Two PhD positions (m/f/d/x) in the TRIBECA project

Founded in 1409, Leipzig University is one of Germany’s largest universities and a leader in research and medical training. With around 30,000 students and more than 5000 members of staff across 14 faculties, it is at the heart of the vibrant and outward-looking city of Leipzig. Leipzig University offers an innovative and international working environment as well as an exciting range of career opportunities in research, teaching, knowledge and technology transfer, infrastructure and administration.

TRIBECA (Tackling the Responsibility of International Business and Enterprises as a Transnational Cause) is a collaborative Franco-German research project investigating how corporate social responsibility became the dominant paradigm for framing the relationship between business, state and society across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its central question is: how has business responsibility become a hegemonic framework for understanding corporate action, and what coalitions of actors, spanning religious networks, multinational enterprises, international institutions and civil society, drove its construction as a transnational cause? Rather than treating corporate social responsibility as a straightforward outcome of corporate strategy or regulatory pressure, TRIBECA approaches it as a historically produced category shaped by competing interests, ideological currents, and multi-level political dynamics spanning the local, national and multilateral scales.

The project is funded jointly by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), runs for 36 months, and is organised around five thematic research strands combining archival, ethnographic, prosopographical and quantitative methods. The working language of the project is English.

The two PhD projects will contribute to the overarching argument that postcolonial development contexts were decisive in bringing business responsibility onto the transnational agenda.

PhD project I

The first PhD project, supervised by Marie Huber and Tristan Oestermann (ZZF Potsdam), will investigate how workforce training and management development became key sites where corporate responsibility and development ideology intersected between 1920 and 1975. It will examine how European multinational enterprises in colonial and postcolonial Africa, Asia and Latin America publicly championed knowledge transfer and staff localisation while internal records reveal persistent reluctance to relinquish managerial and technical control. The candidate will conduct comparative analysis of corporate archives at Bata and Hoffmann-LaRoche, alongside government and international organisation records and oral history interviews with former employees and managers. The candidate should have a background in social sciences or history and training in relevant archival, regional studies, field work and data handling methods, as well as strong writing skills.

PhD project II

The second PhD project, supervised by Dmitri van den Bersselaar, will examine the cultural business history of the ways in which multinational food companies adopted nutrition as a corporate responsibility cause in West Africa, from the independence era through the 1980s. The primary empirical focus is Unilever’s operating companies in Ghana and Nigeria, tracing how the company engaged with malnutrition in dialogue with host governments, the FAO and food scientists – and whether these interventions ultimately improved or worsened dietary health. Sources include the Unilever archives in the UK, FAO records in Rome, ministerial archives in Ghana and Nigeria, newspaper reporting, and oral history interviews. The candidate should have a background in African studies or in economic or business history with prior engagement with West African contexts.