Search results

The City of Copenhagen aims to become the first carbon neutral capital in the world by 2025. Ten per cent of the total CO2-reduction target is to be achieved through energy retrofitting of existing buildings in the city. This article reports from an action research study in the urban renewal section in Copenhagen City Council where planners struggle to promote more and better energy retrofitting projects in the urban renewal scheme. The study finds that planners in fact approach green retrofitting as a ‘wicked problem’ that requires new solution strategies targeting the complexity of developing new retrofitting standards and solutions in the existing urban renewal framework. The analysis shows how planners’ strategic responses are challenged by competing worldviews concerning the role of urban renewal and the problems and potentials of green retrofitting in practice.

The existing housing stock has a major energy saving potential and is mostly considered to be the sector in which energy efficiency most cost effectively can be achieved. About 30% of all energy use is consumed in the housing stock. The European union formulates saving targets, policies and regulations that have to be implemented by the member states and a considerable share of the EU budget for research and innovation is dedicated to this challenge. In recent years many policies, investment programmes, technical innovations and process innovations have been developed and been put into practice. However, it appears to be very difficult to realise massive renovation programmes in the existing housing stock and really make a step forward towards the energy efficiency goals. This special issue presents an overview of actual insights of the perspectives of energy efficiency in the housing stock based on several research projects and analyses and discussions about how the current policies will work out and which are the barriers that still have to be taken. We focus on the policies, the processes and the people.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an overview of contemporary approaches to the challenge of managing positionality and to discuss their applicability to fieldwork in contested fields.

The paper is driven by the author's experience of disconcertment during her fieldwork for a study of economic prioritization of access to new pharmaceuticals. Here she was pushed to take sides between health economists, clinicians and patients. Based on an iterative literature review, the paper identifies contemporary approaches to side-taking and discusses their practical applicability by constructing counterfactual accounts of a specific situation related to her fieldwork.

The author provides an overview of three “modes of intervention” characteristic of contemporary ethnography: political activism, organizational development and intervening description. The author presents the research agenda, the methodological principles and the means of intervention of each of the three modes, and discusses their applicability to the fieldwork process.

The overview of contemporary approaches to managing positionality is relevant for researchers doing fieldwork in contested fields. The paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches, and is intended as a resource for ethnographers who want to clarify their own positionality and prepare or improve their strategies on how to take sides in the process of doing fieldwork.

While the question of how to take sides is a classical challenge for organizational ethnographers, only few studies exist that look across contemporary ethnographic positions on how to manage positionality in the process of doing fieldwork. In addition to providing an overview for the individual ethnographer, this paper aims to participate in a collective academic conversation on the subject of managing positionality in the process of doing fieldwork.

The paper ethnographically explores modes of urban resistance emerging in tandem with climate change mitigation programs in Copenhagen.

Building on 11 months of fieldwork with a Danish construction enterprise, the paper examines the politics of urban climate change mitigation programs through the lens of a group of builders' struggles to rethink and resolve dilemmas related to environmental concerns in construction and urban development.

Based on an analysis of a specific construction project connected to a larger urban climate change mitigation program in Copenhagen, the paper shows how the builders deliberately move between different perspectives and positions as they navigate the shifting power relations of urban planning. The paper argues that this form of crafty resistance enables the builders to maneuver the political landscape of urban planning as they seek to appropriate the role of “urban planners” themselves.

Taking up recent discussions of “resistance” in anthropology and cognate disciplines (e.g. Theodossopoulos, 2014; Bhungalia, 2020; Prasse-Freeman, 2020), the paper contributes an ethnographic analysis of struggles between diverging and, at times, competing modes of engagement in urban climate change mitigation programs and thus sheds light on how professional actors negotiate the ambiguity of “sustainability” in urban planning.

Argues that little attention has been devoted to charismatic or transformational leadership in the voluntary sector, although many socially‐oriented voluntary organizations, such as relatives’ associations, clients’ associations, crisis centres and environmental groups aim to change people’s cognitive and emotional capacity and living conditions. The voluntary associations have a great power to bring about change because of the leaders’ ability to link the goals of the organization to those of the members, so that the aspirations of the individual members coincide with the good of the organization. Analyses charismatic or transformational leadership in concrete terms in a voluntary Swedish organization (Reningsborg), which combines changes in marginalized young people with practical relief work for the poor and needy of eastern Europe. In their work to create resources for international aid, the young outcasts are redefined as helpers and participants in a common project. This is the foundation for the production of identity, meaning and social belonging. Argues that the forms of organization and leadership in this analysed example give lost people access to a meaningful context which our de‐traditionalized postmodern society does not automatically give to the young generation. The new social movements that have arisen out of the need to create identity and meaning may possibly have the same role in transforming society in the postmodern era that the labour movement, the temperance movement and the free‐church movement had in the modern era. Concludes that leadership which enables the communication of messages in keeping with the times and the mobilization of forces for voluntary work are a common denominator of the two eras.