On Not Muddling Lunches and Flights: Narrating a Number, Qualculation, and Ontologising Troubles

Calculating and making public carbon footprints is becoming self-evident for multinational corporations. Drawing on ethnographic data I narrate of the calculative routine practices involved in that process. The narration shows how routine yet sophisticated mathematical transformations are involved in retrieving salient information, and second that mathematical consistency is readily interrupted by ‘dirty data’. Such interruptions call for opportunistic data management in devising work-arounds, which effect enough mathematical coherence for the number to hold together. Foregrounding an episode of calculative data retrieval, interruption and work-around contrivance, I employ it to make a comparative reading of two STS analytics, arguing: whereas Callon and Law’s analytic technique of qualculation reveals the episode of data management and work around contrivance as a teleologically oriented process that manages to bridge mathematical inconsistency, Verran’s technique of ontologising troubles enables us to recognise how a number-as-network configures its particular kind of certainty and coherence, how it sticks

Carbon classified?:Unpacking heterogeneous relations inscribed into corporate carbon emissions

How does a corporation know it emits carbon? Acquiring such knowledge starts with the classification of environmentally relevant consumption information. This paper visits the corporate location at which this underlying element for their knowledge is assembled to give rise to carbon emissions. Using an actor-network theory (ANT) framework, the aim is to investigate the actors who bring together the elements needed to classify their carbon emission sources and unpack the heterogeneous relations drawn on. Based on an ethnographic study of corporate agents of ecological modernisation over a period of 13 months, this paper provides an exploration of three cases of enacting classification. Drawing on ANT, we problematise the silencing of a range of possible modalities of consumption facts and point to the ontological ethics involved in such performances. In a context of global warming and corporations construing themselves as able and suitable to manage their emissions, and, additionally, given that the construction of carbon emissions has performative consequences, the underlying practices need to be declassified, i.e. opened for public scrutiny. Hence the paper concludes by arguing for a collective engagement with the ontological politics of carbon

Failing the market, failing deliberative democracy:How scaling up corporate carbon reporting proliferates information asymmetries

Corporate carbon footprint data has become ubiquitous. This data is also highly promissory. But as this paper argues, such data fails both consumers and citizens. The governance of climate change seemingly requires a strong foundation of data on emission sources. Economists approach climate change as a market failure, where the optimisation of the atmosphere is to be evidence based and data driven. Citizens or consumers, state or private agents of control, all require deep access to information to judge emission realities. Whether we are interested in state-led or in neoliberal ‘solutions’ for either democratic participatory decision-making or for preventing market failure, companies’ emissions need to be known. This paper draws on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Fortune 50 company’s environmental accounting unit to show how carbon reporting interferes with information symmetry requirements, which further troubles possibilities for contesting data. A material-semiotic analysis of the data practices and infrastructures employed in the context of corporate emissions disclosure details the situated political economies of data labour along the data processing chain. The explicit consideration of how information asymmetries are socially and computationally shaped, how contexts are shifted and how data is systematically straightened out informs a reflexive engagement with Big Data. The paper argues that attempts to automatise environmental accounting’s veracity management by means of computing metadata or to ensure that data quality meets requirements through third-party control are not satisfactory. The crossover of Big Data with corporate environmental governance does not promise to trouble the political economy that hitherto sustained unsustainability

Studying reconfigurations of discourse: tracing the stability and materiality of 'sustainability/carbon'

Die Stabilität von Diskursen ist nicht gegeben, sondern hergestellt. Sie wird erreicht durch die Dispositiv-Konfigurationen, also dem praktischen und andauernden ›assembling‹ von semiotischen und materiellen Entitäten. Der Artikel stellt eine Assemblage von Theorien, Methoden und Methodologien vor, die es erlauben nachzuverfolgen, wie heterogene Entitäten (re)(kon)figuriert werden, um das Performieren der Stabilität eines Diskurses zu erreichen. Anhand alltäglicher Büropraktiken, die den betrieblichen Nachhaltigkeits/carbondiskurs konfigurieren, wird nachgezeichnet, wie qualitative Datenanalyse, Grounded Theory sowie Ansätze der Science and Technology Studies verflochten werden können, um eine in den Daten begründete und generalisierbare Diskursethnographie zu ermöglichen.The stability of a discourse is not given but produced. It is achieved in the configuration of the dispositif. The paper approaches dispositif as a practical ongoing assembling of semiotic and material entities. The article presents an assemblage of theories, methods and methodologies that allow tracing how heterogeneous entities are (re)(con)figured to achieve performing a discourse’s stability. Using mundane office practices that configure the corporate sustainability/carbon discourse as an example, the article spells out how qualitative data analysis, grounded theory and Science and Technology Studies approaches can be interwoven to pursue a grounded and generalisable ethnographic study of discourse

Alleviation of energy poverty through transitions to low-carbon energy infrastructure

With Green Deals and a competitive techno-economic basis for low-carbon energy transitions, energy infrastructural change is intensifying. This is matched by rapid growth in scholarship on sociotechnical transitions and energy justice, combined in the phrase ‘just transitions’. Yet how can an abstract concern with a normative concept like justice be brought to bear on the socio-technical complexities of specific changes in energy infrastructure? This is an important and timely question to consider in a practical sense, since the energy policy landscape is increasingly focused on a ‘just transition’ as combining decarbonisation and a progressive vision of social equity and justice. Our synthesis review argues that a focus on the alleviation of energy poverty – a condition whereby people are unable to secure adequate levels of energy services in the home – can enable policy-oriented mobilisation of energy justice as an integral component of evolving energy infrastructure. We approach energy poverty as an opportunity to constructively broach issues of justice in global energy policy discourse, not as a catch-all for wider injustices and vulnerabilities. We present a conceptual framework, applied to three schematic cases of energy infrastructure under transition. In and across these cross-sectoral cases, we reflect on scope for energy poverty alleviation.publishedVersio