Ingmar Lippert's blog

• Conference: 7th International Conference in Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) 2012, 5-7 July Understanding the Drama of Democracy. Policy Work, Power and Transformation

• Panel: Prompters and Curtain-Pullers: Policy advisers in Practice;

Over the last 90 days, our conceptual papers "Outsourcing Emissions: Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as Ecological Modernisation" and "Sustaining Waste – Sociological Perspectives on Recycling a Hybrid Object" are among the five most read articles in an environmental management book (published by Springer). As it seems: our papers have been well placed in that outlet.

I will be visiting Lancaster University in its Lent term 2011 to work with Lucy Suchman of the Centre for Science Studies (CSS) and staff of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC), including Claire Waterton, to unpick the practices of corporate agents of ecological modernisation involved with carbon accounting.

(updated 31/7/2011)

I am spending two weeks focussing on writing up short accessible articles on two topics:

• Greenwashing: for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Green Culture,
• Carbon Dioxiode: for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste.

Finally, after a months of coding, and a couple of weeks of abstracting towards code families and themes, I decided about what to focus on as the core theme of my PhD: the social construction of carbon emissions.

As part of my ongoing STS ethnography, I am trying to narrow down the theme which I a(i)m to analyse in depth.
For analysis, I use TAMS. It's friendly developer, Matthew Weinstein, supported me already several times by implementing some of my requests.

Still new in the realm of research tools are social networking tools for researchers to connect. Academia.edu and Mendeley claim to offer new ways for researchers to find like-minded researchers, i.e. people with similar research interests.

During the last month I have been scanning field notes, covering two and a half months of field work, for all kinds of categories, emerging in the field. I came up with a huge map of codes and how they are linked. Of great help for this work was the TAMS Analyser, i.e. the software called "Text Analysis Markup System" available from http://tamsys.sourceforge.net/.

Finally it worked out: I negotiated access into a multinational corporation for undertaking my ethnographic research. The corporation is active in the financial services sector and one of the global players.
As it seems, I will have a chance to follow actors, actants and other objects as well as subjects for several months - in several countries. Let's see, whether this actually works out.

I will start empirical research in January 2009 in the south of Germany.