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TRR 294:  Strukturwandel des Eigentums

Subject Area Social and Behavioural Sciences
Humanities
Term since 2021
Website Homepage
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 424638267
 
The planned collaborative research centre is based on a diagnosis of conflicts unfolding in the present: while private property grew increasingly important, concentrated and deregulated after 1989, the resulting system of ownership appears to be highly vulnerable to crises and controversy. Alongside global economic crises, challenges include political conflicts surrounding the distribution of private property as well as the dynamics of the knowledge-based economy and bio-economy, accompanied by alternative approaches to the public domain, the sharing economy and freedom of access.We believe that this transition constitutes a fundamental transformation in the institution(s) of property that is taking place on two levels. Structural change of property denotes a range of interdependent processes transforming the subjects, objects and systems of property, for example, new players and products on the financial markets, the management of non-rival or previously non-exclusive objects such as knowledge or wind, and new combinations of public and private ownership. Because property is a constitutive institution of modern societies, we also assume a structural change through property, as the reorganisation of that institution initiates a trans-formation of the overarching institutional order, social structure, the relationship between world, society and self, and everyday practices – without determining any of them fully. Material aspects of this structural change are currently being discussed in terms of the reorganisation of the welfare state, ‘post-democracy’ and ‘post-capitalism’. We hope to develop a new research perspective on the changes in question by pursuing three general assumptions. Firstly, the assumption that the ‘disembedding’ of private property in the sense of Polanyi prompts attempts at reembedding the same. Secondly, that the technological change towards a knowledge-based information economy promotes innovations both in capitalism and in its critique. Thirdly, that the specif-ic nature and materiality of new objects of ownership – from human ova to genetic codes – needs to be socially processed.The CRC aims to expand the classic property debates of philosophy, law and the economic sciences by ex-ploring the topic from the perspective of the social sciences and, in particular, of sociology. Through collaboration between these disciplines, supplemented by expertise from historians, political scientists, scholars of religion and of Chinese and South Asian Studies, we will endeavour to (re-)establish a social theory of property and explore the assumed transformation both on a conceptual and on an empirical level. To this end, we will a) revisit historical and conceptual foundations of Western systems of ownership, b) empirically investigate current conflicts about private property in the global North, Asia and Latin America, and c) analyse alternatives to (private) ownership that are currently being debated.
DFG Programme CRC/Transregios

Current projects

Applicant Institution Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Co-Applicant Institution Universität Erfurt
 
 

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