International Cooperation

Labor Power in the Third Wave of Globalization: Engaging Ideas, Interests and Institutions for Collective Action

This project brings together researchers from the Institute for Work, Skills and Training (IAQ) as well as the broader social science community at the University of Duisburg-Essen with those from the School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) at Rutgers University (USA) for a joint workshop on innovative collective action by labor actors across the world. We plan to use the workshop to develop a research program for a long-term academic cooperation between IAQ and SMLR in global labor studies.

Such a cooperation will fit very well with Essen-Duisburg’s priority research focus on “Change in Contemporary Societies: Building Orders in a Borderless World,” cutting across all three of its focus areas (labor markets, risk and welfare, and transnational governance). We conceive of the proposed workshop as one of three streams in the Rutgers-Renmin Center’s broadly-themed inaugural conference “China Rising: Impact on Work and Employment in China and Beyond,” which is scheduled for spring 2016 in New Brunswick, New Jersey/USA. Funding for the conference has been secured both from Renmin and Rutgers, as well as from Germany’s Thyssen Foundation. Links to the global practice community will be provided by Solidar, a network of NGOs working to advance social justice in Europe and worldwide. By including the workshop as one of three streams, we can circumvent some political constraints that continue to exist from China’s autocratic government for its domestic labor scholars. Given the Chinese government’s intention to control its population, any openly communicated work by domestic scholars on labor contention within China could face negative repercussions from the government. Yet, with the proposed workshop-within-conference setup, every conference attendee can credibly claim to be attending sessions on the politically less sensitive issues such as company-level human resource management and labor economics, yet also contribute to the conversation on innovative collective action by labor. We are sure that a joint trilateral effort could make an important contributions to the perennial “social question,” which has recently presented itself with growing urgency: How can labor processes be organized to both sustain sustainable collective progress and secure the human rights of citizen-workers? Over the next few years, we hope to strengthen the universities’ relationship, building toward an international research-training group that brings senior researchers and PhD candidates together with key stakeholders (including unions and NGOs, businesses and governments) to produce the next generation of global leaders on the governance of labor – both in the academy and in practice.

Project Management
Prof. Dr. Thomas Haipeter
Head of Research Unit "Working Time and Work Organisation" |
Department of Work and Qualification >more

Tobias Schulze-Cleven
Assistant Professor | School of Management and Labor Relations
Rutgers University | New Brunswick | USA  

(New) Political Representative Claims: A Global View [France, Germany, Brazil, China, India]

Europe currently experiences a crisis of established forms of political representation, visible for example in increasing political distrust. Various claims to renew political representation are emerging all over the world. However, most contemporary research on representation focuses on electoral/mandate representation within single countries. As a result, we lack a comparative, global analysis of (new) representative claims developed outside the representative political system; and dynamics developing in the Global South, including non-democratic entities, are neglected by Western scholars. Our research intends to...

Projekt management
Prof. Dr. Thomas Heberer (Universität Duisburg-Essen) >more
Prof. Dr. Brigitte Geissel (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Prof. Yves Sintomer (Centre de Recherches Sociologiques et Politiques de Paris (CRESPPA))
Frau Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal (Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CNRS-EHESS) Paris)