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Philipp Reick

TU Berlin, Germany (CAT Program)
Democracy at work: Historical perspectives and future challenges for employee representation in Europe
12 May 2025 - 16 May 2025
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Philipp Reick is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at TU Berlin. Before coming to Berlin, he was an Assistant Professor at Aarhus University and a fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. His current project focuses on the history of economic democracy in interwar Europe.

He joins the Paris IAS in May 2025 for a group research stay as part of the CAT collaborative program, in collaboration with researchers Aurélie Andry, Sophia Friedel and Pedro Teixeira.

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Research Interests

Labor History, Urban History, History of Social Movements and Trade Union, History of Socialism

Democracy at work: Historical perspectives and future challenges for employee representation in Europe

(Collaborative project, awarded a NetIAS Constructive Advanced Thinking grant, 2021-2024)

DemWo investigates the historical evolution of industrial democracy in a transnational European context. The research group is driven by two central questions: First, it explores how historical periods of crisis and transformation shaped ideas and practices of industrial democracy. Second, the project considers how these historical legacies can inform responses to contemporary challenges. With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise of AI and remote work, and the large-scale transformation of entire industries, the landscape of employee participation is rapidly changing. DemWo seeks to leverage historical insights to address these challenges. Comprised of a team of five scholars from History, Philosophy, and Law, DemWo will examine these issues through a multidisciplinary approach, using methods like close reading of historical texts, source criticism, discourse analysis, and legal interpretation. The results of the research group's work will be disseminated through a joint publication and a public event, co-organized with our stakeholder, the European Trade Union Institute. The project aims to provide well-grounded policy recommendations and contribute to ongoing debates among trade unions and other relevant stakeholders. By strengthening institutions for employee participation, DemWo seeks to enhance employee efficacy, address democratic deficits, and make societies more resilient to the numerous and multi-dimensional challenges democracies are currently facing.

Key Publications

P. Reick, Labor is Not a Commodity! The Movement to Shorten the Workday in Late Nineteenth-Century Berlin and New York (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2016).
P. Reick, "Gentrification 1.0: Urban transformations in late-19th-century Berlin," Urban Studies 55/11 (2018): 2542-2558.
P. Reick, "Toward a History of Urban Social Movements," Moving the Social 63 (2020): 147-162.

32535
2024-2025