Die Unwahrscheinlichkeit des Umweltmanagements

You describe it as unlikely that universities will make an effort to ensure greater protection for the environment. How did you reach this conclusion?

First, a university must select environmental protection from among the many other important issues and decide to focus on it. But even if a university establishes an office dedicated to environmental protection and comes up with various ideas and measures to this end, it is by no means certain that the processes at a university will ultimately become more environmentally friendly. Many stakeholders can have a say in such decisions: the university management, the academic senate, individual departments, professors, and student representatives. As a result, decisions have to pass through lots of hoops, taking many interests into account. The opportunities and situations in which an environmental measure might change are therefore myriad. Once the decision has been made to implement a measure, it must also be possible to incorporate it into the day-to-day work of the administration. This is not to mention the fact that academic staff can simply ignore many requirements that come from the administration.

When most people think of ethnography, they think of distant tribal societies. Why do you use this method to study university administrations?

For about 100 years now, researchers have been applying ethnographic tools to their own societies, such as when looking at street gangs, stock-market trading—or university administrations. In my opinion, the advantage of organizational ethnographies is that they make it possible to apprehend organizations in their entire complexity. Not only do the formal rules become visible, but the informal (as it were) cultural aspects do, too: long-simmering conflicts between certain departments, short official channels, “usable illegalities”. By shadowing people during their everyday work, I was able to observe how decisions are prepared, taken, and finally implemented. Despite comparable structural characteristics, these processes are different from university to university. Ethnography uncovers the deep structure of a university and provides better insight into what really happens there.

Do you want universities to draw practical lessons from your findings on how decisions are taken in order to make it easier for them to establish environmental management programmes? Or what impact would you like your dissertation to have?

Although I find the normative goal of ensuring environmentally friendly operations at universities important, I am not interested in creating a manual for good environmental management practices. On the contrary, the study reveals that such guides always start from overly simple, linear ideas. Organizations are complex, however, simmering beneath the formal surface. This won’t end with good management, especially since the social environment is constantly changing and coming up with new expectations. So despite all the good intentions to make reforms, it remains rather unlikely that changes will actually be achieved.That said, it wouldn’t hurt any university to establish an office or a position for environmental management and to pay attention to the linkages in operations. The influence of the administrative side of a university on teaching and research remains extremely limited. Regardless of anyone’s opinion on the matter, this must be acknowledged as fact.