DEEPEN team members Sara Gonzalez and Thomas Mayer participated in the Norface GOVERNANCE Early-career Workshop in Vienna. The goal of this event was to help young academics in the GOVERNANCE programme to feature opportunities for extra training and new collaborations across teams. In addition, the early-career scholars can receive coaching from senior scholars from outside the programme. The workshop was aimed at pre-docs in all NORFACE Governance projects, about 14 students and primary investigators attended, as well as the organizers from the University of Vienna. All students presented their ideas or working papers to the group, which then were discussed and given detailed feedback.
Thomas presented a paper which he is working on with Tobias Wiß, concerning the differences in democratic input legitimacy in funded occupational pension schemes in Germany and Austria. Their provisional findings show that while individual-direct participation rights in occupational pensions are largely similar, despite the fact that there is a right to occupational pension provision in Germany, there is a large difference in collective-representational democratic input legitimacy between the two countries. Germany shows a higher degree of collective input legitimacy due to the many collective agreements negotiated between trade unions and employers on occupational pensions. This is almost non-existent in Austria.
There were two sessions by lecturers from the University of Vienna. In one session, Jörg Matthes taught the attending students about publication strategies. The other one, taught by Aron Wittfeld, focused on how to approach grant writing.
The workshop provided a great way to meet people from other NORFACE projects and find out what their research is about.
More information on the conference and the presentations given can be found on their website!