Erroneous environments? Ontic achievements and ontology in carbon accounting practices

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a transnational Fortune 50 company headquarters' environmental management team, this paper reflexively opens up a range of situations that took part in enacting the company's carbon footprint. Common to all these situations is that the environmental realities enacted have been categorised by some members as erroneous or as not good enough. These enactments of erroneous realities, the paper proposes, can be generatively analysed by drawing on the partially different, partially complementary sensibilities offered by Annemarie Mol's and Helen Verran's work. Using ethnographic vignettes, I reconstruct the practices that bring some form of reality into being. When enactments of realities are considered erroneous by members we can a) enter into a critical analysis of these authors' notions of ontological and ontic and their entanglement with epistemic work practices, b) inquiring into the micro-politics of (non)solidarities that members and the researcher have to particular realities, and to the workplace's actor-networks in which they are enacted.