Interested in exploring how institutions influence societal wellbeing beyond GDP? Join our
SCOOP project focusing on historical and comparative analysis!
Wat ga je doen? Social welfare, or wellbeing, can be achieved through many channels. This can be by way of well-functioning, open markets or by way of state interventions, including welfare programs and regulation, but of particular interest in the SCOOP programme is how other organisational solutions such as unions, charities, cooperatives, or corporate paternalism could play a role. What sort of solutions were dominant in given cases, how did this change over time, and how successful they were at increasing wellbeing in society?
This project relates to the shift in policy and academic debates from measuring success of societies in terms of GDP per capita to wanting to measure wellbeing in more direct ways. Increasingly, we want to go "beyond GDP". It also links to the question how economic growth and wellbeing are related – a founding question in the field of economic history. Periods where they were seemingly decoupled have been studied intensively. A next step would is to better understand the drivers of well-being and the role of different organizational solutions in this.
You, as a postdoc researcher, will work on these themes. You will reconstruct wellbeing developments for a case and period of your choice, with particular attention to the link between variations in organisational solutions, differences in well-being outcomes and their distribution, and with a view for the possibilities to set up within-country or between-country comparative analyses.
You will have the following tasks and responsibilities:
- conducting research within the period of appointment;
- publishing peer-reviewed journal articles or book chapters;
- helping with the organisation of workshops and an international conference;
- participating in project meetings, and closely collaborating with the other members of the research team;
- helping with setting up and managing project data;
- assisting with knowledge dissemination and other activities of the project;
- presenting research results at national and international workshops and conferences.
Resilient societies are able to maintain high levels of care, work, and inclusion, despite the challenges posed by changing circumstances. In the ten year-long transdisciplinary research programme SCOOP, we depart from the idea that a key component in the potential of societies to achieve this resilience is their ability to sustain cooperation within and between families, organizations, and communities. However, cooperation is difficult to sustain over time. Cooperation in one area (in organisations) can undermine it in another (the family). There can be undesirable consequences, for instance for individuals not involved. Also, the conditions on which cooperation was established can change. Whereas much is known about what helps cooperation to get started, so far much less is known about what makes cooperation sustainable. SCOOP aims to identify the secrets of sustainable cooperation and to elucidate its effects on care, work, and inclusion.
Supervisors will be: Professor Bas van Bavel, economic and social history (UU), Professor Rafael Wittek, sociology (RUG) and Dr Auke Rijpma, economic and social history (UU).