Professor Frank Geels, widely-regarded as an extremely big fish in the academic pond of “socio-technical transitions”  is to take up a place at the Sustainable Consumption Institute of the University of Manchester, MCFly has learned.

Professor Geels has reportedly given his farewells to colleagues at Sussex University, and takes up his post in Manchester this September.

He first came to prominence in 2001 as the winner of Forbes-price from the Foundation for the History of Technology (for best publication of junior scholar in history and sociology of technology). Since then he has worked at Eindhoven University and more recently at Brunel and Sussex Universities.

On his website he writes “My work is inter-disciplinary, drawing upon a background in Philosophy of Technology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). I’ve subsequently expanded in to Evolutionary Economics (EE) and Technology Innovation Management (TIM), and have been exploring management/business studies, neo-institutional theory and cultural studies. My agenda is to create interconnections between STS, EE and TIM because they are institutionalized in such a way that they rarely share ideas. To address multi-faceted topics such as socio-technical transitions, new conceptual perspectives need to be developed by combining insights from various fields in creative ways.”

More to follow.

Marc Hudson
mcmonthly@gmail.com
Yes, we are aware that this news will only be exciting to the sorts of people who choose, on their week off from wage-slavery, to attend lunchtime seminars about innovation. But these people exist (well, one of them does, and since he’s co-editor of this MCFly, you’re reading this article.)