Aim of the project
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 program is how other organizational solutions such as unions, charities, cooperatives, or corporate paternalism could play a role. This prompts us to ask which sort of solutions were dominant in given cases, how this changed over time, and how successful they were at increasing wellbeing in society.
The latter 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". This also links to the question how economic growth and wellbeing are related, being a founding question in the field of economic history. Periods where they were seemingly decoupled have been studied intensively. A next step would now be to try and better understand the drivers of well-being and the role of different organizational solutions in this.
We want to recruit a post-doc researcher to work on these themes. The researcher is asked to reconstruct wellbeing developments for a case and period of his/her choice, with particular attention to the link between variations in organizational solutions, differences in well-being outcomes and their distribution, and with a view for the possibilities to set up within- or between-country comparative analyses.
The post-doc researcher will be based at the Economic and Social History group at Utrecht University.
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Project Initiators
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Dr. A. (Auke) Rijpma -
Prof. dr. B. J. P. (Bas) van Bavel -
Prof. dr. R. P. M. (Rafael) Wittek, Coordinating researcher
- Discipline
Economic and Social History - Location
Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities
