Léa Funfschilling
  |
Lea Fünfschilling is associate professor at the Department of Sociology as well as a member of CIRCLE (Center for Innovation) at Lund University. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Basel in Switzerland. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, located at the intersection of sociology and science- and technology studies. In particular, she has contributed to the development of a distinctly institutional perspective on sustainability transitions. She is the coordinator of the Swedish Transformative Innovation Policy Platform (STIPP) and was recently awarded an ERC Starting Grant for the project ‘ENDINGS – Towards a theory of endings in innovation studies' (2023-2027).
In September 2023, she joins the Paris IAS as part of the French Institutes for advanced Study fellowship program - FIAS - co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 945408. Her fellowship also benefits from the support of the RFIEA+ LABEX, with a national funding (Grant ANR-11-LABX-0027-01).
Research Interests
Sustainability Transitions, Innovation Studies, Science- and Technology Studies, Institutional Theory
The beginning of endings: Establishing an epistemic community for the study of industrial decline
The research questions at the center of the project are: How do established industries come to an end? The project will take on this challenge by studying knowledge dynamics in a new and interdisciplinary way.
The main aim of the fellowship is to build an epistemic community for academics and practitioners and foster research competence around the topic of endings, specifically in the context of industrial decline. The project will bring together scholars from different disciplines to identify ontological and epistemological differences and commonalities regarding their study of endings. Relevant scholarship includes projects that deal with destabilization, discontinuation, decline, de-institutionalization, unlearning, unmaking, phase-out, and other related processes of endings. The project will also engage practitioners, such as policy makers and industry representatives tasked with the phase-out of certain industries, to join our discussions to co-create the next generation of research questions.
Combining theoretical insights from innovation and organization studies, STS, and sociology in a novel way, the project will identify the mechanisms and processes that lead to the erosion and extinction of knowledge in different industries and geographical contexts.
Key Publications
Fuenfschilling, L., & Truffer, B. (2014). The structuration of socio-technical regimes—Conceptual foundations from institutional theory. Research policy, 43(4), 772-791.
Fuenfschilling, L. (2019). An institutional perspective on sustainability transitions. In Handbook of sustainable innovation (pp. 219-236). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Simoens, M. C., Leipold, S., & Fuenfschilling, L. (2022). Locked in unsustainability: Understanding lock-ins and their interactions using the case of food packaging. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 45, 14-29.
 Workshop organized by Deshen Moodley and Lea Funfschilling, 2023-2024 Paris IAS Fellows |
|
|
|
|