FSP 5: Research projects

Funding organisation: FWF as part of the "Top Citizen Science" funding initiative
Duration: 2024-2027
Project team: Klaus Kraemer (project leader), Linda Ahlers-Hirschmann (associate co-leader), Nathalie Posch (research assistant),  Jakob Gasser (research assistant), Mario Rossmann (research assistant)

Project description: The European Central Bank is currently working on developing the digital euro as an electronic equivalent to cash, aiming to enable secure and anonymous payments and counteract the privatization of the monetary system. But what is the public's stance on this endeavor? What do people actually know about the digital euro? What are the perceived advantages and disadvantages of the digital euro? And how do people's perceptions change through knowledge transfer by experts?

In this new FWF research project, we aim to address these questions and actively involve citizens in the research process through a citizens’ conference. Cooperation partners include the Austrian National Bank and the Academic Gymnasium Graz. The project serves as a complement to the ongoing FWF project "Payment Methods in Motion: A Mixed-Method Investigation on the Social Embeddedness of Cash and Cashless Payment Instruments”, which empirically examines the attitudes and behaviors related to digital (private debit cards, payment apps, etc.) and analog (public cash) payment methods within Austrian society. 

Duration: 2022/23

As part of the two-semester research workshop "What do elites know about money?" organised by the research focus Economic Sociology, Master's students from the Institute of Sociology conducted a quantitative survey among Styrian decision-makers in business, politics, administration and social partners. In the first semester, the current state of research on the sociology of money and elites and on social science research into technocracy was compiled and a standardised questionnaire was developed, which was validated and improved on the basis of cognitive interviews and a pre-test. In the second semester, the sample (deliberate selection) was compiled and the data collection finalised (online survey). The Styrian Chamber of Commerce was also won as a co-operation partner. The unusually high response rates in all subpopulations can be attributed to the thematic focus of the survey (including "the future of cash" and "current causes of inflation").

Photo s. NL 38/P. 6

Funding organisation: FWF
Duration: April 2023 to March 2026
Project team: Klaus Kraemer (head), Nico Tackner (research associate), Jakob Gasser, Luka Jakelja

Project description: A mixed-methods design will be employed to investigate the persistence of cash payments in Austria (compared to other Western European countries). Qualitative methods will first be used to explore payment behavior and its underlying motivations.On the basis of these findings, hypotheses for the social mechanisms of payment choice are inductively derived from the empirical data. The need for additional concepts is examined, and how they could be measured (scale development). The questionnaire will subsequently be administered to a sample that is representative of the Austrian resident population.Structural equation models will be employed to assess the extent to which the social mechanisms identified in the qualitative data can be generalized, thereby capturing the complexity of these mechanisms. 

Start: April 2022
Dissertation project by Linda Ahlers-Hirschmann

The dissertation examines the question of which sociologically relevant factors are responsible for the success or failure of market entry and market establishment of providers in the consulting business. What is considered a success or failure is determined by the perception of the actors.
1) With regard to the market sphere, the coming together of new consulting providers and clients in the face of uncertainty must be analysed. This focuses on the economic-sociological problem of cooperation.
2) The co-production between providers and consumers in the implementation of a consulting project, which is constitutive for services, is analysed. The intention is to find out to what extent the interaction taking place at the organisational level has feedback effects on market events.
3) The aim is to determine which organisational-sociological aspects effective in the consulting company have implications for success or failure in the course of market entry and market establishment. The consideration of organisation and market in blocks two and three addresses a research gap in economic sociology, which has so far been limited to the consideration of market action.
4) A further desideratum of economic sociology is that only market behaviour in economically stable times is researched. In order to counter this, a contrasting examination of the future expectations that commissioning companies have with healthy business development or in a crisis when deciding in favour of consulting is carried out. In addition, consulting branches that specialise in companies in the formal mode (IT consulting, etc.) or in the material mode (restructuring consulting, etc.) or that operate independently of these modes (tax consulting, etc.) are used.

Duration: 2021-2025
Dissertation project by Jakob Gasser

Collecting has gained increasing popularity in recent years. Communities have emerged around collectibles, arranging, assessing, examining, exchanging and buying them in both physical and digital space. The dissertation project examines the social conditions of value and price formation on the secondary market of the trading card game Magic the Gathering. Based on a qualitative methodological approach, the study aims to generate insights into the meaning-making process and practise of different groups of actors involved in this market.

Funding organisation: FFG
Duration: 2022-2024
Project team: Klaus Kraemer (Head); Nico Tackner (Research Associate).
Project partners: APOLLO.AI and Research Studio Data Science

Project description: Many processes in modern companies are already recorded and evaluated using key figures. Decisions at management level are a major exception here. The Apollo project therefore aims to develop software that documents decision-making processes and provides AI-supported feedback to optimise corporate decisions. As part of the project, the Institute of Sociology is primarily working on the following questions: Firstly, what concepts can economic sociology offer that are both helpful for the optimisation of decision-making processes and operationalisable? Secondly, how can these be made quantitatively measurable on the basis of decision-making protocols? Thirdly, what methodological problems need to be considered? And finally, how can the developed key figures be prepared for practical use?

Duration: 2018-2024
Dissertation project by Luka Jakelja

The dissertation project explores the intersection of money and profession, focusing on the role of money in the medical field and its influence on the medical profession. Empirical research is conducted through qualitative interviews, providing insights into the verious meanings that physicians attribute to money and how financial considerations shape their understanding of medicine.

Funding organisation: Caritas Styria
Duration: 2017-2023
Project management Klaus Kraemer and Florian Brugger

Project description: The Solidarity Barometer is an ongoing quantitative-empirical research project that has been funded by Caritas Styria since 2017 and was recently extended until 2023. As part of the research project, around 1,000 citizens of Styria are surveyed by telephone each year on a wide range of topics. The annual surveys focus on topics such as loneliness, social cohesion, solidarity-nation-welfare state and voluntary work. The research project aims to analyse the persistence and change of solidarity over time.

Funding body: FFG
Duration: 01.06.2021 - 30.11.2021
Project manager: Klaus Kraemer
Project team: Wolfgang Mayer (research associate)
Project partner: APOLLO.AI

Project description: In this project, organisational sociological foundations of corporate decisions under conditions of uncertainty and complexity are developed. A systematic review of the state of research in organisational studies will clarify the extent to which economic decision-making processes can be supported by the use of software. What role does software play in the context of strategic decisions that go beyond the information problem to include evaluation and judgement problems? How can software support the communication and implementation of decisions that have already been made? What is its contribution to the evaluation and reflection of the decision-making process and what are the limits of its use? A basic FFG project based on the small-scale project is being planned.

Funded by the Jubilee Fund of the Austrian National Bank
Duration: 2016-2019
Project team: Klaus Kraemer (head), Luka Jakelja, Florian Brugger, Sebastian Nessel

Project description: In the context of financial and currency crises, the importance of trust becomes apparent. Especially in times of heightened uncertainty, the fragility of trust in money and the monetary order can be observed. While trust is seen as an elementary social "resource" of economic exchange relationships, the effects of trust crises on the use of money and the role that money knowledge - or varying degrees of non-knowledge - plays in this have not yet been empirically researched from a sociological perspective. Against this background, three questions will be analysed in this research project: What do citizens know about the monetary order (monetary knowledge) (1)? How does the existing knowledge or lack of knowledge affect trust/non-trust in the monetary order (monetary trust) (2)? What influence do knowledge about (1) and trust in money (2) have on the use of money (use of money) (3)? The use of money is not only analysed with regard to the economic functions of money, but is also expanded to include sociologically relevant ways of using money (freedom, signalling, communitisation and control functions).

Kraemer, K., L. Jakelja, F. Brugger, S. Nessel (2022), The Social Ambiguity of Money. Empirical Evidence on the Multiple Usability of Money in Social Life. In: Review of Social Economy, Vol. 80. https://doi.org/10.1080/00346764.2022.2076150 OPEN ACCESS
Kraemer, K., L. Jakelja, F. Brugger, S. Nessel (2020), Money Knowledge or Money Myths? Results of a Population Survey on Money and the Monetary Order. In: European Journal of Sociology 61 (2), 219-267. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003975620000119 OPEN ACCESS
Kraemer, K. (2019), Geld als Institution. Eine Kritik der Vertrauenshypothese. In: Mittelweg 36. Zeitschrift des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, Jg. 28, Heft 3-4, 50-74. https://www.hamburger-edition.de/zeitschrift-mittelweg-36/alle-zeitschriften-archiv/artikel-detail/d/2510/Perspektiven_der_Geldsoziologie/13/

Funded by the Province of Styria, Department of Labour and Social Affairs
Duration: 2018-2019
Project team: Klaus Kraemer (head), Luka Jakelja (research assistant), Katja Röhm, Jakob Gasser, Nico Tackner, Julian Flores (study assistant)

Project description: The aim of the study is to identify obstacles and new ways of including people with disabilities in the Styrian labour market. Special attention is paid to the difficulties perceived by entrepreneurs of Styrian SMEs in integrating the target group into operational production and work processes. What are the success factors of entrepreneurial pioneers in the labour market integration of people with disabilities? What influence do legal-institutional, industry-related, company-organisational and social-individual framework conditions have? What are the suggestions of the entrepreneurs to be interviewed in order to improve the chances of people with disabilities for sustainable labour market inclusion? What practicable inclusion strategies can be derived from the empirical findings of the company survey?

Funded by: Vienna Chamber of Labour
Duration: June 2016 to February 2017
Head: Sebastian Nessel (University of Graz) and Michael Jonas (IHS Vienna)

Project description: The project addresses international developments in consumer research as well as current challenges faced by policy-makers and consumer organisations with regard to consumption and the consequences of consumption. The project aims to contribute to raising and sharpening the self-perception of individual and collective actors in consumer research in Austria, to establish their understanding of a common field of research and to stimulate networking opportunities between research and practice. On this basis, the potential for establishing and institutionalising consumer research in Austria between science, the organisations involved (AK, VKI) and politics will be explored. The aim of the project is to compile an up-to-date overview of the state of development of consumer research in Austria on the basis of empirical surveys, which provides information on (1) the actors involved in the development of the field and their perception of the field of consumer research in Austria", (2) the existing research areas and research gaps from the perspective of politics (federal ministries), science and the organisations involved in consumer issues (AK, VKI) and (3) documented information on these.

Dissertation project by Florian Brugger

The European banking system is in one of its deepest crises. A large number of economic, political science and economic sociological studies analyse individual banks, parts of the European banking system and individual national banking systems. However, an economic sociological analysis of the European banking system has been completely lacking to date. This dissertation project analyses to what extent and how specific constellations of ideas and interests have influenced the historical development of the European banking system. In particular, it focusses on the constellations of ideas and interests that led to the formation of the current banking system and its susceptibility to crises.

Duration: 2015-2017
Project management: Klaus Kraemer, Florian Brugger
Master's theses: Luka Jakelja, Anja Möstl, Siegfried Scheicher

Project description: In recent economic sociological research, a distinction is made between "standard" and "status markets" (Aspers) and between markets for similar mass goods and "markets of the unique" (Karpik). While producers and consumers on standard markets are presumably guided by price signals, decisions on status markets are influenced by socially constructed quality conventions. In status markets, it is not low prices or "information" about the products that are decisive for purchases, but "judgements" and status expectations. Typical status markets are wine markets, art markets, music markets, gourmet markets, but also markets for specialised medical, therapeutic, legal or scientific services, for example. Research has so far failed to clarify the conditions under which standard markets transform into status markets and why such a transformation is unlikely for other standard markets. The research project, which is financially supported by the Styrian Chamber of Agriculture, empirically investigates why the southern Styrian wine market has undergone a social metamorphosis from a standard to a status market over the last three decades, whereas the regional meat market has consistently returned to a standard market regime even after severe crises. The study focuses on local producers as well as intermediary institutions and organisations.

Project start: 2014
Project team: Klaus Kraemer and Florian Brugger (lead), Luka Jakelja, Siegfried Scheicher.

Project description: In economic theory, money has always been described as a unit of account, a means of exchange and payment, and a store of value. To this day, orthodox approaches have not gone beyond such a definition of different "monetary functions" derived from economic acts of exchange. Even the sociological classics from Max Weber to Georg Simmel assigned money a central role in the study of modern societies. However, much of sociology, from Parsons to Habermas to Luhmann, has followed economic theory, which assigns money exclusively economic functions. Based on the theory-led consideration that a number of "non-economic" uses of money (Kraemer 2015) can be distinguished in addition to the well-known "economic money functions", over 320 primary school children were asked about their everyday use of money as part of a research workshop for Master's students at the Institute of Sociology. The "Science and Research" department of the Office of the Styrian Provincial Government is financially supporting the analysis of the data collected and the publication of the research results.

Duration: 2011-2014
Realisation: Sebastian Nessel

Project description: Consumer organisations (VO) such as Stiftung Warentest and the consumer centres of the German federal states have been a central component of the institutional architecture of markets in Germany since the 1950s. Since the 1980s, private organisations have also been founded to represent the interests of consumers. Modern economic sociology has not yet taken note of VOs and their effects on markets, unlike political science and economics, for example. Three questions were therefore at the centre of the economic sociological analysis of VOs: Which strategies do selected VO in Germany apply? How can these varying strategies be explained? What effects do these strategies have on markets? In order to investigate these questions, detailed case analyses of selected VOs in Germany were developed. In a cross-case comparison of the individual organisations, their strategies and conditions of action were then mapped comparatively. Finally, an object-related analysis of markets was developed: Classical approaches of economic sociology were extended by analysing the effects of the strategies of VOs on market objects, market participants and market competition. The study was based on 28 qualitative interviews and the analysis of numerous documents. As a result of the project, a conceptualisation of markets including the demand side was presented using the example of VO.
The research project was part of Sebastian Nessel's dissertation. It was partially funded by a research grant from the University of Graz. The results will be published in autumn 2015 in the monograph: Sebastian Nessel, Verbraucherorganisationen und Märkte. Eine wirtschaftssoziologische Untersuchung, VS Verlag. As part of a follow-up project, a research project is currently being developed that will examine the effects of consumer organisations on consumer decisions and corporate strategies in more detail empirically (quantitatively and qualitatively).

Series "Economy and Society"

Funding organisation: BMBF
Duration: 2011-2014
Project team: Klaus Kraemer (head), Se-Jun Kim, Florian Brugger (study assistant)

Project description: Anthropogenic climate change is a major challenge of the 21st century. In the international climate change debate, different strategies are being discussed to limit climate change (mitigation) or to adapt to the expected changes (adaptation). In addition to new industrial production concepts and technological innovations, changes in everyday practices are seen as essential if ambitious climate protection targets are not to be missed. This research project examines the extent to which the various climate protection instruments and measures affect the socially unequal life chances of different population groups. In particular, the socio-economic and socio-structural distributional effects of selected municipal climate policy strategies on private households are empirically analysed using the cities of Frankfurt/Main and Munich as examples. The research project is located at the interface of environmental and inequality sociology. It centres on the following questions: Which climate policy strategies and instruments reinforce socio-economic disparities in industrialised societies, which have a distributionally neutral effect and which reduce social inequalities? How should the social effects of decarbonising urban supply systems be assessed from the point of view of social justice? How can undesirable social effects be avoided and to what extent can (possible) negative distributional effects for private households in precarious prosperity situations be compensated?
The research project is part of the research consortium KlimaAlltag "Climate change and everyday behaviour: potentials, strategies and instruments for low-CO2 lifestyles in the zero-emission city".
Partners of the research consortium: ISOE, Frankfurt / IÖW, Berlin / VZ NRW, Düsseldorf. Practical partners: City of Munich and City of Frankfurt/M.

Funded by: University of Graz
Duration: 2011-2012
Project team: Klaus Kraemer (head), Sebastian Nessel