Stefanie Börner
Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS)
University of Bremen
Wiener Straße/Celsiusstraße(FVG)
PO Box 33 04 40
28334 Bremen
Germany
Room: W2170
Phone: +49 (0)421 218 66417
Fax: +49 (0)421 218 66353
E-Mail: sboerner
gsss.uni-bremen.de
Stefanie Börner is pursuing a Ph.D. in Social Sciences and is specialising in Research Field III: Social Integration and the Welfare State.
Dissertation Topic
Perspectives of a European Social Policy? The Nationalisation of Social Policy and Solidarity during the 19th Century (working title)
Abstract
Given its mobilizing potential social policy is especially suitable to induce identity and generate solidarity. Therefore groups such as nations or sub-state national communities, but also social classes or occupational groups tend to prefer social security schemes to be congruent with existing cultural, functional or political boundaries. The fact that these boundaries might be constructed is not reflected.
Using workers’ health insurance funds in the nineteenth century as an example the work shows how occupational or local mutual benefit societies reacted to national health insurance planned by public authorities.
It studies the relationship between solidarity and belonging with an already completed period and attempts to use the theoretical insights derived thereof as a point of departure to consider the territorial and sectoral solidarities at the European level. For European integration involves also the shift of boundaries and political competencies questions of redistribution have become vital again, recently.
Academic Supervisors
- Prof. Dr. Herbert Obinger, BIGSSS, University of Bremen
- Prof. Dr. Steffen Mau, BIGSSS, University of Bremen
- Prof. Dr. Georg Vobruba, University of Leipzig
Research Interests
- Comparative Welfare State Research
- Labour Market Policy
- European Integration
- Sociology of Social Policy