Charting a Course: The case for an interdisciplinary theoretical foundation for marine sociology


Felix Morrow, Memorial University

The world’s oceans, once thought to be an infinite pool of resources, are collapsing with 87 percent of global fisheries estimated, in 2012, to either be fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted. This rapid decline lacks historical precedence being a fundamentally modern and capitalist phenomena. Understanding the social roots and implications of global oceanic decline is important for sociology because fisheries, and marine ecosystems broadly, have wide-ranging socio-ecological implications including the decline of the Earth’s largest carbon sink, and impacts on employment and food production. Despite this, environmental sociology has tended to focus on terrestrial topics often treating marine environments like a societyless void and/or an extension of terrestrial-spaces. In light of this gap, sociologists have recently called for the development of marine sociology, a sociology of the ocean, or an oceanic sociology as a distinct subfield of environmental sociology, focused on marine environmental and social problems. As part of this push for a new subfield, Hannigan has called for a theoretical elaboration of prior work that will inform sociological research on marine topics. This paper starts that theoretical elaboration. In this paper, I argue that sociologists endeavoring to research marine topics should look both inside and outside of sociology for their theoretical foundations. To demonstrate this, I reviewed theoretical work in three broad categories: first, the political economy of marine resources; second, the power relations and social dynamics of fisheries governance, management, and science; and third, theorizations of the social construction, and the implications of, ocean-space itself. The largest body of theoretical work by sociologists in the political economy of fisheries is the tragedy of the commodity framework which emphasizes how the logic of commodification drives fishery collapse. Building on the tragedy of the commodity, research has argued for the incorporation of a distinct theorization of the state into the framework. Beyond the tragedy of the commodity, Campling and Colás have drawn on Moore’s concept of commodity frontiers to understand the political economy of marine resources. In this latter framework, unlike the tragedy of the commodity, the state assumes a central and distinct role. The political economic frameworks discussed fall broadly within the bounds of sociology and provide powerful theoretical tools for conceptualizing the macro-level dynamics behind global oceanic decline. In the area of fisheries governance and science, two distinct frameworks emerge: Telesca’s Foucauldian analysis and Bavington’s political ecological analysis. Both frameworks place an emphasis on the implications of the ideological conversion of ‘fish’ to ‘stocks’ through quantifications, and how this conversion underpins, and rationalizes, the industrial fishing activities driving oceanic decline. Further, Telesca’s work examines how the logic of management is utilized to produce, and maintain, imperial and colonial power relations. Both of these frameworks provide a starting point for conceptualizing the micro-level operationalizations of fisheries management and how they affect broader social forces and institutions. Lastly, theorizations of ocean-space itself provide both macro- and micro-level frameworks. On the macro-level, Steinberg has provided a long-run historical analysis of how ocean-space has been continually (re)structured and (re)territorialized in relation to the interests and capacities of dominant actors, ideologies, and technological changes. On the micro-level, the physical differences between terrestrial- and ocean-space have been theorized with a focus on how the physical properties of oceans structure social action. Further, recent sociological work has emphasized how coastal communities build cultural relationships, meanings, and knowledge through interactions with marine environments. These theorizations of ocean-space offer critical methodological insights to sociological research on marine topics as understanding the role ocean-space itself plays in structuring social relations and how social relations structure ocean-space will enable sociologists to avoid the methodological mistake of treating oceans as a mere surface in the background of social relations.

This paper will be presented at the following session: