ethnography

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By way of exploring ethnographic data on carbon construction practices by agents of ecological modernisation in a multinational corporation, this paper seeks to problematise the distributed and heterogeneous intelligence assembled by human and non-humans to make intelligible their carbon footprint.
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. Thus, carbon emerges as co-constituted by thought. I will focus on instances in which the corporate machinery, i.e. automated thought, had to be supplemented by immediate human practices of 1) thinking themselves, 2) organising materials to think through and 3) ordering others to think. At another layer of analysis, I am to scrutinise carbon construction practices through the tension between creatively thinking / envisioning – and calculating / number crunching. Tracing members' practices allows to reconstruct how their usage of dichotomies renders carbon emissions intelligible.
Following these relations of thinking allows to question the conceptualisations 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.

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.

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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.

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