Mark D. Whitaker

email mwhitake@ssc.wisc.edu

608.250-4944

Curriculum Vita

To be presented at the upcoming International Sociological Association's World Congress of Sociology,
Durban, South Africa, Summer 2006.

Environmental sociologist Mark D. Whitaker is a comparative historical researcher on the politics of environmental degradation and sustainability. Toward A Bioregional State is his novel approach to development and to sustainability. He proposes that instead of sustainability being an issue of population scale, managerial economics, or technocratic planning, an overhaul of formal democratic institutions is required. This is because environmental degradation has more to do with the biased interactions of formal institutions and informal corruption. Because of corruption, we have environmental degradation. Current formal democratic institutions of states are forms of informal gatekeeping, and as such, intentionally maintain democracy as ecologically out of sync. He argues that we are unable to reach sustainability without a host of additional ecological checks and balances. These ecological checks and balances would demote corrupt uses of formal institutions by removing capacities for gatekeeping against democratic feedback. Sustainability is a politics that is already here--only waiting to be formally organized.

current status:

I am a dissertator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Sociology, with a doctoral minor in Urban and Regional Planning.

I am seeking academic employment for teaching and overseeing research at the graduate and undergraduate levels. See my CV.

research interests:

I'm researching comparative/historical issues in consumption and environmental degradation, in how patterns of state politics and urbanization influence environmental degradation. Related to this historical research, I'm interested in what it means for present societies to be planning for sustainability and how to evaluate existing policy, recommended policy, or basically how to conceive of the process of environmental degradation as an historical and politicized phenomena that all societies deal with in their history.

The influences on consumption by informal politics, formal policy, and formal institutional frameworks are equally important variables in environmental degradation or environmental amelioration.

past presentations:

In 2001, I presented two papers at the American Sociological Association dealing with factory fiber consumption and urbanization in the British Midlands textile trades from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s. Both papers detailed the social, political, and family/gender ramifications of institutionalizing different consumptive choices in textile fibers.

The first paper presentation discussed how the differing physical technological amenabilities of the textile trades resulted in different urban morphologies and organizational scale issues.

The second paper presentation explained how this had a family and gender ramification: for the different technological, labor, and family/gender issues that varied across the cotton, wool, and worsted textile trades (of Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford textiles respectively).

current presentations:

I went to Brisbane, Australia in July 2002. I attended the International Sociological Association's World Congress of Sociology XV. I presented two more papers.

The first paper evaluated the first two state-level governmental food policy councils in the U.S. (in Iowa and Connecticut). They are attempting to localize consumption. I explored empirically and theoretically why these particular states have addressed these issues over other states in the United States. I argued from U.S. governmental statistical data, maps, and history of the combined environmental and political pressures leading up to these councils that it was more than simply the issue of human health: it was a convergence of sustainability politics against the way their states had been consumptively planned by corporations and state politicians more interested in exports than addressing the externalities. In addressing the externalities, the assemblage of multiple groups were all railing about the interconnections that were broken when the state supported expanding eternalities to human health, ecological health, and economic health. According to U.S. governmental data, Iowa and Connecticut were the two most extreme cases of these rural externalities and urban externalities respectively for these three compared issues of externalities. These state political pressures were multi-level in that opposing expanding externalities and in supporting sustainable consumption meant a profound localization of consumptive policy, and a state support of the smaller against the externalities of the larger. This was challenging the typical priority of the state to support corporate distanciated expansion of risk onto humans, ecology, and the economy as a whole. Are these states actually turning towards a consumptive sustainability politics, that seems to have been built from a unified human, ecological, and economic concern against expansion of risk and externalities? To answer this, I then analyzed whether they are actually turning their policies around by reporting on informal board membership. Plus, I offered further formal institutional suggestions for Iowa and Connecticut as well as other states if all 50 states in the United States were to move towards food policy councils.

The second paper discussed consumption and the state: the state of social theory and the social theory of the state related to consumption. I addressed the empirical interconnections between states and their environment in facilitating particular consumptive arrangements over others. I offered a historical model of state sponsored environmental degradation, and a model of how to have a political economy of consumption.

I am to present in 2006 a talk about my recent book Toward a Bioregional State at the International Sociological Congress, in Durban, South Africa. It is the first attempt at "green constitutional engineering." More information about this is below. Read 25 free pages on the web.

teaching preferences:

For graduate level, I would be interested and feel comfortable teaching three related areas:

political sociology (particularly historical sociology, introduction to political sociology, sociological theories of power and inequality, and/or social movements),

urban sociology, and

environmental sociology courses.

For undergraduate lower division courses, I would feel comfortable teaching urban sociological theory and introduction to sociological theory. I am particularly keen to bring the ideas of Norbert Elias into the 'canon of awareness' of sociological theory.

In terms of teaching experience, I mostly have held Project Assistantships while at UW-Madison. In addition to this, I have graded and commented on assignments of rather large undergraduate lower division courses, particularly, sociology of gender courses (around 100 students).

I did the same in other undergraduate level courses, and twice in an upper division 600 level course in the sociology of resource extraction.

present research agenda:

A few basic points are offered on how economic sociology would be 're-written' within a 'political economy of consumption.'

First, I would argue that the typical homily of "supply equals demand" is untenable as an empirical statement. Analyzed sociologically throughout the entire consumptive flow, consumption becomes more akin to a political infrastructure of statist/consumer implementations over other marginalized choices. Such an infrastructural view on consumption is related to analyzing how alliances orient and strategize for themselves politically in different materials as well as for different organizational frameworks around materials. In other words, the politics of consumption is operationalized through the implementation of particular commodities or their marginalization. This implies competing with other alliances and politics that would publicly implement consumption differently, both politically as well as materially.

State institutions and policy instruments bias into being certain consumptive patterns and informal politics over other arrangements. This can be through, for instance, omnipresent state subsidies that underwrite various sorts of environmental risk expansion that always innately 'warp' consumer and business scale organization in certain developmental directions over others. Various subsidies and preferences to institutionalize particular politicized consumptive infrastructures muffle economic feedback in other directions from the level of the consumer as well.

Researching the interaction between politics, supply, demand, and the 'politics of price' becomes paramount to a political economy of consumption. Consumptive bias can be implemented in various ways: through applied science policy, through financial lending policies, through public relations advertising, through the differential administration of law and punishment, or even direct legal restrictions upon other material competitors.

Ffollowing from this political dynamic to consumption as an infrastructure, I would propose that "supply versus demand" is more appropriate concept when a consumptive infrastructural perspective is taken. Particularly as the scale of consumption is expanded, there is a widening contention of interests between supply and demand over exactly what particular physical characteristics of materials get institutionalized--whether we are talking about foodstuffs or energy sources for instance, to name a few. In the process, different materials and their political represenatatives compete in a polity for implementation or representation of their materially biased interests. Out of this contention, comes different aggregate demand-sided and supply-sided interests in consumption in a state context, with each aligned differently to what interests and material changes they expect out of the state institutional frameworks that support any consumptive infrastructure.

Thus a "supply versus demand" framework is a political question: a ompetition of politically implemented infrastructures and price levels, instead of discourses about presumed (and untested) functionalisms about 'neutral markets.' Examples would be the contested issues around pesticides, animal or plant genetic engineering, building materials, and ecological decay. The ' 'whose commodities?" issue is important.

"Markets" may be interpreted as a mystification discourse in this "supply versus demand" view, similar to how Marx thought of religion: to detract from awareness of how very political is the organization of commodity choices and consumption. Are beliefs in "markets," "individual consumerism," and interpretations of "purchasing as a form of voting or acceptance" the actual opiates of the masses--particularly if the game is politically rigged instead of economically rigged, i.e., when there is little choice of options, and when consumption of a certain commodity occurs less because it is chosen and more because it is politically designed to be unavoidable?

Third, one can analyze consumption more accurately as this implemented infrastructure that is experienced as simultaneously a:

aggregate micro-foundational,
meso-networked, and
macro-sociological political economic issue.

Thus consumption is similar to an endless river carried and passed through various political economic, technological scale, and organizational filters before reaching and attaching itself to individual consumers (who are subsequently attached to it in terms of identity in many cases. This belies that there is much more going to research about consumption than supposedly atomistic individual consumers who are instead immersed in this 'river' of consumption that carries them along--flooding them into support of certain areas of consumption and, via triage, denying them choices in others.

As for the sociological attachments to particular commodities, consumption infrastructurally is a social and political issue reliant upon the mobilized legitimacy (or at best, the ambivalence--at worst, the lack of other choices) amongst aggregate consumers, instead of only fixating on individual consumptive choices being the method of analysis. By maintaining and wielding social discourses of legitimacy (or challenging such legitimacies), a method that analyses the politics of consumptive contention around particular commodities and around different commodites for the same consumptive position can be a fruitful manner to explore how environmentalism in social movements and citizen activism in general are mobilized, or, on the other hand, how they are demobilized into an acquiescent 'consumptive ambivalence' to a particular implemented infrastructure by other organizational groups.

When issues of risk are required to be masked in intentionally mobilizing 'legitimacy' of consumption for supply side interests, this means unfortunately intentionally providing misleading or erroneous information to consumers. This mobilized consumptive ambivalance can lead to aggregate support for expanding material and ecological risk frameworks against consumer self-interest thanks to public relations and advertising spin as the only offered 'risk management' tool. For instance, this is why accurate consumer information, risk information, and labeling is such a contentious issue in the United States and around the world: particularly at larger scales, consumptive infrastructural implementation depends upon a form of imposed social legitimacy through ignorance instead of knowledge, i.e., consumptive ambivalence, where supply-sided interests would prefer to maintain extreme asymmetries of information in consumers as a requirement for expanding a particular infrastructure. This keeps all the 'dangerous' knowledge away from consumers about health and environmental health because it would harm a delimited supply-sided sales interest if consumers change consumption patterns to avoid physical or ecological risk. This is one way where it is clear that consumption is more akin to a combined material and sociological infrastructure--of politically mobilized ideas and materials--for different interests that takes in aggreagate consumers, networked political relations, and macro level institutional frameworks all at once.

Fourth, toward this 'political economy of consumption', I would detail how consumption is highly related to these durable, inertial, and habitual social group identity issues. Instead of being capable of ever finding a 'consumer as a shopper,' mostly one would find a form of durable 'bounded consumers' who in their inertia can have an 'administrated identity.' Plus, on the whole, consumers are typically embedded at birth into a particular clientelistic consumer infrastructure for their identity which have many geographical variations. Thus, identity particular through food cultural pathways or status maintenance becomes built through commodities from the beginning, and identity is enacted and managed in consumptive infrastructural form. Even in 'rebellion,' consumption is less rejected and more simply interchanged from a previous delegitimated form to one seen as more legitimate. This is why attempts at 'informing consumers' can be seen as an unwelcome challenge upon their personal identity, as much as it is an unwelcome challenge to political economic organizational frameworks of supply-sided consumption--that would prefer consumers to be ignorant and unknowledgeable clients.

In short, consumption as infrastructure can be summarized as:

• more accurately as imposed over other choices--innately dealing with hegemonies and marginalizations as a political framework
• It is implemented in state policies, taxing arrangements, and subsidies;
• it is built from infrastructural investments that facilitate some clientelistic 'choices' in aggregate, while demoting others;
• it is dependent upon political contention in a polity, i.e., state;
• and it is a politically touchy imposition in that it depends upon a combination of aggregate micro-level identity and macro level political economic organizations working in tandem, to affirm it, or to demote it away to other choices.

Ascriptive social issues (gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, religion, etc.), issues of legality/illegality of particularly consumptive items, and a sheer inertial habit on the level of organizations and consumers all come into play in the variegated experience of consumptive infrastructures as linked to identity frameworks as much as political economic ones. This abrogates against seeing consumers strictly as autonomous 'market' participants, and closer to conspicuous group-identity based consumers enacting and 'self-administrating' secure senses of identity through consumption, as well as being clientelistically gatekept and delimited in their identity decisions and choices by larger political economic and organizational interests that 'choose the choices.'

Those externalized or marginalized from this are as much part of the process of its expansion, as my historical researches are detailing. Accurate historical perspectives on a political economy of consumption as a political infrastructure explores both the 'in' groups (hegemonic groups) in a consumptive infrastructure as well as the multiple, divided and conquered 'out' groups in states, simultaneously, waiting for their chance or politically demobilized into clientelistic consumptive frameworks of another's interests choices.

Issues of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, handicapped status, age, and religion all connect and get mobilized either for or against particular frameworks of imposed (or accepted) state consumption because, in a political economic sense, the state supports a particular vision of consumption that is reflective of a particular alliance with some consumers over other consumers, and some interests in consumptive infrastrucures over other groups. And what makes consumption legitimate is what makes the state legitimate, and inversely as well.

So states as well as supply sided interests are keen on maintaining consumptive ambivalance together, while the supported environmental degradation expands and politics of opposition is kept divided and silenced. When this builds up in terms of various externalities, consumption as well as states are delegitimated. As a result of these experienced externalities, different forms of political contention can pressure formal policy change, even formal institutional change--to get more representative materials institutionalized that demote risk instead of support its expansion.

It is the analysis of the different styles of these consumptive clientelist political relationships that wed aggregate micro level consumers, meso level networked political relations, and macro level issues that the disseration analyzes and promotes as a sound way to view political economic history.

future research agenda:

My general research agenda in the future is to write a series of political sociological books dealing with world history, as seen through the metric of politics in environmental degradation and consumption. This would detail a story from the once-separated 12 to 13 different geographically isolated sites of state formation-cum-urbanization worldwide into a globalized world. I consider myself well on the way in the establishment of the metrics of analysis of this goal from my master's research and dissertation research.

educational history,

and

comparative historical methods:

In terms of academic history, my undergraduate background is based on comparative urban history and comparative religious studies (two separate B.A. degrees from University of Tennessee-Knoxville, 1992 & 1997). At the graduate level and beyond, I strive to continue the methods of comparative historical inquiry into an analysis of environmental degradation and sustainability and its important causative variables.

This drew me into critiquing empirically and theoretically much existing political sociology and urban sociology on urbanization, state formation and 'consumption.' I analyzed how and through what variables like commodity choice strategies are involved in urbanization and industrialization--and how different ones influence effects of environmental degradation or urban scale and morphology differently worldwide (M.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2000). I brought into sociological analysis I think for the first time a political strategic analysis of commodity choice: both in the history of how and why particular consumptive items are implemented as general variables and as human choices where such commodity variations influence social relations as social choices instead of as something economically given or inert.

This began a route of analysis of toward a comparative historical methodology around the concept of positional variables--simultaneously general sites of social contention, empty and based on contention of different interests, though in practice arranged as a hegemonic outcome of particular political relations over other choices of materials (or ideologies, or formal institutional frameworks--all of these could be considered positional issues). Thus, issues of positionality can be either for social organizational frameworks or for biological and physical items.

I applied this methodology into looking at the political analysis of why certain environmental policy choices have been instiutionalized as well as why certain materials and ideologies are institutionalized.

I plan to defend a dissertation dealing with selected test cases adjudicating the soundness of discussing several case examples of many positional variables as in how environmental degradation is strategically enacted in practice as a form of political choice and hegemony over issues ranging from how various positional issues influence the choices of formal institutions, formal policy, informal politics, and materials choices that flow through them. All would be variables that influence the flow of environmental degradation, increasingly guiding and enforcing a process of consumption that is less an issue of choice or economics and more one of administration of particular commodities and politicized removal of other commodity choices.

The positionality of various biological and physical objects change as well throughout environmental degradation I would argue as some are dropped and others are expanded as environmental degradation proceeds. This dissertation will be completed in Spring or Summer of 2006.

Positionality is a methodological solution to the split styles of sociological thinking across nomothetic and ideographic. It is both. It is a line of historical inquiry that allows discussion of how all societies are simultaneously interactive endeavors as well as human agency strategies of some groups against others for imposing their hegemony--whether representative or unrepresentative choices are institutionalized can be analyzed in this manner.

From this, I have pretty much come to question certain basic tenets of modernism, menaing Eurocentric views on economism or historographic concepts of presumed radical differences in 'present' and 'past' societies. For instance, what is so different about 'modern societies' or environmentalism per se, if all societies have degraded their environments politically, historically, and strategically in some way.

Furthermore, what is so novel about environmental movements when there are many examples of environmental amelioration politics to be found throughout the world in many 'ancient societies' as well as 'modern' ones.

texts:

To gauge my past as well as future research agenda, below is my vita and a series of current publications or publications in progress.

Many of these are empirical test cases that additionally have a very detailed methodogical/epistemological argument for reframing certain ways the topic has been analyzed in the past.

Raw Materials and the Division of Labor. One deals with comparative history of urbanization through the lens of raw materials in consumption. I set out the first environmental sociological view on urbanization as a raw material varied, raw material specific, and raw material dependent aggregative phenomenon--where variations of physical characteristics in raw materials matter as sociological factors in human choice. These raw material variations yield insight causatively into different issues of scale and organization of urban morphological relationships, industrialization, degrees of proletarianization, and state politics. All these empirical variables are systematically analyzed along three major axes that can be used to adjudicate all raw materials and how they are clearly connected to their erstwhile sociological effects of use: their different relative technological amenabilities, substituabilities (or unsubstitutabilities), and their geographical amenabilities which differentially influence choice sets of the humanly implemented materials. These three axes of raw material analysis affect urbanization differences in issues ranging from organizational/industrial scale, urban/population scale, and worker political protest capacies.

Localizing Consumption: A Review of the First Two State-Level Food Policy Councils in the United States. Another paper below comparatively analyzes and evaluates the first two nascent state-level food policy councils in the United States, that use state governments to localize consumption. These two state level food policy councils bring quite an array of different political and consumptive interests together that are typically marginalized by exclusively supply-sided consumptive policy decision making. It is both a comparative empirical as well as a general theoretical argument for the phenomena at hand. Both of these state level food policy councils, it is argued, are attempting to localize consumption by learning how to minimize three interactive levels of externalities: health externalities, ecological externalities, and economic externalities. These three externalities are seen as historically pressuring people in these two states first, more than other states, because of the extremes of these three externalities in these states which bring different concerns together that typically work separately. The paper is written as a critique and 'address' to the urban planning profession: are they, when they neglect to analyze consumption and externalities that are institutionalized in their plans, institutionalizing more suffering than their plans are removing? Interesting gender differentials in externality experience "in the same spaces" show how a the same "general plan" can have complete different demographic effects. It is additionally an instiutional analysis of how the food policy councils operate in these states.

The State as a Biased Sponsor of Consumption: Theorizing Consumptive Bias in the State. Third, I would draw attention to a paper I presented at the 15th Annual World Congress of Sociology, hosted by the International Sociological Association, in Brisbane, Australia, July 2002. As a quick description, this paper deals with epistemological and methodological concerns of comparativists in political-historical sociology and environmental sociology. I offer several empirical sites of analysis as well as a general frameworks useful for conceptualizing and integrating what I would call 'interscience' knowledges in particular phenomena that are there to research though typically methodologically marginalized. By 'interscience' knowledge, I mean to detail how biological and physical science empirical objects are always to some extent social variables and social outcomes, as much as how various objects of sociological study like state formation and urbanization can be 'revamped' to address how they are influenced by variegation of biological/ecological factors--with their political relations being built from consumer clientelism (or gatekeeping in the name of supply-side interests) and how much of state politics can be conceived as consumptive distributionary relations in particular materials organized in different legal manners.

There are various other papers in process below as well:

Related papers:

• Curriculum Vita
• [4.4 MB] Master's Thesis: Raw Materials and the Division of Labor
• article(s) in first review: Raw Materials and the Division of Labor: Textiles and Consumption in Urbanization from Manchester to Mohenjo-Daro, General Theory and Empirical Specifications, I and II. (related to Master's Thesis) [Parts: 1, 2, abstract; shorter version]
• Dissertation Proposal (accepted, in process): Ecological Revolution: (Patterns in) State, Science, Finance, and Consumption in Environmental Degradation; Updated title: Ecological Revolution: The Political Origins of Environmental Degradation
• article in second review: Localizing Consumption: The Health Planning of Urban and Rural State Food Policy Councils Compared, A Foreshadowing of Things to Come? [abstract] [This is additionally a chapter in my book Toward A Bioregional State (2005)
• article published (Sociological Abstracts): The State as a Biased Sponsor of Consumption: Theorizing the Politics and Policies of Consumptive Bias in the Consumer Infrastructure, through a Positionalist Sociology, abstract
• article in first review: Crediting Vision: Understanding Credit as a Tool to Facilitate Equity, Gender Equality, Environmental Sustainability, and Civil Society, A Review and Evaluation of Existing Strategies for Localizing Finance, abstract
• draft [2.39 MB]: Towards a Political Economy of Consumption
• draft: Towards Interscience, Methodological Essays [1, 2, 3, 4, soon]

PowerPoint Presentations:

• [ external link webpage] The Politics of Food (Localizing Consumption, "Health Planning")
• [800 k] Raw Materials and the Division of Labor
• [600 k] Raw Materials and the Division of Labor (shorter version)
• [320 k] Affirming the Pre-existing Plurality of Local, Democratic Voices:A Short History of US Media, Compared to the Global Independent Media Centers Phenomenon since 1999

academic
listserves and websites
hosted by me

Service: Academic Websites, and Listserves, Public Outreach

I am the volunteer host of several academic listserves and websites.

• Since 1998, I have been the owner, administrator, and moderator for COMPURB-L, an internet listserve (networked mailing list) devoted to discussing comparative urbanization from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. There are presently about 250 international subscribers.
• Since 2000, I have been the owner, administrator, and moderator for INTERSCI-L, an internet listserve established to the empirical interconnections across the physical, biological and social sciences. See the list's introductory subscriber letter. There are presently around 55 members.
• Since November 2001, I have written and hosted Toward a Bioregional State: Political Theory and Formal Institutional Design in the Era of Sustainability, a running commentary of "bioregional letters" on formal institutional frameworks which I am arguing are required for sustainability. It has recently been published in book form in May 2005. Formal state structures have yet to be analyzed in political science in terms of their environmental effects as well as the degree they demote or facilitate environmental feedback about environmental risk and unrepresentative development externalities to health, the ecology, and economics in a particular area. I suppose one could consider this site as a form of "green constitutional engineering" strategizing as an ecological response to the Federalist Papers.

  "I am arguing. . .how can we achieve a democracy that is environmentally sustainable, when the present frameworks of democracy are what are leading us into environmental degradation?

  "The following is a list of requirements, as well as arguments for why these requirements should be adopted, and why the present forms of government in the United States are leading us toward environmental degradation, low voter turnouts, and unrepresentative parties. However, what I am arguing is that these are general structural requirements for all states as they move towards sustainability, instead of talking only about the United States. The United States can be considered the running example in these letters though. Structurally, the state in general requires changing, instead of only a change on the the level of political party ideas for instance. These bioregional letters propose how existing unsustainable states could be 'made over' into sustainable states: typically, a different topic is addressed in each letter."

There's even an "ecologized" version of the U.S. Constitution there, at draft version #13 presently.

As mentioned above, this was published in book form (May 2005) as Toward a Bioregional State, available online at amazon.com and many other places.

I have seen it available online in the UK as well.

Book description:

A novel approach to development and sustainability proposing instead of issues of population scale or technocratic planning, the priority is an overhaul of corrupted democratic institutions.

Environmental sociologist Mark D. Whitaker is a comparative historical researcher on the politics of environmental degradation and sustainability. Toward A Bioregional State is his novel approach to development and to sustainability. He proposes that instead of sustainability being an issue of population scale, managerial economics, or technocratic planning, an overhaul of formal democratic institutions is required. This is because environmental degradation has more to do with the biased interactions of formal institutions and informal corruption. Because of corruption, we have environmental degradation. Current formal democratic institutions of states are forms of informal gatekeeping, and as such, intentionally maintain democracy as ecologically “out of sync”. He argues that we are unable to reach sustainability without a host of additional ecological checks and balances. These ecological checks and balances would demote corrupt uses of formal institutions by removing capacities for gatekeeping against democratic feedback. Sustainability is a politics that is already here—only waiting to be formally organized.

Read 25 pages for free here.

Two page summary here.

memberships

The Society for Utopian Studies (1997-1998)
American Sociological Association (1997-1998; 2001-02)
The Social Science History Association (1999-2001)
International Sociological Association (2002-)

comments welcome:

mwhitake@ssc.wisc.edu

Last Updated: July 25, 2006