Disposed to Unsustainability? Ecological Modernisation as a Techno-Science Enterprise with Conflicting Normative Orientations

URL:

Keywords:

Abstract:

In the 1970s widespread awareness of a ‘global environmental crisis’ began to emerge in Western societies. Specific staff were employed to deal with environmental problems. While they are supposed to manage the greening of their organisations, committed to sustainable development, research did not study these agents in their own right. By drawing on two ethnographic cases this paper questions whether their dispositions are likely to help in approaching sustainability. The paper then takes up Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field, a critical realist account of normativity and ANT’s emphasis of heterogeneity to argue that the agents have conflicting normative dispositions.

Attached to this entry, find a draft of the paper to use if you do not have access to the book.