Troels Krarup

Research profile

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Planning at Aalborg University (Copenhagen Campus) working on the role of economic expertise in green transition of the energy sector. In this work, I combine my experience from working on (European) market integration, international finance and the politics of urban greenspaces. In my work, I often combine qualitative, quantitative and historical methodologies.

In my book Paradoxes of the Market (book review), I analyse the conception of ‘the market‘ underlying processes of European financial market integration, and how contradictions inherent to that conception structure controversies around integration processes. Specifically, I study the integration of financial infrastructures in Europe since the introduction of the euro (payment and settlement systems, notably Target2 Securities). The book is based on my PhD dissertation from Sciences Po (MaxPo Center) and material published in Comparative European Politics, New Political Economy, Economy and Society and Competition and Change

I have also conducted research in economic and political sociology with a focus on the European Union and its genealogy. In a 2017 postdoctoral research project (funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation) I analysed the inspiration drawn by early German ordoliberalism from interwar ‘order theology’. The aim was to enrich our understanding of present-day ordoliberalism, which remains an influential tradition of political and economic thinking in Europe up till this day (see my articles in European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology and in International Review of Economics).

At DTU Management I mapped EU regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) markets, combining machine learning models for quantitative textual analysis on thousands of web-scraped EU documents with in-depth qualitative analysis of selected texts in order to better understand the intricate relationships in the recent surge in policy activity (since around 2017) between concerns of discriminatory algorithms, human rights, consumer protection, big tech regulation, innovation, economic growth, geopolitical competition with the US and China and, not least, further development of the Single Market.

Throughout past and present research, I have sought to develop the notion of ‘problem analysis‘ – see in particular my article on the ‘archaeological’ methodology of Michel Foucault in Theory, Culture and Society – as a way of understanding conflicts (social, political, organisational or other) as processes of questions and answers. Problem analysis also extends and develops from my previous engagements with social theory, in particular with the works of Bruno Latour (in The Sociological Review) and Pierre Bourdieu (in British Journal of Sociology of Education).

At the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen (2018-2021) I designed and conducted a national survey in Denmark, targeted at mapping the different forms of civic engagement in the urban greenspaces and ‘greening’ more broadly, ranging from personal-affective attachments to place to participation in community life and to political orientations. I predominantly use segmentation techniques, such as factor, cluster and correspondence analysis and (co-)relational class analysis (using R software).

Skills:

Statistical software: R (most skilled), SPAD, SPSS

Quantitative methods: Especially factoring and clustering techniques and machine learning (quantitative text analysis), web scraping, survey methodology and questionnaire design

Qualitative methods: problem analysis (‘archaeology’, Foucault), qualitative interviewing (esp. expert interviews), genealogy (esp. history of science, knowledge and ideology)

Social theory: Foucault and his contemporaries (Althusser, Canguilhem…), Latour, Bourdieu

Data

Anonymized national survey and register data from the Green Cities project available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.5279/DK-RA-50108