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The combination of the humanities and natural sciences permeates the life of Professor Cordula Kropp like a leitmotiv. As such, the Technical and Environmental Sociologist exemplifies the University of Stuttgart’s mission statement in which interdisciplinary collaboration and the critical monitoring of science and its ramifications plays a central role. Kropp has been employed here as Professor of Sociology since August 2016 and her work focuses on the sociological aspects of risk and engineering science.

“That’s a professorship tailor-made for me” laughs Cordula Kropp in response to the question why she accepted the position at the University of Stuttgart. Yet, having spent her entire life in Munich, this was not an easy step for her: the decision involved leaving her house, husband and the youngest of her two grown-up children there. “The interaction between technology and the environment has always fascinated me”, Kropp admits. In addition, she says, her new operating base is one of three locations in Germany – next to Munich and Berlin – where research into the sociology of technology and the environment is being carried out. One thing in Stuttgart’s favor is its long tradition of paying close attention to the risks concomitant with technology.

As an environmental and technical sociologist, Professor Kropp is interested in how technology develops at all and how it is disseminated. Why, for example, did cars with internal combustion engines become established at the start of the 20th century rather than electric cars? Sociologists carry out research into the opportunities and risks that are concomitant with technical advances and how people react to them. They analyze the impact of contemporary trends, such as smartphones, on society and, by contrast, how society influences technological developments. They are also interested in how societies can cope with the consequences of technical progress, such as climate change, air pollution and species extinction in order to be able to bequeath an environment worth living into later generations.

Kropp spent seven years as Professor of Sociological Innovation and Future Research at the Munich University of Applied Sciences, where she conducted research into how viable and sustainable sociological innovations developed by active, concerned citizens in response to such societal challenges as climate change or the energy transition, become established. Examples of such social innovations that break down traditional, antiquated structures are, among others, citizens energy cooperatives or urban community gardens. Such initiatives may arise in response to technology, be concomitant with technical developments or enable these in the first place.

Kropp has become particularly passionate about climate change. In a series of collaborative projects, the sociologist has conducted research into how pioneering communities in the Alpine region are reacting to climate change and what solutions they are developing. Why does one community adopt a climate-friendly approach by making the transition to regenerative energy sources and organic farming or low impact tourism, whilst a neighboring community does no such thing? “It’s not about highly educated communities with lots of cash to invest”, Kropp explains, “but rather it’s about visionary people with good links to politics and economy. That’s one of the success factors.”

Throughout her career, Professor Kropp has turned her attentions to different aspects of technical and environmental sociology. The charitable Munich- based Project Group for Sociological Research, in which she was participating for seven years, was primarily concerned with the communication of risk within the agricultural sector. For example, Kropp carried research into the BSE crisis, which ranks among Germany’s biggest food scandals and which had negative ramifications for the mass livestock farming industry. The so-called mad cows’ disease was caused by infected animal fodder made of animal meal, which farmers had fed to cows as a cheap source of protein.

Professor Kropp was interested in how the initially vague knowledge about the disease vector and the contamination potential for humans found its way from the research community to political circles and society at large and how they dealt with it. She has published on the subject of how scientists can provide politicians with appropriate advice. And she discovered in the course of another project that food scandals, but also major caesuras in a person’s life such as pregnancy, illness or divorces are precisely the sorts of events that can motivate people to change their eating habits from cheap processed foods to organic produce. Professor Kropp’s research portfolio ranges from the communication of risks associated with food additives and nano materials to the dissemination of reusable food packing to zero energy houses and networked mobility products and services.

By contrast with some of her colleagues, the sociologist has always been closely involved in science and technology. Even as a young high school student in Munich her A-Level (Abitur) options included German and Physics. “I can also recognise the beauty in a technical construction”, says Kropp, who has been married to an engineer for many years. “Often”, she goes on to say in a critical appraisal of her own fraternity, “there is an inappropriate arrogance about sociologists, who expect engineers to think about cultural issues without themselves taking the trouble to bother with scientific theories.”

Her personal route to the field of Sociology took a bit of a detour. Immediately after graduating from high school, she embarked on a traineeship as a book seller to keep her parents happy, who, at that time, regarded a degree in Humanities as a ticket to nowhere. But in the depths of her mind she was troubled by an event that took place in 1986, her high-school graduation year, that shook global confidence in technical progress to the core: the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. That incident revealed to her the charged relationship between technical progress and the environmental impact. She read books on the philosophy and sociology of technology and had deep conversations with the renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who frequented the book shop in Paris where she worked. It was he who finally ignited a love of Sociology in her young mind.

Back in Munich where she studied Sociology at the Ludwig-Maximilian University, she encountered another mentor in Ulrich Beck († 2015), who was one of Germany’s best known sociologists at the time. His 1986 book Risikogesellschaft – Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (published in English as Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, 1992), which coincidentally appeared just after the Chernobyl disaster, touched a nerve and became a best seller. In it, he describes the transition from an industrial to a “risk society”, in which people are continually faced with new challenges as a result of technical progress, and are forced to take decisions that make life more risky.

Under the auspices of the late Beck, Kropp completed her doctoral studies into hitherto one-sided understanding of nature within the field of Sociology in which it had been variously regarded as a world completely separate from the technological sphere or else as a source of resources larder for humanity. In the same spirit as her doctoral supervisor, however, Kropp does not recognise a delineation between nature on the one side and society and technology on the other. Each influences the other.

Kropp demonstrated that many actors are involved in conflicts of nature, all of whom relate to each other in some way or other. Inspired by the actor–network theory developed by Bruno Latour, John Law and Michel Callon, Kropp not only regards humans as the “actors” in question, but also artefacts, ideas, media or policies. “If we wish to explain how risks arise, what they mean and how to assess them”, Kropp explains, “then we need to bear in mind that all of these factors are interconnected at a profound level.”

She now plans to lend more weight to this sociological school of thought at the University of Stuttgart. “It is a slightly different approach to that taken by my predecessor Professor Ortwin Renn, who placed more emphasis on technology impact assessment”, Kropp explains, “but the results are often similar.” In light of the opportunities available at the University of Stuttgart, she goes on to say, she intends to devote more of her time to infrastructures, whether as prerequisites for self-driving cars or for delivering sustainably produced food to the population. Renn’s “hobby horses”, risk research and technology impact assessment, will remain part of the research portfolio. Six months after taking on her new professorship and following many meetings with colleagues from various disciplines, Professor Kropp is impressed by one thing in particular at the University of Stuttgart: “I have never encountered this level of enthusiasm for interdisciplinary collaboration anywhere else!” Helmine Braitmaier