Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
such constraints for his organisation others, within the organisation as well as
without, i.e. state bureaucracies and public discourses on the environment, con-
structed constrains for him. Julian was faced with many relations which affected
his work practices and his position provided little power to influence them. In our
case, the symptom 'glass waste' was a site at which various constraints inter-
sected; to name but a few: economic, cultural, legal and organisational. This site
was stabilised through these multiple relations and it was not easy to alter them.
Any 'greening' exercise will have to deal with such constraints.
Comparing this discussion with thoughts presented above makes obvious that
the construction of a recycling network is not clearly a ground for developing a
sustainable human-nature relationship. Rethinking the case - with Bourdieu, Ac-
tor-network theory as well as Ecological Modernisation Theory in mind - indi-
cates that recycling naturalises 'glass waste' and that this technological so-called
solution carries the taken-for-grantedness of waste and therefore processes it in a
proper EM rationality. This rationality produces a lock-in of having to have more,
rather than less, glass waste. The recycling network has to ensure sufficient glass
waste to sustain itself. However, for humans involved it seems rational in order to
ensure having sufficient waste to ensure rather more than less waste produced.
Thus, this analysis suggests that
in the course of Ecological Modernisation prac-
tices, unsustainability can be sustained
.
Having recognised this, we should now turn the critique to consider where
change could come from. This requires consideration of both the tendency of
change and the inert character of social order. By using Sterne's work we recog-
nised that the 'world-making' which Bourdieu (1989) refers to can be extended, in
that we make the world by both construing and constructing it
38
- symbolically
and materially. However, this 'we' needs to be differentiated. The power of world-
making is unequally distributed. Some have more access to forms of capital than
others. Consider 'glass waste'. It was part of many actors' habitus. 'Glass waste'
served as a crystallisation site of many habitus, i.e. of Julian's, the recycling com-
pany's agents', the bottle producers' as well as the 'drinking folk's'. Among these
actors the bottle producers, I assume, have most agency in shaping the social phe-
nomenon 'glass waste', albeit they have no monopoly in it. In a market economy
the consumer has some say and in our example the agents of the social technology
recycling can transform the phenomenon as well. Needless to say, neither the ma-
terial glass nor its constituting entities, like silicon dioxide molecules, have agency
in how they become the site of history being objectified; the real/actual aspects of
glass merely effectuate how the social can be inscribed on it (Sayer 2000); my cup
of tea has effects, rather than agency, on me writing this paper. However, the same
aspects of glass structure not only the room for configurations of habitus but also
wider fields. If glass became scarcer, it would become expensive and recycling
might be substituted by returnable bottles. Of course, a bottle and the specific fab-
rication of glass are a hybrid between the social and the natural and through them
agency can be exercised. An analysis which construes 'glass waste' as a given,
naturalises it.
38
Cf. Fairclough et al. 2002
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