Socialization as social Innovation? An Analysis of the Public Discourse on current Demands for expropriation

The demand for the socialization of private property is negotiated by a broad public since the Berlin referendum on the expropriation of large housing companies in 2021 at the latest. Apart from the “Initiative Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.” demands for the expropriation of energy companies arisfe such as “Expropriate RWE & Co.” The opinions on this request differ in political and legal discussions regarding the question of feasibility and justice of the execution of expropriations. The discourses remain a field of tension of societal negotiations until today – also because § 15 of the German constitution, which grants the possibility of expropriations, has not been used in legal practice so far (Biatel 2019).

In this project, we intend to look at 1.467 press articles and examine how demands for socialization are negotiated discursively by means of the Blended Reading Approach (Stulpe und Lemke 2016). We consider the press to be a central component of the public in a democratic society, as ideas are presented, exchanged, discussed and assessed there (Waitkus and Wallaschek 2022). We will use a Topic Modelling to see, which are the current thematic focus in German press on socialization. This analysis will be supplemented with a qualitative content analysis of selected articles, which will tell us how the thematic focus is negotiated. We see that the discourse on property of certain goods is no longer considered as a relation between subject and object, but is negotiated as a central societal principle of order (Carruthers and Ariovich 2004, Jing et al. 2022). During these negotiations questions of social responsibility of property are raised, which can hardly be reconciled with market-orientated pursuit of profit of large corporations. Thus, the conflict regarding the transfer of private into public property hints at a change of practices on different levels, which bring up a fundamental challenge of institutionally secured primates of property. We will look at this discursive negotiation on socialization from a matching perspective of a social innovation. Howaldt and Schwarz define this as a “New configuration of social practices in certain fields of action or social contexts, aiming at solving problems or satisfying needs in a better way than it has been possible on the basis of established practices” (2010: 54). The project is supposed to detect current changes of the system of property ownership in a late-capitalist society. We thus expand the interdisciplinary discourse by structural change of property by focusing on a central research gap regarding the negotiation of the legitimacy of ownership of goods, which concern fundamental human needs.

^{Photo: Hamburg Enteignet}

Literature

Biatel, Marie-Stella. 2019. “Aktueller Begriff. Die Enteignung nach Art. 14 Abs. 3 GG und die Vergesellschaftung nach Art 15 GG.” Deutscher Bundestag: Wissenschaftliche Dienste.

Carruthers, Bruce G. und Laura Ariovich. 2004. "The sociology of property rights." Annual Review of Sociology 30: 23-46.

Howaldt, Jürgen, & Michael Schwarz (2010). „Soziale Innovation“ im Fokus. Skizze eines gesellschaftstheoretisch inspirierten Forschungskonzepts. Bielefeld: transcript.

Jing, Cheng, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, und Li Ling. 2022. “The Three Modes of Appropriation. Lessons of Chinese Practice for Theorizing Property”. Working Paper 1. Erfurt/Jena: Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio 294: Strukturwandel des Eigentums.

Stulpe, Alexander und Matthias Lemke. 2016. “Blended Reading. Theoretische und praktische Dimensionen der Analyse von Text und sozialer Wirklichkeit im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung.” In: Text Mining in den Sozialwissenschaften, herausgegeben von Matthias Lemke und Gregor Wiedemann, 17-61. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

Waitkus, Nora und Stefan Wallaschek. 2022. “Legitimate Wealth? How Business Owners are Portrayed in the Press.” Social Justice Research 35: 404-435.

Student research group

• Julie Lou Linda Kuschel
• Allan Sandham

Mentor

• Prof. Dr. Katharina Zimmermann