Kritischem Denken Raum zu geben – das ist der Anspruch der Femina Politica, der einzigen deutschsprachigen Fachzeitschrift für feministische Politikwissenschaft. Seit 1997 erscheint die Femina Politica mit dem Ziel, zur Akademisierung und Professionalisierung feministischer Politikwissenschaft im deutschsprachigen Raum beizutragen. Sie veröffentlicht Beiträge, die bestehende sozialwissenschaftliche Ansätze feministisch erweitern und reformulieren oder auch neue Debatten anstoßen.

The lecture will explore the transformation of the Chinese model of capitalism in the context of the accelerated introduction of advanced digitalized manufacturing, proposed by the Chinese Government in its report “Made in China 2025” and in various documents related to China’s 13th Five-Year Plan. Based on current field studies in the Pearl-River Delta, we examine prospective pathways of industrial transformation related to the predominant regimes of production in core manufacturing industries.

This interdisciplinary two-day conference explores the role of contexts in the production and reproduction of social inequality.

Contexts matter for individual and aggregate outcomes because they channel opportunities and define choices. Contexts connect individuals or segregate them from each other. Contexts include neighborhoods, networks, families, schools, workplaces, and nations.

This conference brings together economists and sociologists, for an interdisciplinary exchange of theory, evidence, and methodology.

Die Neuzeit hat nicht nur souveräne Staatsapparate, international operierende Handelskompagnien, einflussreiche Financiers und dezentrale Märkte hervorgebracht. Es hat sich auch ein spezifischer Machttypus formiert, der weder durch politische Strukturen noch durch ökonomische Strategien hinreichend beschreibbar ist. Er konstituiert sich allein über das Ineinanderwirken beider Pole.

Expertenwissen wird für grenzüberschreitende Governanceprozesse immer wichtiger. Es entstehen transnationale Deutungseliten, deren Autorität aber auch bestehende Machthierarchien reproduziert und verfestigt. Parallel beobachten wir die Entstehung kritischer Gegeneliten. In diesem Vortrag wird nach dem transformativen Potenzial dieser kritischen Professionals gefragt, die im Sinne des Gemeinwohls und demokratischer Werte eine andere Politik verfolgen.

2016 marks the 40th anniversary of the passage of the German Co-determination Act of 1976. This law, which mandates the parity representation of workers in the supervisory boards of companies with more than 2000 employees in Germany, constitutes one of the key pillars of the ‘German model’ of corporate governance and industrial relations. This occasion offers an opportunity for researchers to assess the contribution of co-determination to economic democracy and the social market economy in the context of internationalization, liberalization and digitalization.

Recent historiography has tended to downplay the importance of the family in neoliberal revisions of the social. And yet a closer look at the key economic debates of the 1970s indicates that a focus on private family values was central to the neoliberal project of a free market order. Whether they were looking at the question of welfare reform, inheritance or the financing of higher education, neoliberal thinkers such as Milton Friedman, Gary Becker and James Buchanan were adamant that the private family should replace the social insurance state as the primary source of economic security.

Research on neoliberalism is still divided into social scientific and social history literatures on the one hand, and economic and intellectual history literature on the other hand. Major publications also still suffer from Anglo-Saxon bias due to a focus on English language literature despite a wide range of relevant publications in other major languages.

In dem Vortrag werden die langfristig wirksamen Politik‐Schritte zur Aufrechterhaltung des weltwirtschaftlichen Gleichgewichts angesichts der gestiegenen Chancen und Zwänge zur internationalen Wanderung betrachtet. Der Druck auf immer mehr Gleichheit (Tocqueville) erzwingt heute eine Globalisierung der Lebensbedingungen, wie sie in den reichen Ländern (dem „Norden“) vorgefunden werden. Ein Abflauen der Wanderungen aus dem „Süden“ (der Dritten Welt) in den „Norden“ kann nur erwartet werden, wenn der Süden wirtschaftlich merklich schneller wächst als bisher.

To achieve a balance between needs and resources older people combine resources from the state, the market and non-monetized social relations. Each has comparative advantages and limitations. The talk will contrast top-down approaches that fragment needs and institutional resources by presenting  bottom up view of how individuals integrate resources in different ways to meet different ways. The logic has significant implications for restructuring public expenditure in a time of fiscal conflict.

Buzz words like industry 4.0 or digital capitalism have become popular to allude to new technologies and challenges to prevailing production systems. While the internet is central to the digital revolution, the links between the internet and changes in the organization of production and service economies are still not very clear.

Length-biased sampling is a pervasive problem in population research.
Applications range from methodological problems (e.g., how do you pick the
right unit of analysis for a survey) to conceptual insights (e.g., the
relationship between the demographic concepts of "period" and "cohort").
This workshop will discuss these issues using a diverse set of examples
drawn from social science research.

MEET THE NEW INFLUENCE ELITES: A new breed of influence elite has emerged in recent years. Today’s novel elites are more mobile, diversified, and global in reach than their forebears, while often less visible. They set up or empower consulting firms, think tanks, nonprofits, and “grassroots organizations,” among other entities, that can serve as vehicles of influence.

How do political parties portray themselves and their agendas in national elections in Western Europe? Examining trends in campaign content from the late 1940s to the present, the paper investigates how changes in the electoral landscape have altered the types of issues emphasized by the major parties.

Stress is highly prevalent and unequally distributed along socioeconomic and ethno-racial lines. While the effects of stress on children and adults are well documented, less is known about the long-term consequences of stress exposure when it occurs before birth. This project combines a natural experiment, an original longitudinal dataset, and in-depth interviews to examine the effect of in-utero exposure to acute stress on children’s outcomes.

The presentation seeks to contribute to the debate on economic crisis, policy change, and the resilience of neoliberalism by comparing the policy responses of a selected group of peripheral European countries (East and West), which have been hard hit by housing busts and financial crises. Looking at recent reforms targeting indebted house owners and the housing regime and/or the financial sector, she identifies three policy responses to the Great Recession.

Can social policies be both effective at reducing social problems and inequalities, and politically popular? For a long time, scholars have thought that universal social policies were more effective and more popular than policies targeted at the disadvantaged. Scholars have also documented tremendous variation in the extent to which social policies are broadly supported by public opinion, constituencies of beneficiaries, and vested stakeholders.

Violence has become one of the most identifiable hallmarks of masculinity, a defining characteristics especially prominent among men in disadvantaged contexts. Physical alacrity offers them an opportunity to attain various types of capital. However, not all subscribe to this practice, even when it is woven into the fabric of street life that surrounds them. By drawing on 19 interviews with men involved in street-level sex work in a large American city, I examine their decision-making regarding willingness to engage in physical altercations.

in the Series Great Crisis of Capitalism - A Second Great Transformation?

Rethinking Comparative Political Economy: Growth Models and Distributive Dynamics

Co-authored with Jehane Simona Moussa and Christian Suter, Institut de Sociologie, Université de Neuchâtel

The intensification of climate change and its accompanying geophysical and social disasters pose enormous future risks for the human species. Societies around the world have already exhibited significant differences in their recognition of these risks and in their efforts to cut emissions. The international research project on Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks, with cooperating research teams in 17 countries, studies the causes of this cross-national variation in degree of risk recognition and in consequent intentional policy-driven emission cuts.

The lecture develops a research programme for the historical comparison of different stages of capitalism. Starting from historically comparative theories of capitalism, Andreas Nölke will sketch a model that draws especially on Polanyi and theories of organized capitalism. He validates this model by discussing the current crisis of the liberal stage of financialization, as well as the contemporary economic model of state capitalism in large emerging economies as a potential model for a new stage of non-liberal capitalism.

Although economic inequality and uneven development exist across the United States, poverty has historically been higher in the South. Accordingly, this study investigates the relative contributions of four theoretical explanations in understanding the higher poverty in the South relative to the Non-South: 1) family demography, 2) economic structure, 3) race composition, and 4) power resources. The four most recent U.S. waves (2000, 2004, 2007, and 2010) from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) provide the individual-level data for this study.

The lecture examines how, in the course of modernization, Japan learned from Germany and Britain about ideas and institutions concerning social reform, and attempted to implement and develop them at home. It focuses on Fukuda Tokuzo, a pioneering liberal economist and social

The global rise of non-standard employment is often cited as one of the most important reasons for increasing levels of insecurity over the last 40 years. Yet, non-standard work is also one of the most underdeveloped factors in the literature on perceived worker insecurity. In this paper, we seek to understand the relationship between the most common form of non-standard employment, part-time work, and perceived worker insecurity.

In 2011, female nurses in Germany made 87 Cent for every 1 Euro a male nurse made. Using data from the BIBB/BAuA-Employment Survey, we examine how much of this female-male earnings gap can be explained by differences in human capital characteristics and selection into work settings, and how much of this earnings gap can be accounted for by occupational selection. First, we estimate a Mincer wage regression with an extensive set of demographic and work characteristics.

Gabriel Abend will give a lecture about his new book "The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics".

Sex segregation by occupation and field of study is often presumed to reflect fundamental differences in men’s and women’s intrinsic natures and aspirations. But historical and cross-national comparisons reveal a great deal more variability than such a simple narrative would suggest. Moreover, this variability often takes on surprising patterns.

Talk by Prof. Eric Widmer, University of Geneva

Lecture by Prof. Michael J. Handel, Northeastern University, Boston

The changing character of jobs is a perennial question in the social sciences. With regard to the requirements associated with employment, i.e. the qualities of the tasks that are to be carried out, various scholars have at different times argued for a) a successive demeaning of jobs, b) a continuous increase in the complexity of jobs, and c) a growing dualization of jobs. Despite the attention garnered by these contrasting visions, evidence on the actual development of skill requirements is surprisingly scant.

This talk takes its cue from Hacker’s & Pierson’s observation that politics is first and foremost organization: “organized combat”. If we want to understand the outcomes of politics, we have to look at how it is organized on a long-term basis: by whom and with what resources? Sweden is taken as an example of how politics as organized combat has changed quite dramatically in the last couple of decades.

This talk provides an overview of the range of responses to the spread of precarious work in industrial countries. It first summarizes what is meant by precarious work and presents some data on its growth in various countries in recent years. It then reviews some of the actions taken by unions and different social movements in response to the spread of precarious work. Next, an array of social welfare policies and labor laws that have been enacted by governments to address the growing concerns over precarious work and its consequences will be discussed.

Health care systems vary across multiple domains, including financing, delivery of services and access. While it is possible to evaluate health care systems in different ways, one of the most important aspect is how users of services evaluate their health care system and whether they consider their health needs to be met in satisfactory manner. As all citizens in a country are past, or at least potential users of services, we argue that public attitudes provide an important window into the general cultural climate of satisfaction, or lack therefore, with the health care system.

Why are income and subjective well-being related? Scholars have offered two very different sorts of explanations, suggesting that income’s positive association with happiness and life satisfaction is attributable to 1) the goods that income “buys” (the absolute income explanation) or 2) the social comparisons that income engenders (the relative income explanation). The presentation will summarize key findings of a national RDD survey of 728 U.S. adults conducted in 2012 that was designed to address this issue.

This conference presents sociological research on poverty conducted by a set of international scholars. Special attention is devoted to how the major societal institutions of work, family, housing, and education contribute to poverty.

The worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2010 was set off by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the U.S. and caused widespread banking failures and worldwide recession. Why were Western European countries so susceptible to the housing price downturn? Neil Fligstein will explore various mechanisms by which the financial crisis might have spread. The result is surprising: European banks went down because they had joined the market in the U.S. for mortgage backed securities and funded them by borrowing in the asset-backed commercial paper market.

Social scientists often examine relationships between variables measured at multiple levels of analysis. For example, a labor market scholar may be interested in simultaneously investigating the effects of individual human capital and structural characteristics of local labor markets on workers’ wages, promotion opportunities, and job insecurity.  There are two levels of analysis in this example: the individual level (level 1) and the local labor market level (level 2).

This conference features outstanding international scholars presenting the best of inequality and social policy research. The sessions will feature exemplary research at the frontiers of scholarship in this area, including research on the causes, consequences and interrelationships between both inequality and social policy. Among the topics presented, our guests will examine the politics of social policy, educational expansion, rising income and earnings inequality, dualization, and labor market discrimination.