Grundmann held post-doctoral positions, at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, at the Graduate college Risk and private law at the University of Bremen, and at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne.
[2] Grundmann's interest in the role of expertise in modern society is influenced by frameworks such as Post-normal science and Roger Pielke Jr.'s Honest broker.
[3] His work challenges widespread believes in global success or failure of environmental policy as result of scientific consensus, or as an outcome of corporate power.
[7] The basic approach used Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Zur Kritik der politischen Ökologie[8] published in 1973 in the German Kursbuch[9] It has been translated in English in Ted Bentonќs Greening of Marxism in the 1990s.
Grundmanns explicit advocacy of the term is exemptional [11] and his introduction into the topic has been quoted as late as 2010 by leading Chinese Scholars as being wonderful.
[12] Grundmann's defence of 'mastery over nature' as a metaphor in ecologically informed socialism was however not in line with Ted Benton's interpretation of the domination term used by Marx.
[13] Whilst the book received some praise and critical attention at the time, it was published at a difficult historical juncture—after the fall of communism there was little enthusiasm for theoretical frameworks inspired by Marx.
This has changed, and the forthcoming Chinese translation and recent reviews and papers about Grundmann's marxist ecology published in China[14][15][16][17] indicate an ongoing interest in the topic.
[18] In the years that followed, he moved away from social theory and started engaging with issues about environmental sustainability from the viewpoint of science and technology studies.
This move was inspired by the insight of Karl Marx that technology reveals the active transformation of nature, performed by humans and their social forms of organization.
Their common work on Werner Sombart led to a re-evaluation of the legacy of this pioneering German sociologist, examining in particular his low salience in the postwar period.
The assumption, that STS studies critical of the linear model would automatically translate into practice would echo the very linear model under scrutiny,[26] In a contribution to a volume in Knowledge and Democracy in 2015 Grundmann stated that those previous scholarly critiques already converted into governments attempting to improve management of public expectations on technological risk assessments.
[29] Perlentaucher mentioned e.g. a positive review of Alexander Kissler in Süddeutsche Zeitung, stating Stehr and Grundmann would have successfully started to plough a new field.
[32] Examples such acid rain,[33] smoking regulations,[34] ozone depleting substances, genetically modified foods[35] show how cultural, economic and political issues exercised a strong influence.