From Motivation to Action: Symbolic Presuppositions and the Culture of American Environmentalism

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Abstract

The theoretical question concerning the nature of the motive forces of action has attracted relatively little attention from sociologists focused on the empirical realm of symbols and symbolic organizing principles. The contribution of this paper is a reformulated and more theoretically coherent sociological concept of motivation that takes into account symbolic organizing principles at a fundamental level of analysis. My central contention is that “symbolic presuppositions” – a high order of symbolic control of action, which underlies social orders, an agent’s understanding, affective orientations, practical ethics, other features of the symbolic environment of action (from institutions to repertoires), as well as other tendencies that drive action – constitute an essential component of a sociologically sound concept of motivation. I develop the concept of “symbolic presuppositions” so as to complement the concept of motivation such that it opens a vista on symbolically-constituted levels of analysis that introduce new opportunities for sociological inquiry. The core theoretical contribution is the specification of the relationship between motivation at the level of symbolic presuppositions and action. The empirical purchase of this approach is demonstrated in new work examining the advent of the environment as an object of cultural orientation. This study accounts for symbolic presuppositions undergirding the emergence of the environment as an object of orientation whilst demonstrating the ways in which this relatively new phenomenon has come to function as a presupposition of American culture.

Author

• Eric Malczewski, Harvard University