Complexity and Resilience in the Social and Ecological Sciences by Eoin Flaherty

Author:Eoin Flaherty
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781137549785
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

3.4.5 Operationalising Identity as a Metric of Resilience

One of our first-encountered definitions of ecological resilience defined it as ‘...the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks – in other words, stay in the same basin of attraction’ (Walker et al. 2004: 6). Adaptive capacity is the capability of actors within social-ecological systems to respond to perturbation or disturbance at an institutional level, as measured through their capacity to retain institutional integrity and function through space and time. For sociology, ‘identity’ constitutes one of the quintessential concepts advanced within the interpretivist tradition. Exemplary of developments in post-positivist social theory, identity is a cornerstone of the behaviourist critique of essentialism, which interprets social action and interaction as a fluid outcome characterised by the active negotiation of symbolic meaning. It is a concept which recognises the unique capacities of human agency and language, which: ‘...enables a degree of detachment from the demands and exigencies of the immediate circumstances and...creates a cognitive space in which a considered response (rather than an immediate reaction) may occur’ (Layder 1997: 22).

Sociology’s challenge to previous interpretations of action as a response-stimulus outcome, were in turn bound up with more general movements away from scientific analogizing, as discussed in Chap. 1. Indeed, such criticisms interfaced with early sociological systems theory in a substantial way, given that many subsequent behaviourist critiques (i.e. those of G.H. Mead and Herbert Blumer) directly addressed functionalism’s linear depiction of socialisation and social structure as agents of pre-ordained role direction. Mead’s pronouncements on the self instead depicted identity largely as a social construct. Later variants of a more fundamentalist constructivism (i.e. Berger and Luckmann 1967) emphasised ‘social constructs’ as the mainstay of sociological analysis; ‘...it is only if they are socially constructed that things might be amenable to sociological analysis’ (Weinberg 2009: 281). Social science approaches to identity thus describe a broad continuum between those who emphasise the impossibility of ‘scientific’ objectivity (i.e. extreme variants of linguistic constructivism), and those who view institutions, relations or attributes as the outcome of socio-historical shaping (in which case anything exhibiting influence from the hand of humanity is open to interpretation as a social construct, we well as the linguistic categories which define its objectivity).

These observations initially appear largely inconsequential for current research objectives, but the role of such debates in solidifying separatisms of the natural and the social should not be understated. Along with a general avoidance of notions of truth and falsity, certain strains of relativist separatism have positioned constructivism as the quintessential theoretical basis of sociology (Weinberg 2009). The intellectual rigor and practical merits of studies rooted in constructivism are not in question, as clearly ones’ choice of research strategy emerges as a consequence of the nature of specific types of research question. In highlighting this apparent incommensurability, an initial difficulty associated with the proposed adoption of ‘identity’ appears to be that of incorporating a concept of the

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