My research
Brief overview
I completed my doctorate in Management Studies at Oxford’s Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (formerly known as the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization) at Saïd Business School.
Prior to that, I obtained an undergraduate degree in information science and a master’s in the sociology of science and technology.
My doctoral thesis makes the case for a processual view of how organisations practice ethics, which I refer to as ethicising. This is briefly described below and in this press release from InSIS: Ethics in Action.
Ethicising – often conceptualised under names such as corporate social responsibility, social performance, and sustainability – features prominently as a mode of sense-making in the world of business, particularly in the face of perceived threats such as climate change.
Working at the intersection of management & organisation studies, especially with reference to the ‘practice turn’, science & technology studies, social accounting and anthropology, I have identified three key modalities that seem to underpin ‘ethical’ behaviour in corporate settings, namely:
Moments of standardising, i.e. attempts to make ethics measurable, mobile and durable through standards, metrics and benchmarks.
Moments of materialising, i.e. creating material configurations that are aligned with members’ conceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ technologies and work practices.
Moments of unethicising, i.e. the various ways in which practitioners legitimise their socio-ethical domain by contrasting it to that of inferior others.
Empirically, I have undertaken extensive participant observation studies in three explicitly ‘ethical’ yet very different companies: an energy company, a CSR consultancy and an ‘ethical’ property company. From time to time, companies approach me with a question or project they find too boring to undertake themselves, so I guess I can call myself a consultant, too. I work as a CSR consultant.
In these capacities, among other things, I have drafted guidelines for how a company can engage meaningfully with indigenous peoples facing an extractive operation, created an ethical supply chain for the property sector, mapped out the most pertinent social issues confronting the medical industry, and pulled together data on consumer trust in ‘ethical’ coffee labels.
At the moment of writing, March 2008, I am I have been a Visiting Researcher with the Science, Technology and Society Center at UC Berkeley and at CERN in Switzerland. I have also enjoyed fieldwork in the Russian European North, London and The Netherlands.
Papers and stuff
Below is a selection of my recent writings, some of which you may be able to download.
Media’s role in the journey from consumer to citizen, The Guardian online (Nov 2009).
Sustainability questions the media needs to answer, The Guardian online (Oct 2009).
Toennesen, C., Molloy, E. and Jacobs, C. (Under review). Lost in Translation? Actor-Network Theory and Organisation Studies (pdf).
Toennesen, C. (Forthcoming) Ethics in Practice (to appear in: Globalization in Practice) N. Thrift, A, Tickell, S. Woolgar (eds.), Oxford University Press.
Toennesen, C. (2007). Becoming Mr. Ethical: Notes on the Reflexive Study of Ethics and Organising. EGOS (pdf).
Other academic activities
I have been designing and convening various undergraduate courses for the OPUS and Stanford Programmes at Oxford. Namely, courses in Organisational Sociology, Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility. I have also served as a lecturer in executive MBA modules, speaking about the relationship between innovation, technology and ethics.
My research has been presented in multiple formats and places, including the Oxford-Achilles Working Group on CSR (2009), EGOS (2006, 2007) and EASST/4S (2006, 2007, 2008). For the past couple of years, I have been organising and convening the ‘Ethics as Practice’ stream in connection with the latter event, the interest in which has risen sharply.
Lastly, I have acted as a reviewer for the journals Organization, Social Studies of Science and Telecommunications Policy.
Other affiliations
European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS)
The European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST)
The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)
The Danish Association for Science and Technology Studies (DASTS)
St. Catherine’s College
Research Associate at Institute of Information and Media Studies (IMV) at Aarhus University
Works of inspiration
Karl Weick’s writings on the social psychology of organising and sense-making in organisations continue to amaze me. The suggestion that organisations are outcomes of action rather than foundations gives rise to a lot of interesting questions, particularly when coupled with practice-research such as that undertaken by Karin Knorr-Cetina, Lucy Suchman, John Law and, in the specific context of ethics, Nelson Phillips and Stewart Clegg. I like the use of gerunds in social scientific literatures.
Also, I find Bowker, Star, Griesemer and Gieryn’s work on standards and boundary-drawing very useful in order to understand how domains of accountability are negotiated between various stakeholders.
See below for further details on some of my favourite books.
A word on method
While neither being against nor unfamiliar with quantitative research methods, I lean towards a qualitative approach and appreciate the reflexive writings of Steve Woolgar and, in fiction, Salman Rushdie, namely his masterpiece “Midnight’s Children.”
Good stuff
Here are some of the books and articles that have helped shape my research:
Bowker, G. C. and S. L. Star (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, Massachussets, The MIT Press.
Clegg, S., Kornberger, M. and Rhodes, C. (2006). “Business Ethics as Practice.” British Journal of Management 17.
Law, J. (1994). Organizing Modernity. Oxford, Blackwell.
Michael, M. and L. Birke (1994). “Accounting for Animal Experiments: Identity and Disreputable “Others”.” Science, Technology, and Human Values 19(2): 189-204.
Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, N. Ca. and London, Duke University Press.
Phillips, N. (1992). “Understanding Ethics in Practice: An Ethnomethodological Approach to the Study of Business Ethics.” Business Ethics Quarterly 2(2): 223-244.
Schatzki, T., Knorr-Cetina, K. and Savigny, E. (eds.) (2001) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London, Routledge.
Suchman, L. A. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Weick, K. E. (1979), The Social Psychology of Organizing. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Woolgar, S. (1988). Science: The Very idea. London, Tavistock Publications.