Knowledge for Corporate Energy Management - Structural Contradictions and Hope for Change? - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 211

18 Knowledge for Corporate Energy
Management - Structural Contradictions
and Hope for Change?
Ingmar Lippert
Augsburg University, Chair of Sociology, Augsburg, Germany
18.1 Introduction
'Energy' has been continuously a topic in Western discourses on environmental
and technology politics, at the latest since the global oil crises between 1970 and
1980. Potential for private sector innovation to put environmental protection goals
into practice is considered significant. Implicit to the aims of energy efficiency
and safe energy is the presence of actors who support corporations in reaching
these aims. These agents of ecological modernisation, i.e. environmental manag-
ers , and their practices have rarely been scrutinised. This paper, therefore, aims to
make them the object of enquiry - approached from a Science and Technology
Studies perspective. This article studies the implications for knowledge politics of
techno-economic decision-making by such an actor within the energy manage-
ment at a site of a multinational corporation. Based on ethnographic research at
the site the article focuses on an instance of a management tool, corporate sugges-
tion schemes, to mobilise workers' ideas of improving the environmental per-
formance. With this it becomes possible to attend to how corporate agents of eco-
logical modernisation deal with the issue 'energy'. We find that the manager uses
specific forms of knowledge - adequate to the discourse of ecological modernisa-
tion - while, however, sidelining alternative forms. Thus, the latter are lost to sus-
tainable development. It is concluded, that the actors' knowledge practice renders
corporate energy management unsustainable. To conceptualise a way out of this
dilemma the article draws on theories of grounded utopias.
The global oil crises between 1970 and 1980 provided a discursive environment
from which 'energy' emerged as a continuing topic in Western discourses of envi-
ronmental and technology politics. Actors within this discourse normally consider
potential for innovation in the private sector significant to achieve environmental
protection goals. These aims are for example energy efficiency and saving energy.
This presupposes the presence of actors who support corporations in reaching
these aims. Within the environmental management discourse we normally concep-
tualise these actors, i.e. environmental managers, as acting rationally and
grounded in scientific decision-making. Ecological Modernisation Theory, as con-