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Energy and social change: an introduction

The majority of the papers collected in this section have been selected from those presented at the first international conference held in Italy on the social implications of energy issues. The introduction to this special issue pursues two aims: on the one hand, to emphasize the importance of the energy question for the study of social change; and on the other, to show the potential importance of the social sciences, and in particular of sociological research, in regard to the energy issue. To this end, the introduction considers a large part of the literature on the role of the social sciences in analysis of the energy issue, but also the changes in the social and political institutions, and therefore in social organization, consequent upon the ‘energy revolutions’. It finally concentrates on certain areas of inquiry in which the social sciences are the main players: the analysis of public opinion and environmental conflict. This concerns the acceptability of technologies for the production of energy from different sources, especially the alternatives to fossils, and how this affects the development of new technologies and future scenarios in regard to energy and the environment.