LOGO

The Western welfare societies of the OECD world have undergone multifaceted processes of social change in recent years. At the socio-structural level, patterns of social inequality have changed profoundly, resulting both in a polarization of material resources and in a hardening of social positions and stagnating upward social mobility. At the institutional level, a market-oriented transformation has taken place, involving a weakening of unions, the lowering of top tax rates and a roll-back of status-maintaining social policies in favor of policies emphasizing activation and individual responsibility. On a cultural level, we are experiencing a loss of importance of collectivist-egalitarian values in favor of an increase in importance of individualistic patterns of orientation, such as autonomy and self-realization.

Against this backdrop, we are especially interested in the values and justice orientations as well as the potentials for solidarity and conflict that go along with these dynamics in modern welfare societies. We study these issues both from a national and cross-national comparative perspective, using quantitative as well as qualitative methods.

Our current research projects address the following questions:

• Social milieus and social cohesion: As part of our participation in the Research Institute for Social Cohesion (RISC) , we examine social cohesion from the perspective of social milieus. Social milieus are large latent groups with similar socio-structural positions and cultural values, each of which cultivates milieu-specific forms of cohesion. In the project “Milieu conflicts and social cohesion” , we investigate potential for conflict resulting from such diverging “varieties of cohesion” using large-scale quantitative survey data. In addition, we investigate milieu-specific patterns of conduct-of-life and the social practice of cohesion from a qualitative-empirical perspective in the project “Qualitative Panel: Milieu-specific practices of endangering and maintaining social cohesion”.

• The culture and politics of wealth taxation: The concentration of economic resources within the upper layers of the social structure is also due to reductions in the taxation of wealth and top incomes since the mid-1990s and 2000s. How were these tax cuts for the wealthy justified vis-à-vis the non-wealthy majority of the population? A special issue on “Wealth, Inequality and Redistribution in Capitalist Societies” was published in the journal Social Justice Research at the end of 2022.