10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17176
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2038-3460
17176
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Anna Åberg
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Nina Möllers and Karin Zachmann (eds.), Past and Present Energy Societies: How Energy Connects Politics, Technologies and Cultures, Transcript Verlag, 2012
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
5
Book Reviews
2014-07-14
2023-06-13
2014-07-14
2023-07-24
204-207
TS
Anna Åberg
2014/07/14
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17176
204
KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
2038-3460
1
en
207
Nina Möllers and Karin Zachmann (eds.), Past and Present Energy Societies: How Energy Connects Politics, Technologies and Cultures, Transcript Verlag, 2012
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17176/16078
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204                                                           Tecnoscienza 5 (1)


Nina Möllers and Karin Zachmann (eds.)
Past and Present Energy Societies: How Energy Connects Politics,
Technologies and Cultures
Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012, pp. 340

Anna Åberg KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

     There is much focus today on the “next big energy transition”, mostly
defined as a transition away from the prevailing fossil fuel base of most
energy systems in the world. This potential transformation can imply a
more sustainable resource base, or the change from a high-energy society
to a low- (or just less high) energy society. The concept of an energy tran-
sition is in itself nothing new; it has been used to describe earlier changes
from for example wood to coal and in connection to the nuclear debate.
However, the contemporary discussion often fails to historicize the con-
cept in itself and its different meanings over time. Historical knowledge is
also seldom used to unpack the complex processes, politics and artefacts
that make up the diverse energy systems globally in the framework of the
contemporary discussion.
     The book Past and Present Energy Societies: How Energy Connects
Politics, Technologies and Cultures edited by Nina Möllers and Karin
Zachmann, brings history into this discussion. It gathers authors from the
humanities and social sciences to investigate how “energy concatenates
politics, technologies and cultures”, providing a basis for reflection on the
complex relationships between energy and society in relation to possible
future transitions. The volume gathers ten chapters into three themes: 1)
Cultural Representations of Energy, 2) Energy Consumption Practices
and 3) Societal Perceptions of Energy Resources.
     In the first chapter, Nina Möllers analyses energy-related displays at
world’s fairs, showing the changing views of energy (predominantly elec-
tricity) in society. She highlights how a prevailing energy narrative of
abundance and connection to economic growth has been perpetuated at
these world's fairs. Even when this narrative was challenged in relation to
the energy crises through the 1970s, the displays did not question the
overall narrative, nor did they urge a change in consumption patterns. In-
stead they prolonged a technocratic narrative concentrated on a “techno-
logical fix”.
     Sophie Gerber follows with an analysis of marketing strategies of
power companies in Germany throughout the 20th century, describing
how these strategies became a “crucial element and condition of the elec-
trification and mechanization of households”. The advertisements show
discourses and conflicts that arose around electrification, making it clear
that the introduction of this new technology was not in any way a smooth
and predictable process.
Book Reviews                                                             205
    Electricity advertisements are also the focus of Yves Bouvier, in his
study of promotional films from the French electricity company Électric-
ité de France (EDF). He shows how electrical appliances went from being
central characters in these films during the 1950s and 1960s, to being re-
placed by a more consumer based narrative of energy saving during the
1970s and 1980s, only to return in the 1990s. In addition to showing how
prevailing narratives of energy during different time periods are played
out in the films, he also concludes that they both reproduce dominant en-
ergy narratives and partakes in the social construction of the relationships
between consumers and electricity itself. This conclusion is valid for all
the contributions in this first section, which provides an interesting com-
parison of energy narratives reproduced through cultural representations.
Especially important is the contribution to visual representations of ener-
gy cultures, as these representations tend to be left aside in many analyses.
    Although the first section is preoccupied with consumers and con-
sumerism, it deals mainly with representations of consumers from the side
of companies and exhibit constructors. The second part of the book
delves more deeply into the practices of energy consumption, starting
with Nina Lorkowskis study of the rental business of storage water heat-
ers in Berlin in the 1920s-1960s, and how it led to changes in electricity
consumption patterns. Lorkowski brings to attention both the "projected
consumer", imagined by engineers at the electricity company Bewag, and
the actual practices of the consumers. She shows how the installation of
water heaters connected directly to ideals of hygiene by making it possi-
ble to take baths more often, and how new hygiene patterns were co-
created by consumers and engineers. The water heater is described as a
“Trojan horse” into the households, making it possible for companies to
change electricity consumption patterns. Lorkowski draws an interesting
parallel to today’s household introduction of smart meters.
    Mathias Mutz focuses on the introduction of Daylight savings time
(DST) in East and West Germany, and its connection to discourses of en-
ergy saving. He concludes that although the passage to DST has been
framed as an effort to save energy, this framing is simplified. Issues con-
nected to leisure, quality of life and individualization were central in the
debate, while the energy issue served as a background to discuss these
matters. Mutz thereby shows the complex way that energy problems are
integrated in broader societal and political discourses.
    A different political perspective is given by Karl-Michael Brunner,
Anja Christanell and Markus Spitzer, dealing more specifically with social
inequality and consumer practices in a contemporary setting. Starting
from the notion that energy consumption patterns can put a spotlight on
social inequalities, not only on a global scale but also within countries,
they present a case study based on in-depth interviews with members of
poverty-stricken households in Vienna about their energy consumption
patterns. This study stands out in the volume due to its contemporary and
anthropological rather than historic nature. While the subject matter is
206                                                           Tecnoscienza 5 (1)

pressing and the political intent is laudable, its place in the volume is not
completely clear.
    While the first two parts of the volume focus on electricity, the third
part is more diverse, including other energy carriers and sources. This
part suffers from a certain lack of coherency, but nonetheless includes
interesting cases, starting with Helena Ekerholm’s study of the use of
wood gas as automobile fuel in Sweden around the time of the Second
World War. She highlights how promoting actors did not manage to
make wood gas an alternative to petrol in the minds of the consumers.
This was partly due to technical problems, but even more to the view of
the fuel as non-progressive and a necessity during the war more than a
viable choice for the future. Petrol, on the other hand embodied the ideal
of modernity connected to the automobile expansion, and soon regained
its place on the market after the end of the war.
    Valentina Roxo adds an explicit environmental perspective when she
demonstrates the lack of environmental discourse surrounding the oil ex-
traction in Western Siberia. She shows how environmental problems have
been blindsided by the discourse of economic profit and technological
progress in the Russian debate about resource extraction. Even when crit-
ical voices have been raised in the political discussion and institutions for
the protection of nature have been created, this has had practically no
consequences for policy practice in the extraction areas. The complex re-
lations between extractors and the people living in the area are also
brought to the fore.
    Thomas Moe Skjøldsvold turns our attention back to Northern Eu-
rope in his chapter on the Swedish and Norwegian discussion on bioen-
ergy use. He focuses on how promoting actors within the field have imag-
ined their “public's” view of bioenergy. The discussion is an interesting
theoretical complement to the discussion on marketing and images of the
consumer projected by energy companies. Sjøldsvold shows that the im-
agined responses of different publics on bioenergy have had real effects in
the strategies of public engagement from the side of the bioenergy actors.
This shows the importance of imaginaries for the practices of energy pro-
ducers as well as consumers, adding an important dimension to the earlier
studies in the volume dealing with cultural representations of energy and
energy practices.
    As a final contribution, Silvana Bartoletto writes an overview of the
connection between energy and economic growth in a long-term perspec-
tive, showing four general phases of different relationships between ener-
gy and growth.
    The introduction states that the book is meant to “contribute to the
current scholarly energy debate by shedding light on the political, techno-
logical and cultural premises of the high-energy society and its capacities
of transitions”. As it stands, the book focuses more on the premises of the
high-energy society and changing perceptions and uses of energy over
time than on practical capacities for transition. Several contributions un-
Book Reviews                                                              207
derline and show the social construction of energy societies, but we are
left with very little in terms of alternatives in the end, especially with re-
gard to different political or market organization. However, this is per-
haps not surprising considering the predominantly historical perspective.
    Nevertheless, this volume is a great contribution to the field of energy
history and provides the reader with many useful and enlightening case
studies. I especially want to underline that certain contributions will be
excellent as readings for university education dealing with social and his-
torical perspectives on energy discourses in production, consumption and
culture.


                                    ***


Ronald Leenes and Eleni Kosta (eds.)
Bridging Distances in Technology and Regulation
Oisterwijk: Wolf Legal Publishers, 2013, pp. 204

Simone Arnaldi Università di Padova

    The recent history of technology is characterized by a significant de-
gree of regulatory pluralism. As a rough approximation, this growing plu-
ralization is the consequence of two intersecting processes. Firstly, the
fundamental transformation induced by globalization affects the previ-
ously unchallenged role of the nation state in setting regulations domesti-
cally through traditional command-and-control mechanisms and interna-
tionally through the forms of international public law (Ferrarese 2000;
Malsch 2013, with a reference to S&T) and opens up the regulatory space
to non-state actors. Secondly, in emerging technological fields that are
characterized by a high degree of uncertainty regulators lack the re-
sources or information needed to develop sound “discretion-limiting
rules” of mandatory nature (Dorbeck-Jung and Shelley-Egan 2013). As a
consequence, new regulatory instruments complement traditional hard,
mandatory regulation. Soft regulation is typical of this context and it con-
stitutes a tool for leveraging the information advantages of those actors to
be regulated. In this broad picture, space opens for other forms of nor-
mativity. Such normative but extra-legal aspects enter regulation especial-
ly through the science advisory system (Tallacchini 2010), and instru-
ments and mechanisms such as ethics advisory committees (Tallacchini
2009, Mali et al. 2012) and technology assessment (Rip et al. 1995).
    As far as high scientific uncertainty pushes “regulatory decision-
making into a more political direction” and thus requires “the weighing
up of sometimes competing values” (Falkner and Jaspers 2012), the reli-
