Helen Roby

Community energy is a key part of the UK Government's plan for decarbonising the energy sector, yet public engagement with the sustainability agenda remains low. This paper explores the importance of community energy groups in this process, drawing on a study examining how to increase local engagement with energy projects. The findings reveal striking diversity in what constitutes a community, the range of community energy projects being undertaken, the journeys communities are taking towards sustainability and the factors that shape those journeys. This diversity has implications for whether and how communities become engaged in energy projects. The findings also suggest that there is potential to use commercial approaches to achieve better targeting of carbon-reduction initiatives.

Rebecca Whiting, Helen Roby, Gillian Symon, and Petros Chamakiotis develop an unconventional research design using video methods, asking participants to produce their own video diaries, a process which is then followed by narrative interviews. This approach generates multi-modal data: audio, visual, and textual, and involves adopting a qualitative perspective, and a social constructionist epistemology. This participant-led research design allows researchers to investigate a range of issues that are not often recalled in interviews or surveys, by capturing naturally occurring, real-time events and activities, and micro-interactions including non-verbal behaviours. Although video methods are used in other disciplines, they are rare in organizational research. The approach is illustrated by a study which explored how digital technologies affect our ability to manage switches across work-life boundaries. Analysis of participants’ video diaries illustrates the theoretical and reflexive insights that can be gained from this method. The problems and pitfalls encountered in this study are also considered.

Although smart cities are now the subject of a growing literature, there is a paucity of research which considers how smart city projects develop on the ground. This paper begins to address this concern by exploring the development of a transport application, MotionMap, within the MK:Smart smart city programme. MotionMap aims to provide city-wide real-time transport information services. It is being developed through an ongoing dialogue sparked by the interaction of lead users and prototypes of a smart transport app. We draw on insights from Strategic Niche Management and social practice theories to explore how ‘smart’ might be integrated within and potentially transform the plurality of mobility practices that exist in cities.

This article applies paradox as a metatheoretical framework for the reflexive analysis of roles within a participatory video study. This analysis moves us beyond simply describing roles as paradoxical, and thus problematic, to offer insights into the dynamics of the interrelationship between participant, researcher, and video technology. Drawing on the concept of “working the hyphens,” our analysis specifically focuses on the complex enactment of Participation-Observation and Intimacy-Distance “hyphen spaces.” We explore how video technology mediates the relationship between participant and researcher within these spaces, providing opportunities for participant empowerment but simultaneously introducing aspects of surveillance and detachment. Our account reveals how video study participants manage these tensions to achieve participation in the project. It examines the roles for the researched, the technology, and the researchers that are an outcome of this process. Our analysis advances methodology by bringing together a paradox perspective with reflexive work on research relationships to demonstrate how we can more adequately explore tensions in research practice and detailing the role of technology in the construction and management of these tensions.

Smart grids that use information and communication technologies to augment energy network management have been developed in several locations including London and Stockholm. Common rationales for smart grids include: reducing the carbon dioxide emissions of energy supply, maintaining security of supply and promoting affordability. However, beyond these general abstractions, smart grids seem to exhibit considerable diversity in terms of their characteristics and rationales for development. Thus, while the term smart grid may imply abstract notions of what smart grids are and might do, they are developed in response to local contingencies and are diverse. In this paper, the authors therefore explore the governance processes through which smart grids are constructed. The paper suggests that standardising smart grids through definitions and best practices that fix both problems and solutions should be avoided. Rather governance processes should be promoted in which local contingencies can be articulated and more legitimate smart grids developed in response to these.

Research with consumers has revealed limited awareness of the sustainability impact of clothing (Goworek et al., 2012). Semi‐structured interviews conducted with a range of experts in sustainable clothing to increase understanding of the challenges for sustainable clothing revealed that a focus on sustainability alone will not drive the necessary changes in consumers’ clothing purchase, care and disposal behaviour for three reasons: (i) clothing sustainability is too complex; (ii) consumers are too diverse in their ethical concerns and (iii) clothing is not an altruistic purchase. The findings identify the challenges that need to be addressed and the associated barriers for sustainable clothing. Interventions targeting consumers, suppliers, buyers and retailers are proposed that encourage more sustainable clothing production, purchase, care and disposal behaviour. These interventions range from normalizing the design of sustainable clothing and increasing the ease of purchase, to shifting clothes washing norms and increasing upcycling, recycling and repair.