To complete his research team Prof. Maurizio Ferrera at the University of Milan – Department of social and Political Science is seeking candidates for:
- 3 two-year post-doc positions (renewable for an additional two-year period)
Post-doc fellows will be included in the “REScEU” research team on “Reconciling economic and social Europe: values, ideas and politics”, a research project funded by the European Research Council – Advanced Grant.
Application deadline: 3 September 2014
Info, details and requirements at: http://www.unimi.it/ricerca/assegni_ricerca/78591.htm
Kind regards,
Prof. Maurizio Ferrera
Dept. of Social and Political Sciences
University of Milan,
Via Conservatorio, 7 – 20122 Milan, Italy
Tel: +39-02-50321176
Email: [log in to unmask]
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BRIEF PROJECT OVERVIEW
The nation-based welfare state (NBWS) and the EU are two precious legacies of the XX century. Their mutual relationship has been however fraught by an unresolved tension (and potential “clash”), which the recent crisis seems to have markedly exacerbated.
The purpose of the project is to develop a new theory for a better understanding of the genetic roots of such tension, its temporal swings, the range of possible institutional solutions and their political pre-conditions. The project will address these questions by closely investigating the intellectual and political dynamics of both welfare-state building and EU-building. Drawing on Weber’s pioneering insights on the relationship between values, ideas, institutional orders and politics, a new framework will be elaborated, with a view to overcoming the “compartmentalized” treatment of each of the four elements which characterizes contemporary neo-institutional approaches.
Extensive empirical work will reconstruct the logic of some key developmental junctures: the crisis of the 1970s, when the tension emerged; the period between the Amsterdam and the Lisbon Treaties, characterized by rebalancing efforts; the post-2007 crisis, which seems to have re-ignited the tension. Phase-specific intellectual and political constellations as well as actors’ strategies in decisive “moments of choice” will be the object of detailed case analysis.
The project will also include an applied and policy-oriented component. An “observatory” will be created (EUvision), aimed at monitoring factual developments in the social politics of integration and at carrying out a second-order analysis of intellectual “contents” on EU-building, produced by prominent ideational actors at both the national and supranational levels.
Successful applicants will be involved in theory-building, theory probing and the empirical application streams of the research project. Under the supervision of the project director, they are expected conduct empirical research in accordance with the theoretical framework in order to cast new light on the political/intellectual mechanisms that facilitate/hinder a “balanced” EU-building process, based on a sustainable and legitimate mutual “nesting” between the economic and the social dimension.
The empirical research will focus in particular on two temporal phases: i) the 2000s; ii) the 2010s.
A number of independent case studies focussing on specific moments/events of the two phases will be carried out. The end-product of the empirical research stream will be a fully-fledged neo-weberian theoretical reinterpretation of EU-building in its economic and social dimensions.
The empirical exploration of the two phases will rest on qualitative methods and will entail extensive and detailed process tracing through primary documentary sources and, most critically, a number of (loosely semi-structured) interviews to top national and EU politicians and key intellectual figures in Europe (ca. 20 interviews per phase, for a total of 40).
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