Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
suggestion within these criteria then they had little chance of being approved.
Thus, if an idea was not also a successful suggestion it was unlikely to be accepted
and turned into reality. The 'Programme' only knew suggestions. If they did not
satisfy the implicit standards then they were declined. Thus, whether the workers
were aware or not, their ideas were transformed into another social reality by en-
tering them into the mechanism suggestion scheme. The suggestions within the
latter were then reviewed by human actors. Independently of how well they fitted
to formal requirements, the suggestions provided knowledge.
However, the recipients of the knowledge were not disposed to deal with all
knowledges in the same manner, but to select them according to their fit into their
objectivist framing. It was this framing which marginalised the specific ideas of
the workers. At the same time we can recognise how not only specific ideas but
systemically forms of knowing are also disregarded. This resembles Ecological
Modernisation Theory (EMT) in that sense that EMT is based on objectively ana-
lysing situations and developing solutions. The inherent values and problems of
technoscientific knowledges are not considered but reproduced. This corresponds
to what Christoff (1996, p. 478) called “a unilinear path to ecological modernity”.
Alternative forms of human-nature relationships cannot easily find room to evolve
under an ecological modernisation paradigm.
To summarise, with this analysis we can recognise two contradictions in the
setting: First, the instrument 'Programme' was developed to harvest knowledges.
These are needed for effective environmental protection. However, at the same
time, certain forms of knowledge are structurally excluded. Knowledges which do
not fit to the rationality of ecological modernisation cannot be utilised and may
even create conflicts. Second, the ideas are lost not only by excluding them
through the suggestion scheme but also because the workers are not disposed to
put them otherwise into practice because of their relation to the production site;
they neither own the means of production nor are they responsible for the envi-
ronmental effects of the production.
It is these two forms of hierarchy, among knowledges and the possession of
means of production, which sustain unsustainability. With the hierarchy among
knowledges embedded into the field and the workers and Kunz positioned to not
question this hierarchy, communal learning processes within this kind of field are
unlikely. The other form of hierarchy makes it more likely that the workers' ideas
are not put into practice by themselves.
Hence, we can see this configuration of the organisational field as constraining
the possibility to construct sustainable futures. This is the case even though the
environmental manager is good willed and acts very much in the logic of ecologi-
cal modernisation. At his position within this configuration, he is unlikely to re-
flexively confront his stance. Therefore, I suggest, to search for possibilities for
change in the wider social context. Its actors might reconstruct the configuration
of the field, such that alternative futures become more likely. In the following,
therefore, we shall turn towards asking how we can conceptualise a way out of the
dilemma.
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