Sammendrag
Abstract: How are the building craft-professions contributing to the transition to a more environment friendly building standard? This paper tackles the issues concerning how builders enact cultural sustainability through their work in the new “green economies”. The building sector at large stands for about 40% of global energy usage, and is seen as one of the key sectors where energy can be drastically lowered – but it requires skill upgrading of the craftspeople putting this climate policy into action (Loorbach, 2007). Previous research on craftspeople is highly lacking in the regards to climate transitions, especially in high-expertise areas such as buildings (Pinderhughes, 2006). The project has qualitatively investigated what it means to be a craftsperson in contemporary society, with building regulations, automation, tendencies towards more temporary employees and outsourcing of work. This has been done through in depth semi-structured interviews, and our findings show that the transition can be improved by enrolling craftspeople in the decision processes (Jones and Conrad, 2008). Our research suggests that such enrolling should pay close attention to the skills and culture traditionally associated with the building crafts. The research is theoretically framed in Studies of Science and Technology, with a focus on sustainable transition studies, which the authors are bringing into the new context of enrolling everyday workers into the transition to the environment of tomorrow (Aune and Bye, 2005). The paper hypothesizes: Can cultural sustainability contribute to better justice for sustainable transition workers?
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