Research Agenda

The graduate programme will look into the opening and closing of markets and social systems in the interaction of global orders, European decision-making and national traditions. The processes of Europeanization and globalization are primarily geared toward the opening of markets. More open markets produce tensions, conflicts and crises, whose settlement involves new forms of closures through re-regulation on both a European and a global level. In this way, national forms of market order are getting under pressure of adjustment. At the same time, more open markets have an influence on the regulation of social systems. National traditions of social orders are being changed and complemented with European and global patterns of order. The interaction of developments taking place on several levels produces new, more open and more flexible forms of an order of markets and social systems. The change in markets and the related transformation of social systems form the two pillars of the research programme, which are closely intertwined.

The graduate programme pursues basically approach in terms of social sciences, which can, however, only be dealt with adequately through an interdisciplinary cooperation with single disciplines from the field of economic and legal sciences. In the framework of the programme, Ph.D. themes are to be treated, which take their origins either in sociology and political science, in private and business law, in labor and social law, in financial science, in international management or in social politics. The projects related with the legal, business or economic sciences are in tune with the program's orientation on social sciences. Consequently, the graduate programme's research portfolio promises to unite in an interdisciplinary way all those discourses on the themes to be covered, which are undertaken separately in the single disciplines of the social sciences otherwise.

Complete Research Agenda 2005-2007 (pdf, 130kb)

Complete Research Agenda 2007-2011 (pdf, 204kb)