(Counter-)Narrating European integration: : How trade unions came up with joint position on the Freedom of Services in the EU

In order to maintain social standards within the European Union, trade unions have to overcome national differences to form common political positions. Especially against the background of the recent enlargement rounds, the crafting of such positions has become a daunting task. In this context, the European Services Directive has posed an important challenge to trade unions: The so-called ‘country of origin principle’ implied that workers were supposed to be employed in line with the standards of the sending- and not the receiving country. After lengthy discussions between representatives from Eastern and Western Europe, the trade unionists managed to form a joint political line and forced the European Commission to remove the principle. In order to challenge the hegemonic neoliberal narrative of the common market bringing freedom and prosperity to the countries of Europe, the article will show how the counternarrative of a European Social Model served as a reference frame for this joint position

The Influence of the Discursive Power of Unions in the Swift Re-regulation of Slaughterhouse Labour during the COVID-19 Crisis in Germany

The article analyses the re-regulation of labour in the German meat industry during the COVID-19 crisis. While working and employment conditions have long been criticised with only minor results, the massive coronavirus outbreaks in German slaughterhouses led to a rapid reform of work in the meat industry. We argue that unions were able to exert influence on policy-makers based on the discursive power that they accumulated prior to COVID-19, but that they needed to adapt their framing strategies by including public health concerns to their criticism. That was possible because the outbreaks endangered local residents as well as the slaughterhouse workers, which decisively increased the pressure on policy-makers. The article contributes to the approach of discursive power resources and strategic framing by unions, and elaborates the relevance of the process of gaining discursive power over time as well as the unforeseeable changes that can dramatically increase a union’s chances of political influence. KEYWORDS: coronavirus; COVID-19; power resources; unions; meat industr

A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere?: An Introduction

The political public sphere is important for democracy, and it is changing – this is how the quintessence of Jürgen Habermas’s monumental study on The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) could be summarized in simple words. In the fields of political sociology and social theory, history, but also research on social movements, cultural studies, and media and communication studies, his conception of the public sphere as a sphere mediating between the state and civil society has had a decisive influence on the debate about the potential of collective reason for modern democracy. In this introduction we give a short overview of Habermas’s arguments on the rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere, demonstrate the necessary link between the public sphere and democracy and, referring to the contributions to this special issue, sketch current transformations of the public sphere along three basic processes – digitalization, commodification, and globalization

Grüne Politik unter Bedingungen 'neuer Komplexität'

Gesellschaftliche Modernisierung hat im internationalen Rahmen zu einer neuen Komplexität im Spannungsfeld einer zunehmenden Anzahl von Zielgrößen geführt. Gleichzeitig lassen sich auch im Parteiensystem sowie in der Sozialstruktur insgesamt Erosions- und Transformationserscheinungen verzeichnen. Der Artikel analysiert Politik und Außenwirkung der Grünen vor diesem Hintergrund.Social Modernisation has lead to an increase of complexity in terms of policy-aims. At the same time developments of erosions and pluralisation can be encountered in terms of multi-party systems as well as broader social structure. The article analyses German Green Party Politics against this background

Zur Ambivalenz politischer Mythenbildung: Gewerkschaften in der europäischen Tarifpolitik

Die sozialwissenschaftliche Debatte über die politischen Potenziale von Gewerkschaften wird durch eine Reihe suggestiver Tendenzen geprägt. Eine sozialdemokratisch-internationalistische Haltung ist hierbei verbunden mit der Anwendung institutionalistischer und integrationistischer Axiome im Forschungsprozess. Um Fehlschlüsse zu vermeiden, müssen diese Tendenzen in ihren Auswirkungen auf die Wissensproduktion stärker reflektiert werden.Research in social science on trade unions in the course of European integration is shaped by a number of suggestive tendencies. A political affiliation to social democratic and internationalist ideas correlates with a widespread popularity of institutionalist and integrationist axioms. In order to avoid false conclusions, we have to reflect these tendencies and their impact on the production of knowledge more strongly

Die Suche nach Transitzeitvariationen mittels bodengebundender Beobachtungen

Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurden bekannte Transitplaneten untersucht, um durch eine präzise Messung des Transitzeitpunktes Indikatoren für die Existenz zusätzlicher Objekte im System zu erhalten. Dazu fiel die Auswahl auf sieben bekannte Transitplaneten, die aufgrund ihrer Eigenschaften zusätzliche Objekte vermuten ließen. Unter Zuhilfenahme des YETI-Netzwerkes konnten über einen Zeitraum von vier Jahren 93 Transitbeobachtungen mit einer Gesamtbelichtungszeit von 291 Stunden an 17 verschiedenen Beobachtungsstandorten weltweit durchgeführt werden. Aufgrund verschiedener Einflüsse, maßgeblich wechselnder Wetterbedingungen, verblieben dabei nur 41 Transitbeobachtungen zur weiteren Analyse. Die restlichen Beobachtungen mussten entweder bereits während des Transitereignisses abgebrochen, oder nachträglich aufgrund zu hoher photometrischer Fehler aussortiert werden. Zuzüglich zu den eigenen Daten wurden auch publizierte Resultate anderer Forschungsgruppen verwendet