M Gro
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 10755 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | M Gro |
| NOMBRES | M |
| APELLIDO | Gro |
| FIRMA | GRO M |
| AFILIACIONES | Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3716-7512 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 73 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 300 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 73 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1994 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Fruchtbare Gemengelagen
Article Fruchtbare Gemengelagen: Die Umweltsoziologie mit epistemisch-methodischen Neuerungen auf wankendem ökologischem Boden was published on February 1, 2026 in the journal Soziologische Revue (volume 49, issue 1)
The webcam strikes a balance
The widespread adoption of videoconferencing in higher education has transformed digital learning, offering new opportunities for engagement while at the same time creating challenges related to student well-being. This underlying study examines these dual effects of webcam use in online education—its “light” side, which promotes social academic integration and engagement, and its “dark” side, which contributes to videoconferencing fatigue and po…
Wake effects and temperature plumes
Energy transitions are knowledge-intensive processes where a multitude of actors are trying to cope with inevitable knowledge gaps, surprises, and uncertainties. In this context, we focus on two techno-physical phenomena that are gaining practical relevance with the expansion of wind and geothermal energy extraction, and are surrounded by significant unknowns: wake effects and temperature plumes. Both phenomena can potentially affect the efficien…
Who owns the wind? Understanding wind energy production through a property chains perspective
In this article, we argue that the resourcification of wind is based on a specific entanglement of different property objects - in particular wind, land and wind turbines - and property holders. We depart from an understanding of property as a social phenomenon that is enacted through social practices and thereby becomes relevant within an arrangement of different entities (human, non-human and material) by structuring the relations between these…
Car driving as inverted quarantine and the sensory response to collective threats
Attempts at changing individual car use behavior towards increased use of public transport have so far largely failed. This paper will argue that the continued rise in individual car use needs to be understood as part of an overall trend towards protecting oneself instead of protecting the environment, i.e. an individualized sensory response to an omnipresent collective threat. The car industry serves this trend perfectly with features that turn …
Bruno Latour, Kampf um Gaia
Article Bruno Latour, Kampf um Gaia: Acht Vorträge über das neue Klimaregime. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2020, 523 S., kt., 25,00 € was published on July 1, 2022 in the journal Soziologische Revue (volume 45, issue 3)
Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies
Once treated as the absence of knowledge, ignorance today has become a highly influential topic in its own right, commanding growing attention across the natural and social sciences where a wide range of scholars have begun to explore the social life and political issues involved in the distribution and strategic use of not knowing. The field is growing fast and this handbook reflects this interdisciplinary field of study by drawing contributions…
Institutionalised ignorance in policy and regulation
Natural Experiments
In the mid‐nineteenth century, the term “natural experimentation,” or “social experimentation,” was used to describe sociological observations of events that occur in the course of life as opposed to the manipulation of variables by researchers. In the twentieth century, the notion of natural experiments as well as field or quasi‐experiments was used to denote a comparison of a treatment applied to a control group without defining beforehand how …
Stuck on coal and persuasion? A critical review of carbon capture and storage communication
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is discussed as a technology for mitigating climate change. With social scientific research on CCS having increased considerably over the last decade, this paper offers a first comprehensive review and evaluation of studies that investigate the way CCS projects are communicated to (local) stakeholders and the general public. We conduct a systematic review of 115 papers for a state-of-the-art assessment of research…
Making the Covid-19 crisis a real opportunity for environmental sustainability
An optimistic narrative has gained momentum during the first year of the pandemic: the COVID-19 crisis may have opened a window of opportunity to "rebuild better", to spur societal transitions towards environmental sustainability. In this comment, we review first evidence of individual and political changes made so far. Findings suggest that economies worldwide are not yet building back better. Against this background, we argue that a naïve oppor…
Influence of quality of intensive care on quality of life/return to work in survivors of the acute respiratory distress syndrome
Clinicaltrials.govNCT02637011. (December 22, 2015, retrospectively registered)
Speed tourism
The German Autobahn has inspired many people’s imagination with its lack of a general speed limit, the quality of its road surface as well as its allegedly well-behaved drivers. One of the consequences of this positive reputation has been the emergence of a phenomenon I would like to call “speed tourism.” In this article, I treat speed tourism as a special form of tourism that involves viewing the driving experience as an opportunity for either t…
Stefan Bargheer, Moral Entanglements
How the diesel engine became a “dirty” actant
Futurizing politics and the sustainability of real-world experiments
The German energy transition towards more sustainable forms of energy production has been characterized as a large-scale or real-world experiment. Whereas experiments are open-ended processes set up explicitly to allow (or even generate) surprises, by contrast sustainability implies the pursuit of clearly defined, normative ends. Whereas much of the literature on system transformation builds on the concept of innovation, our hypothesis is that fo…
Ecology
Although the term ecology was picked up in sociology in the late nineteenth century it became a concept recognizing human societies as part of their natural and built environments during the 1920s and 1930s in the Chicago School of sociology. By the 1950s sociological (human) ecology mainly focused on the spatial distribution of human phenomena in urban areas. Only in the 1970s, with the new field of environmental sociology, did a focus on the ec…
Remaking Participatory Democracy through Experimental Design
Rebound Effects in Practice
Experimentando con la tierra. Geotermia, no-conocimiento y transiciones energéticas como experimentos a la intemperie
Los combustibles fósiles no-renovables hicieron posible lo que se ha llamado el mundo moderno. Dado que los recursos no renovables son cada vez más difíciles y costosos de extraer, la transición a fuentes de energías renovables es una tarea crucial. En orden a enmarcar posibles caminos hacia la innovación responsable y transición dentro de las sociedades democráticas, este artículo se construye en torno al concepto de experimentos “terrenales” o …
On the invisibility of epochal breaks and the virtues of useless science
Risk as zombie category
‘Non-knowledge’ is a classical sociological term introduced into sociology most prominently by Georg Simmel. Dismissing classical sociological concepts as ‘zombie categories’, Ulrich Beck turned to non-knowledge relatively late in his career. This article argues provocatively that many of Beck’s observations on issues ranging from the uninsurability of modern risks to the notion of risk itself would have greatly profited from being complemented o…
Give Me an Experiment and I Will Raise a Laboratory
Bruno Latour once argued that science laboratories actively modify the wider society by displacing crucial actors outside the laboratory into the "field." This article turns this idea on its head by using the case of geothermal energy utilization to demonstrate that in many cases it is the experimental setup outside the laboratory that is there first, with the activities normally associated with a laboratory setting only being decided upon and im…
The social-ecological co-constitution of nature through ecological restoration
Die Natur der Gesellschaft. Eine Geschichte der Umweltsoziologie
The Unknown in Process
In contemporary debates on risk in modern societies, on reflexive modernity and a general crisis of knowledge, concepts and terms such as ignorance, non-knowledge or negative knowledge are used to denote that there can be knowledge about what is not known. Many of these terms are not only used with different meanings, sometimes antithetic to one another in their implications, but they often propose tree-like taxonomies without broaching the issue…
Society as experiment
Experiments are generally thought of as actions or operations undertaken to test a scientific hypothesis in settings detached from the rest of society. In this paper a different notion of experiment will be discussed. It is an understanding that has been developed in the classical tradition of the Chicago School of Sociology since the 1890s, but has so far remained unexplored. This sociological understanding of experiment does not model itself st…
Objective Culture' and the Development of Nonknowledge
Recent debates about the knowledge society have furthered awareness of the limits of knowing and, in turn, have fuelled sociological debates about the persistence and intensification of ignorance. In view of the ubiquity of the notion of ignorance, this paper focuses on Georg Simmel's insightful observations about Nichtwissen (nonknowledge) as the reverse side of knowledge. The paper seeks to relate the notion of nonknowledge to Simmel's conceptu…
Collaborative experiments
The social reformer, sociologist and feminist Jane Addams (1860-1935), who established Chicago's Hull House as one of the first settlement houses in America, described her work as experimental, but at the same time she and many of her co-workers rejected the idea of Hull House as a laboratory for social scientific investigation. The present article discusses Addams's unique understanding of social experiment beyond the laboratory. Through `experi…
Risk as zombie category
‘Non-knowledge’ is a classical sociological term introduced into sociology most prominently by Georg Simmel. Dismissing classical sociological concepts as ‘zombie categories’, Ulrich Beck turned to non-knowledge relatively late in his career. This article argues provocatively that many of Beck’s observations on issues ranging from the uninsurability of modern risks to the notion of risk itself would have greatly profited from being complemented o…
The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman
Give Me an Experiment and I Will Raise a Laboratory
Bruno Latour once argued that science laboratories actively modify the wider society by displacing crucial actors outside the laboratory into the "field." This article turns this idea on its head by using the case of geothermal energy utilization to demonstrate that in many cases it is the experimental setup outside the laboratory that is there first, with the activities normally associated with a laboratory setting only being decided upon and im…
Unexpected Interactions
Georg Simmel reflected intensively on the place of human beings in nature, developing a sociological perspective for observing natural and social changes that so far have been largely ignored. This article discusses Simmel's theoretical starting point for observing the natural in contrast to the social. In his writings, Simmel became adept at moving back and forth between the two sides of observation - the natural and the cultural. The significan…
Brain Potentials in the Processing of Complex Sentences
Transdisciplinary Environmental Science
Human Geography and Ecological Sociology
This article discusses how American geography and sociology began their university institutionalization in the 1890s with some very similar disciplinary points of origin and understanding of their subject matter but subsequently carved out their own fields by creating new or abandoning old disciplinary areas. Some of the disciplinary “catchment areas” were fought over until they came under the heading of human ecology around 1907/8, which, at lea…
It's always dark in front of the pickaxe
This article departs from the view in which ignorance is seen as necessarily detrimental and analyses how specified ignorance (here called 'nonknowledge') can even serve as a productive resource. By using the example of cleaning up contaminated land in a timely and effective manner, it is argued that nonknowledge is a useful resource; in some instances, on a par with knowledge in its importance. The article discusses some of the strategies used t…
Classical Sociology and the Restoration of Nature
In this article, the author argues that the reflections of the early-20th century sociologists Georg Simmel and Émile Durkheim on the place of human beings in nature could serve as a model for integrating restored and invented nature into sociological analysis, while at the same time allowing other species and nonhuman nature a measure of independence as subjects or actors in a network of relationships that includes humans. Simmel’s concept of so…
Sociologists of the unexpected
Dreams in sleep apnea patients
Futurizing politics and the sustainability of real-world experiments
The German energy transition towards more sustainable forms of energy production has been characterized as a large-scale or real-world experiment. Whereas experiments are open-ended processes set up explicitly to allow (or even generate) surprises, by contrast sustainability implies the pursuit of clearly defined, normative ends. Whereas much of the literature on system transformation builds on the concept of innovation, our hypothesis is that fo…
When ecology and sociology meet
Edward A. Ross, a key figure in the early history of American sociology, developed a conceptualization of natural and social changes of the material environment that is virtually forgotten today. In this paper, these topics are discussed and located vis-à-vis Ross's intellectual contemporaries and their general take on the nature/society relationship. It is argued that ecological and sociological ideas in the early twentieth century influenced on…
Speed tourism
The German Autobahn has inspired many people’s imagination with its lack of a general speed limit, the quality of its road surface as well as its allegedly well-behaved drivers. One of the consequences of this positive reputation has been the emergence of a phenomenon I would like to call “speed tourism.” In this article, I treat speed tourism as a special form of tourism that involves viewing the driving experience as an opportunity for either t…
Natural waste
The most organized and regulated societies in Europe have a comparatively high density of pet dogs per inhabitant. Contrary to the general trend in Western societies towards raising standards of hygiene in everyday life, pedestrian areas and urban parks tend to be dog fouling hotspots. Unlike other nonhuman animals, pet dogs are often walked to public places for the sole reason to defecate. This article aims to explore a variety of dog owners’ st…
A Realist Philosophy of Social Science
The Diversity of Environmental Justice
By comparing the US environmental justice movement with recent European developments, this paper suggests an environmental justice framework which is based on the idea of environmental justice as a heterogeneous process rather than an analytical or normative category. Using major debates on environmental justice particularly in the UK and Germany as a touchstone, eight dimensions of environmental justice are carved out and integrated into a proce…
Return of the wolf
Ecological restoration aims to initiate natural processes and to facilitate ecosystem recovery. It is also seen as an opportunity for humans to enter into an active relationship with ecosystems. Many contemporary restoration projects not only engage laypersons, but also include the expectation that nature will respond to human efforts in surprising and unpredictable ways. Some practitioners claim that the deliberate inclusion of ‘unwanted’ elemen…
Communicating Ignorance and the Development of Post-Mining Landscapes
Scientific knowledge is always limited by ignorance. However, after more than 15 years, communication about the limits of knowing in landscape design is increasingly founded on the belief that uncertainty and risk need to be answered with more certainty via expert knowledge, which has led to a development stalemate or “lock-in.” This observation supports the thesis that laying open the limits of scientific knowledge to the public can improve publ…
Who owns the wind? Understanding wind energy production through a property chains perspective
In this article, we argue that the resourcification of wind is based on a specific entanglement of different property objects - in particular wind, land and wind turbines - and property holders. We depart from an understanding of property as a social phenomenon that is enacted through social practices and thereby becomes relevant within an arrangement of different entities (human, non-human and material) by structuring the relations between these…
Institutionalised ignorance in policy and regulation
Dreams in sleep apnea patients
Classical Sociology and the Restoration of Nature
In this article, the author argues that the reflections of the early-20th century sociologists Georg Simmel and Émile Durkheim on the place of human beings in nature could serve as a model for integrating restored and invented nature into sociological analysis, while at the same time allowing other species and nonhuman nature a measure of independence as subjects or actors in a network of relationships that includes humans. Simmel’s concept of so…
Brain Potentials in the Processing of Complex Sentences
Unexpected Interactions
Georg Simmel reflected intensively on the place of human beings in nature, developing a sociological perspective for observing natural and social changes that so far have been largely ignored. This article discusses Simmel's theoretical starting point for observing the natural in contrast to the social. In his writings, Simmel became adept at moving back and forth between the two sides of observation - the natural and the cultural. The significan…
New Natures and Old Science
Ecological restoration is a growing field in many parts of the world. Although it started as a field of practitioners in the Midwest of the USA, restoration is currently growing rapidly as an academic discipline. In this paper the development of ecological restoration is discussed by relating it to the propagated Mode 2 for the dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies, that is, the shift from traditional discipline- based resear…
When ecology and sociology meet
Edward A. Ross, a key figure in the early history of American sociology, developed a conceptualization of natural and social changes of the material environment that is virtually forgotten today. In this paper, these topics are discussed and located vis-à-vis Ross's intellectual contemporaries and their general take on the nature/society relationship. It is argued that ecological and sociological ideas in the early twentieth century influenced on…
Essay reviews
Social Consequences of Internet Use
Sociologists of the unexpected
Human Geography and Ecological Sociology
This article discusses how American geography and sociology began their university institutionalization in the 1890s with some very similar disciplinary points of origin and understanding of their subject matter but subsequently carved out their own fields by creating new or abandoning old disciplinary areas. Some of the disciplinary “catchment areas” were fought over until they came under the heading of human ecology around 1907/8, which, at lea…
Die moderne Gesellschaft als Experimentierraum
Einleitung
Heterogene Akteure und experimentelle Kooperationen
Die Zukunft des Experiments in der Wissensgesellschaft
Vergessenes Wissen und Überraschungen
Experiment und Modernität
Experimentelle Praktiken der deutschen Abfallentsorgung
Rekursives Lernen in der Sackgasse
Literatur
Ecological restoration as a real-world experiment
The concept of real-world experiments is a framework to understand environmental design projects under real world conditions. Contrary to laboratory experiments that are generally thought to exclude the public, real-world experiments involve combinations of social and natural factors. In this paper the theory of real-world experiments is applied to the fieldwork of ecological restoration. The case discussed here is an ecological design process at…
Realexperimente
Realexperimente tragen die Risiken der Forschung in die Gesellschaft. Gesellschaft wird damit ein Laboratorium des Wandels, in dem die Suche nach neuem Wissen und die Anwendung erprobten Wissens Hand in Hand gehen. Die Fallbeispiele in diesem Buch illustrieren, wie sich daraus rekursive Lernprozesse ergeben. Die Beispiele stammen aus drei Kontinenten und erstrecken sich von der Sanierung des Sempachersees in der Schweiz bis zum Design einer Halbi…
Society as experiment
Experiments are generally thought of as actions or operations undertaken to test a scientific hypothesis in settings detached from the rest of society. In this paper a different notion of experiment will be discussed. It is an understanding that has been developed in the classical tradition of the Chicago School of Sociology since the 1890s, but has so far remained unexplored. This sociological understanding of experiment does not model itself st…
Inaugural Introduction
The founding of Nature and Culture comes at a time when proenvironmental attitudes in the world are still high, but the discourse on ecological issues has been eclipsed mostly by issues of security, terrorism, and economic growth. This trend might also be because the debates on ecological issues to date are mostly based on natural scientific evaluations and findings on the state of the natural environment. What is lacking is more input from the h…
Communicating Ignorance and the Development of Post-Mining Landscapes
Scientific knowledge is always limited by ignorance. However, after more than 15 years, communication about the limits of knowing in landscape design is increasingly founded on the belief that uncertainty and risk need to be answered with more certainty via expert knowledge, which has led to a development stalemate or “lock-in.” This observation supports the thesis that laying open the limits of scientific knowledge to the public can improve publ…
A Realist Philosophy of Social Science
Sociology (40 obras) · Philosophy (35 obras) · Computer Science (28 obras) · Political science (27 obras) · Epistemology (26 obras) · Philosophy (20 obras) · Social science (20 obras) · Environmental ethics (17 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Engineering (14 obras)