Patrick Witzak Doctoral Researcher at the Chair of Sociology with focus on Comparative Sociology

Patrick Witzak is doctoral researcher at the Chair of Sociology with focus on Comparative Sociology (Prof. Dr. Sigrid Quack) and holds a doctoral scholarship from the Hans-Böckler-Foundation. In his research, he focuses on processes of juridification in the field of transnational labour regulation and the role of legal professionals and transnational activist networks within these processes. As part of his research, he was a visiting researcher at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Universitat de València (Prof. Dr. José-Manuel Rodríguez Victoriano) and at the School of Management and Labor Relations of Rutgers University (Prof. Tobias Schulze-Cleven Ph.D.).

He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of Duisburg-Essen with focus on organisation, work, and social structure. He completed the Master of Arts in Sociology with focus on comparative studies in society and transnationalisation at the University of Duisburg-Essen with a Hans-Böckler-Foundation scholarship.

Research

My broader research focuses on international employment relations and cross border action fields of collective employee representation. I am also interested in mechanisms, actors and effects of the development of transnational institutions in the field of labour.

My doctoral Project is funded by the Hans-Böckler-Foundation and deals with the co-operation between legal actors and cross-border activist networks, which influence the legal degree of binding new forms of employment regulation. The project is based on analytical multi-level framework models to investigate relevant influence paths of employment regulation and the establishment of social rights. Based on this, mobilizations in the course of recent industrial accidents are considered. These can be understood as campaigns or mobilization-networks in the struggle for improving working conditions.