Vol. 2 (2026)
Practice Theory and Social Change

Essays

Signs of Change: Studying Climate Change as Social Change from Within

Published 09-11-2026

  • Thomas Scheffer

Thomas Scheffer
Goethe University, Frankfurt

Abstract

This essay develops an ethnomethodological approach to studying climate change as social change, positioned between the intervention-oriented concerns of transformation studies and the general theories of social change found in sociology. Rather than treating social change as an abstract process to be explained from the outside, the article approaches it as a practical concern: something that members of society recognise, interpret, respond to, and participate in bringing about. Climate change presents an existential problem that increasingly enters into the routine organisation and reproduction of social life. The article proposes understanding this process through different stages of realisation, in which climate change becomes recognised and responded to in ways that may become increasingly competent, routine, and automatic, while also generating resistance and denial. Drawing on ethnomethodology, the analysis examines the signs of change through which members of society, including sociologists, make these developments visible, accountable, and consequential. Such signs reveal how different stages of realisation coexist, intersect, and inform possibilities for further change. In doing so, the article offers an approach to investigating climate change as social change from within: not as a transformation with identifiable beginnings or endings, but as an ongoing, practically accomplished process.

Keywords

climate change, ethnomethodology, existential problems, trans-sequential analysis

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