Contact
Work group
The Economy (Senior Fellow)
Philipp Ther is professor of Central European history at the University of Vienna, where he founded the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET). Two of his monographs deal with the recent economic and social history of Europe, Europe since 1989: A History (Princeton UP, 2016) and How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation since 1989 (Polity Press, 2023). In these books, he developed the concept cotransformation for assessing the impact of neoliberal reforms in post-communist Europe on the West and, in particular, on Germany. His most recent book is a multigraph on the transformation of shipyards in late state socialism and the EU (with Ulf Brunnbauer et al., In den Stürmen der Transformation: Zwei Werften zwischen Sozialismus und EU, Suhrkamp, 2022). He has also worked on the history of music institutions and markets in Central Europe since the late eighteenth century.
Research Project
Towards a Global Business and Labor History: The Transformation of Shipyards since the Late 1970s
The project builds on previous research on the transformation of Eastern European shipyards during late state socialism, postsocialism and when the new member countries entered the EU. As we found out during our research, one of the main reasons for the long and deep crisis of shipbuilding in Europe is competition from East Asia. South Korea entered the world market in the 1970s, the same period when socialist countries invested heavily in the industry, which they perceived as a key factor in and symbol of socialist modernity. Whereas Polish, East German, and Yugoslav enterprises mostly produced losses, the state capitalist model, which was later emulated by the People’s Republic of China, seems to have worked. In addition to the competition and conditions in the global shipbuilding market, the (long-term) project intends to explore labor relations and shop floor practices through a combination of oral history and archival studies. The research (to be conducted again with Ulf Brunnbauer) also pays attention to the role of the EU and its laws protecting competition, and stresses EU enlargements and China’s accession to the WTO in the new millennium as turning points in the “long” transformation and neoliberal globalization that have taken place since the late 1970s.
Philipp Ther | Towards a Global Business and Labor History: The Transformation of Shipyards since the Late 1970s as video and podcast on Wissenschaftsportal L.I.S.A.