A One Day Workshop at the Swedenborg Society, London, Thursday 21st October from 10 until 6pm - organised by Andrew Goffey, Matthew Fuller and Adrian Mackenzie.
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.
2nd of October 2009, the Social Technology Workshop will take place at the Virtual Knowledge Studio, Amsterdam.
The workshop will be hosted by the Virtual Knowledge Studio. The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences is located in the International Institute of Social History.
A member of our group, Ingmar Lippert, has been invited to give a paper, entitled Dematerialising earth [1] as well as to act as respondent in the Stream "Government".
References
Environment, Management and Society Research Group in collaboration with Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) organizes an international workshop on ethnographic methods in environmental research.
Below you may find links to the contributions of the workshop.
Below find the pdf-version of the programme.
Supported by
Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society (IAS-STS)
http://www.sts.tugraz.at/
The Board of Students of the international Programme "Environmental and Resource Management" (B.Sc./M.Sc./Ph.D)
http://board.erm.tu-cottbus.de/
Friends of The University Association
http://www.tu-cottbus.de/btu/de/universitaet/foerderverein/kontakt/
Environmental Management: More of the Same or Time for Change?
Confronting the Manageability Paradigm
Date: 11 – 13th January 2008
Location: Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Germany
We are grateful to the participants of the workshop for contributing their studies and critical comments. The workshop was visited well by local students of Brandenburg University of Technology (which runs a study course "Environmental and Resource Management").
Aspects for ERM Students
Several thoughts are worth noting:
First of all, you are very welcome to submit a proposal for the workshop. For the kind of questions which the workshop poses the library has some (of the most) relevant books. Check this list of books.
Second, you might be interested in getting credit points for participating in the workshop. If this is the case, contact Ingmar Lippert (lippert /at/ sts.tugraz.at) or the Board of Students.
List Compiled Oct. 2007 by Ingmar Lippert
This list includes books available in the library of BTU Cottbus (Germany)
focussing on a critical perspective on the environment and research into
EM/RM.
Contents
