Publications by members of the Environment, Management and Society Research Group

Abstract: A widely used and discussed case for environmental markets are carbon markets. This paper engages with a presupposition of environmental markets in general and of voluntary carbon markets in particular: For these markets to exist, demand for the goods traded in these spaces is presupposed. By way of exploring the practical management of uncertainties in carbon accounting by corporate environmental managers, i.e. agents of ecological modernisation, I show traces of how the certainty of demand for carbon offsetting is socially produced. Empirically, this paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a multinational corporation of the financial services sector. Located at its sustainable development unit, I followed members in their everyday and professional activities which gave substance to the carbon emissions the corporation eventually reported. Using the sensibilities provided by Actor-network theory (ANT), the paper argues that the demand for offsetting should not be naturalised but, rather, understood in its social and political dimensions. Through the investigation of accounting for natures we are able to recognise more fully how the socio-technical infrastructure underlying environmental markets prefigures economic demand. Thus, this paper may suggest a rethinking of the grasp which carbon market regimes actually have on the carbon realities they are supposedly optimising.

Keywords: Actor-Network Theory, Carbon emissions, Carbon Market, ethnography, uncertainty

Abstract: This paper explores recent studies on ecological modernisation practices in their relation to organisational and societal fields. A set of such practices are often signified as environmental management. We will develop a comparative perspective on such practices and their limits. Often, environmental management is construed as apt to solve local as well as global environmental problems. Examples are geo-engineering, the Clean Development Mechanism, Corporate Environmental Management Systems or Natural Resource Mangement. However, also practices which are commonly not classified as "environmental management" in itself, such as recycling done by individuals or travelling to academic conferences, may be orientated towards reconciling the conflicts between capitalist dynamics and environmental protection. All such practices are socially, politically, economically, but also materially and naturally, limited. We revisit studies on a variety of limits to generate a multidimensional approach for their analysis. The paper concludes by pointing to the performativity of both environmental management as well as its limits and draws out this paper's implications for the empirical study of management of environments.

Keywords: environmental management, limits, limits to business as usual, science and technology studies

Abstract: By way of presenting ethnographic evidences from corporate practices of the conceptualisation and measurement of carbon emissions, this paper engages with a diversity of actors engaged with greening capitalism. It discusses how effects of consulting companies as well as of an international environmental NGO are enacted by corporate actors whose job it is to manage carbon emissions. Based on an understanding of these actors as agents of ecological modernisation, then, the paper draws out a critique of supposedly ecologically innovative mechanisms. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a leading multinational in the financial services sector over a period of more than 12 months, I focus on everyday work practices as taking place in a capitalist context. It is through practical work that the presences of diverse external actors are imagined and brought into being, resulting assumably as well in material effects. Internal and external actors are forged into a shared trajectory channelled through financial arrangements. Acted out on a stage shaped by interwoven lenses of science, engineering, accounting and management, the co-construction of corporate carbon management allows to further our understanding of how capitalism is recreated and stabilised along multiple paths. First, work in the field is enabled and exercised by a highly diverse mixture of employees, including cheap labour, such as coloured migrants, reaching via white interns and part-time personnel to top managers. We need to understand how their work is interlocked in order to conceptualise measures which would transcend the sustaining of capitalist carbon markets. Second, I will address how the quest for profit is organising the management mechanism. Finally, the paper provides insight into the fabric of the very emissions which are traded through carbon markets. Thus, we discuss the shaping of the artefact "carbon emissions" as a specific kind of entity emitted within capitalism and enabled through an assemblage of actors. Following these paths allows to question the linkages of the actors involved and how their practical interactions render carbon, nature and our society (un)sustainable. This, I hope, provides a chance to better conceptualise individuals, their social and material contexts, and through that, corresponding room for manoeuvre.

Keywords: Agents, capitalism, Carbon emissions, work practice

Abstract: Low Quality Emissions?: Investigating Power Relations Inscribed in Carbon Emissions By way of presenting ethnographic evidences from corporate practices of the conceptualisation and measurement of carbon emissions, this paper engages with the firm materiality presupposed by carbon markets - the robustness of carbon which is to be reduced. I investigate a metadata element of carbon emissions, the quality of carbon (data). It discusses how the corporate actors whose job it is to manage carbon emissions draw on, (re)configure and (re)produce those power relations through which carbon emerges into corporate existence. Employing an understanding of these actors as agents of ecological modernisation, then, the paper draws out a critique of carbon markets as an economic-technical fix. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork at a leading multinational in the financial services sector over a period of more than 12 months, I focus on everyday work practices as taking place in a capitalist context. It is through practical work that the presences of carbon emissions are imagined and brought into being. Actors draw on hierarchies to exercise the shaping of their emissions. Investigating the power relations involved in deciding about carbon data allows to further our understanding of how carbon markets may effect carbon realities at a global scale: Corporate carbon management practices are oriented towards the factuality of carbon markets. The mere existence of the latter co-configures the field of corporate carbon management. Thus, we discuss a prerequisite of the backbone of global green house gas mitigation efforts, i.e. the entities which gave rise to carbon markets, and question how they are assembled. Drawing on the conceptual instruments of "capital" and "field" developed by Bourdieu, this paper constructs four fields of production and the capitals at work within them as mediating power. Drawing on Latour we find: Carbon emissions are the inscriptions produced in these fields. This kind of (arte)fact is black-boxing the distribution of capitals within the fields. The global corporate construction of carbon emissions as a stable, objective entity allows to relate to presumable equally stable certified emission reductions (CERs). Economically, then, carbon emissions constitute the demand for CERs. Low quality emissions imply that carbon markets perform poorly. Following the practices designated to produce high quality carbon data allows to question the power relations in which and through which actors perform. This, I hope, provides a chance to better conceptualise individuals, their social and material contexts, and through that, corresponding room for manoeuvre.

Keywords: Bourdieu, Carbon, emissions, Latour, management practice, power

Abstract: Bringing into play concepts of Bourdieu and Actor-network theory, this paper addresses a specific hegemonic social technology which reproduces the dichotomy between the natural and the social, i.e., ecological modernisation. The latter refers to those predominant Western practices and discourses which conceptualise and shape society-nature relations since the early 1980s. By drawing on ethnographic research in one of ecological modernisation’s most significant sectors, corporate environmental management, I discuss how we can gain from conceptualising the practices of the agents in the field in their hybrid character. The empirical basis of the ethnography lies in fieldwork carried out for six months in the head quarters of one of the largest financial services providers (having more than 150.000 employees and serving more than 50.000.000 customers). In this paper, I focus on humans and non-humans who enacted multiple relations within the multinational's environmental management system, and by that co-constructed climate change. Environmental managers are influenced, or even formed, by a social technology of conceptualising society-nature relationships in a specific way and materialising these conceptualisations in both material and non-material devices as well as in nature itself. Western societies and dominant forms of capitalisms rely on this social technology to work: its ideology suggests that nature can be measured by science, that nature’s, i.e. environmental, problems can be addressed by (social) engineering solutions and that the latter can be objectively managed. In that respect environmental management emerges as a significant social technology sustaining the foundations of our society: the dichotomy of society and nature as well as the moral ground for exploiting nature. I will instantiate the heterogeneity of this social technology through sketching the hybrid habitus spread among human agents of ecological modernisation – the environmental managers – as well as material and informational devices at the local level of my field site. We can find as well how these local instances of the social technology render the hegemonic and global society-nature relationship unsustainable. In that sense, then, I am discussing a social technology which stabilises a specific collective which is, in the every-day, taken-for-granted to be a totality: the capitalist spaceship earth. I aim to understand how the social technology is so inert in its trajectory although it is a fragile endeavour of putting humans and nature at their respective places. Thus, this paper questions and re-conceptualises a social technology, prominent in contemporary culture and economy, which includes non-human devices and argues that through this re-conceptualisation we can better grasp it and its human actors – as well as corresponding room for manoeuvre.

Keywords: Dichotomies, ethnography, social technology

Abstract: While ecological modernisation has been heavily criticised, a concern for its agents is lacking. By way of conceptualising agents of ecological modernisation through a Bourdieusian take I explore possibilities to bring Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ in a conversation with three other lines of thought: Critical Realist accounts of agents and agency as well as Actor-Network Theory and Haraway’s cyborg metaphor. With them I problematise Bourdieu’s concepts and propose to think of field and habitus as hybrid. Thus, agents act as part of ‘hybrid collectives’. This argument is illustrated by ethnographic data of an agent of ecological modernisation within an organisation: The agent was involved in setting up a recycling scheme. I show how her agency was both enabled and constrained by ‘hybrid fields’ consisting of hybrid entities who/which partially have partial agency. This goes together with recognising the ubiquitous existence of resistance. Both, agents and materials resist and agency is, again, constrained and enabled by ubiquitous resistance. Furthermore, Agents exist within multiple ‘hybrid fields’ and hence they have to organise action vis-à-vis these fields. This organisation of action requires agents to make constrained choices. These constrains exist through both humans and non-humans which, through agency or effect, are part of the factors which shape situations. Then, situations, in both their materiality and their sociality, are shaped by distributed agency as well as effects of entities which do not have agency. Nevertheless, agents have some agency. Therefore I propose a conceptualisation of possible emancipation from (specific) fields. Such emancipation seems necessary for stabilising changes of acting, i.e., changing dispositions.

Keywords: Actor-Network Theory, Agents, Bourdieu, Ecological Modernisation, hybridity