these compounds to incorporate them into human health risk assessments and characterizations. Conclusions: Future research efforts should strategically attempt to fill this toxicological knowledge gap so human health risk assessments of PAHs in environmental media or food can be better determined. This is especially important in the aftermath of petroleum spills. Citation: Wickliffe J, Overton E, Frickel S, Howard J, Wilson M, Simon B, Echsner S, Nguyen D, Gauthe D, Blake D, Miller C, Elferink C, Ansari S, Fernando H, Trapido E, Kane A. 2014. Evaluation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons using analytical methods, toxicology, and risk assessment research: seafood safety after a petroleum spill as an example. Environ Health Perspect 122:6–9; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1306724

A targeted health risk assessment following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon exposure in Vietnamese-American shrimp consumers.

Background: The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 prompted concern about health risks among seafood consumers exposed to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) via consumption of contaminated seafood. Objective: The objective of this study was to conduct population-specific probabilistic health risk assessments based on consumption of locally harvested white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus) among Vietnamese Americans in southeast Louisiana. Methods: We conducted a survey of Vietnamese Americans in southeast Louisiana to evaluate shrimp consumption, preparation methods, and body weight among shrimp consumers in the disaster-impacted region. We also collected and chemically analyzed locally harvested white shrimp for 81 individual PAHs. We combined the PAH levels (with accepted reference doses) found in the shrimp with the survey data to conduct Monte Carlo simulations for probabilistic noncancer health risk assessments. We also conducted probabilistic cancer risk assessments using relative potency factors (RPFs) to estimate cancer risks from the intake of PAHs from white shrimp. Results: Monte Carlo simulations were used to generate hazard quotient distributions for noncancer health risks, reported as mean ± SD, for naphthalene (1.8 × 10–4 ± 3.3 × 10–4), fluorene (2.4 × 10–5 ± 3.3 × 10–5), anthracene (3.9 × 10–6 ± 5.4 × 10–6), pyrene (3.2 × 10–5 ± 4.3 × 10–5), and fluoranthene (1.8 × 10–4 ± 3.3 × 10–4). A cancer risk distribution, based on RPF-adjusted PAH intake, was also generated (2.4 × 10–7 ± 3.9 × 10–7). Conclusions: The risk assessment results show no acute health risks or excess cancer risk associated with consumption of shrimp containing the levels of PAHs detected in our study, even among frequent shrimp consumers. Citation: Wilson MJ, Frickel S, Nguyen D, Bui T, Echsner S, Simon BR, Howard JL, Miller K, Wickliffe JK. 2015. A targeted health risk assessment following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon exposure in Vietnamese-American shrimp consumers. Environ Health Perspect 123:152–159; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1408684

Building Environmental States Legitimacy and Rationalization in Sustainability Governance

This article explores the potential for nation-states to become substantial contributors to sustainability governance. This potential resides in the ability of nation-states to make environmental protection a basic goal, in part by committing institutional resources toward the formation and implementation of substantive actions perceived necessary for long-term environmental sustainability. Existing research suggests that nation-states undertake environmental action in order to maintain legitimacy in the face of political pressure. While the maintenance of legitimacy is necessary, we argue that a substantive state role in sustainability governance is also dependent upon the rationalization of state environmental roles. Further, rationalization can be fostered through the enrichment of embedded state-societal networks with two key actors in civil society: environmental justice movements and environmental knowledge professionals. This article develops a conceptual framework that grounds sustainability efforts in rationalization processes and examines the synergistic potential for these two social actors to help build states that institute fundamental environmental reform.

Tracking Industrial Land Use Conversions: A New Approach for Studying Relict Waste and Urban Development

Research on urban development and environmental hazards has focused attention on problems associated with current industrial facilities, derelict industrial brownfields, and government-listed hazardous waste sites. Yet we continue to know very little about environmental contaminants remaining on past industrial sites that have since converted to other uses. This article develops a methodology for examining the prevalence of such sites and their historical conversion and then presents an illustrative case study of this methodology for New Orleans, Louisiana, from 1955 to 2006. Contrary to expectations, results show that most sites occupied by polluting industries in the past have since converted to other uses and that this conversion is most common in predominantly White neighborhoods. These findings extend and complicate extant research on urban industrial hazards and environmental justice, calling attention to the potential accumulation of historically generated contaminants not just in identifiable brownfields and lingering industrial corridors but also in neighborhoods throughout older cities.

Urbanization as Socioenvironmental Succession: The Case of Hazardous Industrial Site Accumulation.

This study rehabilitates concepts from classical human ecology and synthesizes them with contemporary urban and environmental sociology to advance a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. The theory illuminates how social and biophysical phenomena interact endogenously at the local level to situate urban land use patterns recursively and reciprocally in place. To demonstrate this theory we conduct a historical-comparative analysis of hazardous industrial site accumulation in four U.S. cities, using a relational database that was assembled for more than 11,000 facilities that operated during the past half century—most of which remain unacknowledged in government reports. Results show how three iterative processes—hazardous industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment—intersect to produce successive socioenvironmental changes that are highly relevant to but often missed by research on urban growth machines, environmental inequality, and systemic risk.

Absences: Methodological Note about Nothing, in Particular

This article considers the growing body of STS research on absences in technoscience. While solid conceptual ground has been made in theorizing different forms of absence and their social production, researchers have not paid sufficient attention to various methodological challenges that a focus on absences implies. How does one study what is not there? I offer 10 methodological considerations as a provisional foundation for an empirical program of research on absences and a brief illustration drawn from an ongoing study of absence in post-Katrina New Orleans.