Ingmar Lippert is doing research on Agents of Ecological Modernisation supervised by the Chair for Sociology, Christoph Lau, of Augsburg University (Germany). He did his undergraduate studies at Brandenburg University of Technology (Germany) and Bosporus University (Turkey) and graduated in Environmental and Resource Management.
During this degree his interest shifted from the management issue (choosing and optimising the 'right' tools) towards a critical investigation of the societal conditions of the management paradigm and the construction of choices and norms which environmental managers act on. Institutionally this shift has urged him to study social scientific perspectives and, therefore, he moved on to postgraduate studies in Environment, Culture and Society at the Centre for Study of Environmental Change (Sociology Department) and the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy of Lancaster University, UK. In this context he started to conceptualise environmental managers as Agents of Ecological Modernisation, problematised using various critical takes in and beyond social theory: Bourdieu, Critical Realism, Autonomist Thought and Actor-Network Theory. From this vantage point he investigates workers who are supposedly bringing about the 'greening' of their corporation. He focuses on their knowledge practices and how implicit and explicit norms are used as resources as well as limit and channel their agency in their engagement with carbon accounting. During his studies he has been supported through several scholarships by the German National Academic Foundation.
As a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society (affiliated to the Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture of Alpen-Adria-University at Klagenfurt, University of Graz and Graz University of Technology) Ingmar Lippert was the first winner of the Manfred-Heindler-grant. In early 2011 he was visiting student of Lancaster University's Centre for Science Studies and Centre for the Study of Environmental Change. He acted as a reviewer for the journals Environmental Politics and ephemera - theory and politics in organisation and edited Part III1 of the book Implementing Environmental and Resource Management. This book part concerns the Limits to Managing Environments and was published by Springer.
In 2010 he published his first two books, critically posing the idea of making environmental management the object of study (Fragments of Environmental Management Studies2) and conceptualising Agents of Ecological Modernisation3.
Current Research
Ingmar Lippert is focussing on the enactment of carbon emissions by corporate agents of ecological modernisation. Lean more about his recent activities at our blog.
Affiliations
- Council Member of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology
- Member of the International Sociological Association (ISA): Research Committee on the Sociology of Science and Technology (RC 23)
- Hans Böckler Foundation (Scholarship holder)
- 1. Limits to Managing the Environment In Implementing Environmental and Resource Management, Edited by M. Schmidt, V. Onyango and D. Palekhov. Heidelberg: Springer, 2011.
- 2. Fragments of Environmental Management Studies. Tönning, Lübeck, Marburg: Der Andere Verlag, 2010.
- 3. Agents of Ecological Modernisation. Tönning, Lübeck, Marburg: Der Andere Verlag, 2010.