I have worked both as a research fellow at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) specializing in „Organizations & Digital Technologies“ and as a visiting scholar at the Berlin Social Science Center (Germany) in the group “Politics of Digitalization”.
After studying political science, economics, law, sociology, and media at the University of Osnabrueck (Germany), Bielefeld University (Germany), Sciences Po Paris (France) and the University of Alicante (Spain), I worked as a research fellow at the University of Witten/Herdecke Faculty of Management and Economics, the Bielefeld University Faculty of Sociology, and the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). In my PhD project, I have analyzed 300+ years of data, and explored how modern organizations and decision procedures are both built and transformed in relationship with societal and technological change. My research challenges the classical consensus about the emergence of organizations in the late 18th and 19th century. Rather, in my book, published Open Access with Springer Nature thanks to support of the Leibniz Fund and the WZB, I show that (professional) organizations evolved before industrialization and the French Revolution. During my doctorate, I was a fellow of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago (USA) as part of the German-American Fulbright Program.
Drawing on sociology, law, and business and administration history, I have explored the processes at the intersection of organization, media technology and society, with a general interest in the questions of how organizations cope with uncertainty, how they define organizational problems, solutions and rules, and how they deal with those in formal and informal ways. In particular, I have studied and taught how (new) forms of organizations, marketplaces, and professional decision procedures evolve, and how different forms of social order are built up and adjusted in relation to technological, legal, and economic developments.
In one of my research projects I have studied the relationship between big data technologies and discrimination in different forms of organization. In this context, I have investigated how both members and non-members make sense of big data applications, and how social boundaries are reshaped in the process.