ERC Consolidator Grant: 4 million euros to Bielefeld sociologists

Professor Dr Minh Nguyen and Professor Dr Carsten Sauer have both received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC)

Bielefeld University

 

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In his new project, Professor Dr Carsten Sauer examines the mechanisms that are contributing to the gender pay gap between women and men.

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Credit: Photo: Bielefeld University/Sarah Jonek

Two researchers from the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University, Professor Dr. Minh Nguyen and Professor Dr. Carsten Sauer, have been awarded prestigious Consolidator Grants from the European Research Council (ERC). Together, their projects have been allocated approximately 4.4 million Euro in funding. In her new ERC project, Nguyen is investigating the process of financialisaton, i.e. the increasing importance of financial markets and logics,  for working lives in Asia. Sauer is investigating in his project the issue of gender-based wage differentials in Europe. The ERC announced on Tuesday, 3 December, the winners of the new ERC Consolidator Grants.

‘Minh Nguyen and Carsten Sauer having been awarded these ERC Consolidator Grants speaks to the exceptional calibre of their research. I am very pleased for both of them,’ says Professor Dr. Angelika Epple, Rector of Bielefeld University. ‘Their projects bring sophisticated methods to bear on highly relevant social issues – making an important contribution to our research university.’

Financial markets and their impact on workers in Asia

In her project “FinancialLives,” Professor Dr. Minh Nguyen is considering how the everyday lives of workers in countries like China, Vietnam, and Laos are increasingly subject to the logics of financial markets. These countries combine socialist politics with market-economy principles. Increasingly, working people must integrate financial strategies into their daily lives in order to ensure livelihoods and wellbeing. ‘In this new project, we are trying to understand how financialised risk has become normalised in these societies, and what this implies for work, for working people, and for social and political life more broadly,’ says Minh Nguyen. For her analysis, Nguyen draws on long-term ethnographic research with observations and interviews gathered from extensive fieldwork. This project builds upon her ERC Starting Grant project entitled „WelfareStruggles,“ which was completed this year. In this project, Nguyen showed how, due to precarious working conditions, workers in China and Vietnam are resorting to financial solutions because the social security systems in their countries provide little protection from market risks.

Pay Disparities in Europe

In his project “FAIRGAP,” Professor Dr. Carsten Sauer is investigating the mechanisms behind the gender pay gap in Europe. He is pursuing the question of why women often earn less than men, despite efforts to eliminate gender-based disparities in compensation. Sauer and his team are focusing on the subjective perceptions of fair pay. Due to prevailing gender norms, employees and employers often implicitly perceive men earning more as fair. Using experimental surveys and other novel methods, Sauer and his team are investigating how unconscious patterns of thought and norms influence the outcomes of wage negotiations. Sauer will be analysing these mechanisms in several European countries. ‘We want to find out how individual, organisational, and societal factors converge to create – and maintain over time – gender inequalities in terms of both pay and perceptions of what is fair,’ explains Carsten Sauer. Drawing upon comprehensive data, the project aims to identify scientifically proven approaches for fairer pay negotiation processes and labour market practices.

An expert in social transformations

Professor Dr. Minh Nguyen studied English and sociology at the Vietnam National University in Hanoi. She completed a Master’s in Social Planning and Development at the University of Queensland, Australia, and earned her doctoral degree in Social Research in International Development at the University of East Anglia, UK. Prior to her professorship at Bielefeld University, she worked for five years as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany, where she delved deeper into research on social transformations in East and Southeast Asia. Since 2018, she has been a professor of social anthropology at Bielefeld University, with specialisations in welfare, migration, and mobility, along with gender and class in East and Southeast Asia.

An expert in social disparities

Professor Dr. Carsten Sauer studied sociology, philosophy and economics at the University of Konstanz and earned his doctoral degree at Bielefeld University. He served as a research fellow in the Radboud Excellence Initiative at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and as a professor of sociology at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany. In 2021, he was appointed as a professor of social structure analysis of social inequalities at Bielefeld University. Sauer’s main research interests include labour and organization research, empirical research on inequality and justice, and empirical methods.

Significant financial support

These ERC Consolidator Grants will enable both researchers to conduct their ambitious projects over a period of five years. Professor Dr. Nguyen will receive some 2.42 million Euro for her new research, and Professor Dr. Sauer will receive approximately 2 million Euro for his work. ERC Consolidator Grants are aimed at outstanding researchers whose own working group is currently at the consolidation stage. In this funding round, Bielefeld University is one of seven research locations in North Rhine-Westphalia whose scientists have acquired new CoG. In previous years, seven researchers and their projects at Bielefeld University received funding from the ERC Consolidator Grant programme. The European Research Council (ERC), established by the European Union in 2007, is the leading European funding organisation for excellent cutting-edge research, supporting scientists of all nationalities and ages across Europe.