In publica commoda

Die gesellschaftliche Legitimität von Finanzprofiten

New Research Project headed by Prof. Dr. Sascha Münnich: "The Social Legitimacy of Financial Profits", starting October 1st 2015

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research has granted Juniorprofessor of Comparative Sociology Sascha Münnich funding for a research project, with a team of two research assistants. The money is part of the ministry's research funding program "Financial System and Society". In this project Muennich's team examines the public debates on the moral legitimacy of the financial economy, which have intensified throughout all European societies over the crisis, in order to analyze the relation of legitimatory discourses and the institutional regulation of financial markets in a cultural, comparative, historical study. From this sociological perspective legitimacy is understood as an important aspect of market institutions that is grounded in historically grown culturally divergent discursive patterns of the 'good economy' and boundaries drawn between 'deserved' and 'undeserved' profits. The aim of the project is to understand the historical origins of these discourses as well as their relation to the evolution of financial market institutions.
In order to empirically analyze market legitimacy it is necessary to follow the discursive practices of political, economic and social actors on four levels: Expert discourses, parliamentary debates, press content and discursive protest issued by social movements. The project consists of three parts. First, a historical-institutionalist project which compares financial market regulation and the accompanying legitimatory debates in press, parliaments and expert networks about 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' profits between the 19th century and the 2000s in Germany and the United Kingdom. Second, a macro-oriented project which develops a quantitative-statistical tool for extracting semantic constructions of legitimacy aims at a multivariate analyses of profit discourse structures in different sectors, as well as institutional and socio-economic contexts of different European countries. Third, an interpretative interview-based study of the moral economy injected by social protest movements such as ATTAC and Occupy in Germany, United Kingdom, France and Spain, which will also contain a comparison of their legitimatory principles to the ideologies of historical anti-finance movements.

Term: October, 2015 to September, 2018

Research assistants:
Katharina Legantke, M.A.
Heide Haas, M.A.(from 01.11.2015)