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This article is structured to answer a number of questions that have been raised over the years about the origin, structure, and application of the treadmill of production theory. The following questions are addressed: What was the theoretical structure of the treadmill of production? Why does the theory focus on production rather than consumption? Was the treadmill a dialectical or a linear change theory? How has the treadmill theory changed under the growing globalization of production since 1980? Has the treadmill been evaluated empirically? What forces have limited the diffusion of the treadmill in environmental sociology? Is the treadmill more/still useful today for ecological analyses? For social analyses?
Keywords: consumption: ecological modernization; environmental sociology; production; social movements
I. ORIGINS OF THE TREADMILL THEORY
What Was the Theoretical Structure of the Treadmill of Production?
The treadmill of production was a theory introduced by Schnaiberg (1980) to address the question of why U.S. environmental degradation had increased so rapidly after World War II. He argued that a growing level of capital available for investments and the changing allocation of such capital investment together produced a substantial increase in demand for natural resources. Essentially, the major changes outlined by the theory were that more capital was becoming accumulated in Western economies, and this capital was being applied to replacing production labor with new technologies to increase profits. These new technologies required far more energy and/or chemicals to replace earlier more labor-intensive processes. New technologies emerged from the organization of scientific and technological research in universities and research institutes, as well as in the new "research and development" departments of large firms. Moreover, unlike the prior use of labor, the new technologies represented forms of sunk capital. To further increase profits, managers of firms needed to increase the levels of production and sustain higher levels (because worker inputs could more readily be cut back as opposed to fixed costs of machine operations).
The treadmill of production was thus, primarily an economic change theory, but one that had direct implications for natural resource extraction as well as for the opportunity structure for workers. In essence, the "treadmill" component recognized that the nature of capital investment led to higher and higher levels of demand for natural resources for a given...