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Twenty years ago, two environmental sociologists made a bold call for a paradigmatic shift in the discipline of sociology—namely, one that would bring nature into the center of sociological inquiry and recognize the inseparability of nature and society. In this essay, we review recent scholarship that seeks to meet this challenge. The respective strands of this literature come from the margins of environmental sociology and border on other arenas of social theory production, including neo-Marxism, political ecology, materialist feminism, and social studies of science. Bringing together scholars from sociology, anthropology, geography, and history, each of these strands offers what we consider the most innovative new work trying to move sociology beyond the nature/society divide.

In the late 1990s, the British anti-genetic engineering (GE) movement effectively closed Britain's market for genetically modified foods, while the U.S. anti-GE movement had a negligible impact. In seeking to explain the different outcomes of these similar social movements, the authors draw upon the global commodity chains (GCC) literature to extend the understanding of the economic and industry-related openings and closures social movements face as they seek to promote social change. This analysis not only illustrates the importance of economic structures and organization for movement outcomes, but also shows how the economic sphere is culturally constituted. In this fashion, it broadens the social movement literature's understanding both of the way that political economy matters to movement efficacy and of the way that cultural processes infuse the economic sphere. The study advances the GCC literature by showing how GCCs are cultural as well as economic constructs.

Popular commentaries suggest that the movement against genetic engineering in agriculture (anti-GE movement) was born in Europe, rooted in European cultural approaches to food, and sparked by recent food-safety scares such as "mad cow" disease. Yet few realize that the anti-GE movement's origins date back thirty years, that opposition to agricultural biotechnology emerged with the technology itself, and that the movement originated in the United States rather than Europe. We argue here that neither the explosion of the GE food issue in the late 1990s nor the concomitant expansion of the movement can be understood without recognizing the importance of the intellectual work carried out by a "critical community" of activists during the two-decade-long period prior to the 1990s. We show how these early critics forged an oppositional ideology and concrete set of grievances upon which a movement could later be built. Our analysis advances social movement theory by establishing the importance of the intellectual work that activists engage in during the "protomobilizational" phase of collective action, and by identifying the cognitive and social processes by which activists develop a critical, analytical framework. Our elaboration of four specific dimensions of idea/ideology formation pushes the literature toward a more complete understanding of the role of ideas and idea-makers in social movements, and suggests a process of grievance construction that is more "organic" than strategic (pace the framing literature).Substantial evidence shows that a new social movement against genetic engineering in agriculture has had a significant impact on public acceptance of genetically engineered (GE) foods, the regulation of these new production technologies, and the economic fortunes of the agricultural biotechnology industry (Barrett 2000;Kilman 2002;Schurman and Munro 2003). Anti-biotech activists have helped to turn many consumers away from GE foods and catalyzed important new regulatory restraints on the technology, including insect refuge requirements for genetically engineered crops, a multiyear moratorium on new GE crop approvals in Europe, and new labeling laws in many countries. In 1999, a coalition of US-based activists exposed the presence of an unapproved