Page 73 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

56 K.-W. Brand

closed’ communication systems even if we share the assessment that economic,
political or social movement actors primarily perceive and analyse environmental
and sustainability problems according to their own internal ‘rationalities’. Sociology
has a variety of different theoretical approaches to the understanding of social pro-
cesses, including systems theory, action theory, symbolic interactionism, neo-Marxism
or discourse theory, all of which can be used to study sustainability communication
from different angles.

Communication and Institutional Practices: Sociological
Approaches

Although competing with each other, most approaches are no longer seen as exclusive
schools today. In problem-oriented research especially there is a trend towards pro-
ductive eclecticism. This also goes for theoretical debates where synthesising
approaches have met with growing resonance since the 1980s. One of the best
known is Giddens’ theory of structuration (1984), which attempts to overcome the
gap between action and structure through a perspective that emphasizes their recip-
rocal reproduction. What Giddens calls ‘duality of structure’ refers to the fact that
institutional structures not only constrain but also enable social action. If the func-
tion of institutions is broadly understood as regulating social life, providing inter-
pretations of reality that give meaning and identity, offering adequate strategies for
problem solution, governing the division of power and resources, norming patterns
of behaviour and sanctioning deviance, then institutions both create the precondi-
tions of ordered social life and limit the scope for possible modes of social action.
Institutions are, however, able to structure social life only to the extent that social
actors reproduce them in everyday practices, thus confirming and re-confirming
their validity.
If this reciprocal process of constituting action and structure, everyday practices
and systemic processes, is combined with the insight that communication is the
basic medium for constructing social reality, then Giddens’ approach can also be
given a symbolic-interactionist twist. This research perspective assumes that humans
are able to act because of the meanings they attribute to situations, institutions,
things, nature etc., whereby these meanings are continually adapted to a particular
field of action (Blumer 1969; Jonas 1987). Meanings are not only negotiated inter-
personally and situationally, they also achieve a normative, ‘objective’ power within
the process of institutionalisation (Berger and Luckmann 1966). They structure our –
mostly latent – everyday knowledge and deliver categorisations through which we
try to find our bearings in reality and attempt to influence it. Finally, they also give
us a basis for legitimising, or criticising, existing institutions.
Symbolic interactionism and Giddens’ theory of structuration converge in impor-
tant aspects. Dominant interpretations of reality and institutionalised social practices
rely on continual communicative reproduction in everyday life in order to exercise
their orienting and normative functions. This includes a continual symbolisation and