Research

In this two-semester teaching research project, the students worked together with the research team from the Professor of Sociology of the Economy on economic, social and cultural transformation dynamics in rural Brandenburg.

Funding/Funding/Scope

• Own funds of the Professor
• Funding from the Viadrina
• KuWi faculty

Term

Summer 2021 – February 2024

Cooperation partner

Municipal council and mayor of the investigated municipality of Falkenhagen (Mark)

Description

At the beginning of 2021, the team of the Professor of Sociology of the Economy led by Prof. Dr. Sascha Münnich was encouraged by the municipal council and the mayor of Falkenhagen (Mark) to take stock, form an opinion and create a social portrait of the municipality of Falkenhagen (Mark). The municipal council wanted to review its own communication strategies and improve them if necessary. For the Viadrina team, this led to the plan to investigate three further social science research interests in an extensive one-and-a-half-year study of the standardized and non-standardized, detailed survey of Falkenhagen residents:

A. Images of the village and the place of residence: How do the residents of Falkenhagen (Mark) describe the village in which they live and its inhabitants? Where do they see the greatest advantages, but also problems and challenges in their lives in Falkenhagen? What roles do references to the difference between town and country play in this?

B. Social structure: How are their personal relationships in and around the village structured, how do they organize their professional life and their leisure time? Where do they see group lines, conflicts, opportunities and limits of community building?

C. Political attitudes: How do residents assess the current political situation in Germany and Brandenburg? What do different groups of residents think about current issues in federal and state politics? What attitudes do the residents of Falkenhagen (Mark) have towards current issues such as mobility, the future, infrastructure, politics and the environment?

The three research interests were outlined in a standardized questionnaire to all residents and then deepened in qualitative interviews with some residents, whereby topic A was discussed with everyone, topics B and C were only discussed with some of the residents in the interview. There was a fourth topic at the beginning of the study, which related to specific socio-political challenges in the community, but the results were not valid enough to be reported here.

The results of the study show that although the urban-rural dichotomy continues to have a high symbolic significance in the everyday lives and political attitudes of the population, from a social science perspective rural space is a multidimensional space;rural space is to be seen as a multidimensional space in which the challenges of economic, social, political and ecological transformation, which affect urban and rural areas alike, are superimposed in a space affected by multiple structural problems. Furthermore, it is a social space in which the personal relationships and autobiographical fates of small groups form the opportunities but also the limits of social adaptation and the recovery and re-intensification of a village community.

Teaching

Summer semester 2022: TEACHING RESEARCH PROJECT (semester 1 of 2): „Basics of standardized survey methods – Social living conditions in Brandenburg“.

Winter semester 2022/23: TEACHING RESEARCH PROJECT (semester 2 of 2): „Qualitative interviews – Social life situations in Brandenburg“.

Publications

Final report – Life and future orientation in Brandenburg. Available at: https://mycloud.europa-uni.de/s/PTbobRJezyYmFSa

Project management and employees

Project management: Prof. Dr. Sascha Münnich; Jonas Rietschel, M.A.

Collaborators: Viktoria Hrynek, Maren Romstedt, Daniela-Johanna Grigoleit, Jutta Angelmaier, Karolin Sander, Katja Konrad and Sophia Recht. As well as many M.A. and B.A. students of the European University Viadrina in various study programs of the Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies.

 

 

The social legitimacy of financial profits in Germany, Spain, France and Great Britain.

Funded by the BMBF as part of the call for proposals „Financial System and Society“

Term: 1.10.2015 – 31.1.2019

Scope: EUR 340,000

The research project „The Social Legitimacy of Financial Profits“ addressed the fundamental sociological question of how the institutional and organizational structures of financial markets in various European countries, which have developed into the dominant sector of the global economy in the course of the rise of financial capitalism since the 1990s, generate political and cultural legitimacy. The question was when they are criticized and justified by civil society, whether and if so how such debates differ between different European countries, and to what extent moral ideas about legitimate and illegitimate profit generation in the financial sector (can) influence the evolution of financial capitalism. Starting from the question raised by the financial crisis of 2008 as to what extent a lasting weakening of the legitimacy of the actions of financial investors can be observed, we aimed at a fundamental conceptual and empirical sociological examination of the deep structure of the cultural embedding of financial and economic orders.