Newly appointed in Göttingen in October 2019: Prof. Dr. Sascha Münnich

On October 1st, Sascha Münnich is joining the faculty of social sciences as professor of sociology within the field of sociological theory. Sascha Münnich is bridging political sociology and economic sociology in his work and has been a junior professor of comparative sociology in Göttingen since 2013. He was John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University, Center of European Studies in 2014/15 and has worked for many years as researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. The German Ministry of Education and Science has funded his research projects in the past. Sascha Münnich has been awarded the Otto Hahn Medal for an excellent dissertation by the German Max-Planck-Society in 2011.

In his research, Sascha Muennich examines the legitimacy of national and transnational economic orders from a historical-comparative and institution-oriented perspective. Already in his dissertation the question of complementarities and causal mechanisms between institutions and social discourses has been prominent in his empirical work and theoretical thought.

Sascha Muennich has worked on financial capitalism dynamics and crisis, as well as on how they interact with the public critique of profits and the market distribution of value. Other topics have included the relation between ideas and interests in labor market policy in Germany and the U.S., the role of social market structures for profit distribution between firms, as well as the influence of civil society organizations on nationally distinct critical discourses about the future of capitalism. He has published on the history of economic thought and the history of criticism of capitalism. The core of his work aims at the moral embeddedness and distinct cultural roots of divergent varieties of capitalism. In the coming years, Sascha Münnich will explore the role of public critique for innovation and the economic dynamic of contemporary market economies, with a special focus on the fundamental sociological question how national, regional and transnational institutional arenas bring about divergent discourses of legitimation. The challenge for institutional theory is how these divergent spaces and histories together shape the contemporary order of global capitalism.

Sascha Münnich teaches macro-sociological theory, political sociology, e.g. the interplay of democracy, capitalism and welfare states, institutional theory, historical sociology, comparative methods, economic sociology and market sociology. He is highly experienced in research-oriented teaching and his seminars aim at three teaching goals: First, the integration of thinking and writing, second, the skill of discursive reading of complex texts, and third, the ability to illustrate abstract arguments and concepts of sociological theory with contemporary, every-day social problems and on-going public debates.

Recently published:

• Muennich, Sascha. 2019. Profit as Social Rent: Embeddedness and Stratification in Markets. Embeddedness and Stratification in Markets. Sociological Theory 37:162–183.
• Münnich, Sascha. 2018. Die Legitimität von Finanzregimen. In Finanzialisierung, Demokratie und Gesellschaft. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie Sonderhefte, 58 (2018), Hrsg. Jürgen Beyer, und Christine Trampusch, 227-258. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.