Sociology

Faculty & Staff

Denise Lach, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331-3703
Phone: 541-737-
Fax: 541-737-5372
E-mail: denise.lach@oregonstate.edu

Areas of Interest:

• Environmental Natural Resource Sociology
• Applied Sociology including social impact assessment, program evaluation, and organizational development
• Organizational Sociology
• Water Conflict and Dispute Resolution

Current Projects:

• Examination of changing roles and expectations for science and scientists in natural resource decision making
• Institutional resistance to changes in the water sector
• Transformation of water resources governance structures

Brief Vita:

Education:

• Ph.D. - Sociology, University of Oregon 1992
• M.S. - Sociology, University of Oregon 1988
• B.S. - English/Education, University of Minnesota 1976 

• Lach, Denise.  2009.  Moving Science and Immovable Values Regarding Old Growth Forests: Clumsy Solutions for Wicked Problems.  Pages 233-243 in Spies and Duncan, Eds. Old Growth in a New World: A Pacific Northwest Icon Re-examined.  Washington, DC: Island Press.
• Larson, Kelli and Denise Lach.  2008.  Participants and non-participants of Place-Based Groups:  An Assessment of Attitudes and Implications for Public Participation in Water Resource Management.  Journal of Environmental Management 88: 817-830.  Also available on line at 10.1016/j.jenvman.2007.04.008.
• Lackey, Robert, Denise Lach, and Sally Duncan, eds. 2006.  Salmon 2100: The Future of Wild Pacific Salmon.  Bethesda, MD: American Fisheries Society.
• Steel, Brent, Denise Lach, and Vijay Satyal.  2006.  “Ideology and Scientific Credibility: Environmental Policy in the Pacific Northwest.”  Public Understanding of Science 14: 1-15.
• Lach, Denise, Helen Ingram, and Steve Rayner.  2006.  “You Never Miss the Water ‘Till the Well Runs Dry: Crisis and Creativity in California.”  Chapter 10 in Verweij, Marco and Michael Thompson (eds), Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Duncan, Sally and Denise Lach.  2006.  Privileged Knowledge and Social Change: Effects on Different Participants of Using Geographic Information Systems Technology in Natural Resource management.  Environmental Management 38(2): 267-285. 

• National Science Foundation: “Changing Expectations for Science and Scientists in Natural Resource Decision Making”
• US Department of Energy: “Using a Consensus Conference to Characterize Regulatory Concerns”
• USGS and Institute for Water and Watersheds (IWW): “Building Capacity to Manage Conflict and Change through Oregon’s Water Governance Structures”

• 2004 James and Mildred Oldfield/E.R. Jackman Team Award (for Water Allocation in the Klamath Reclamation Project, 2001)
• 2008 OSU College of Liberal Arts, Robert J. Frank Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Award