Postdoc position (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 postdoc position will contribute to the overarching argument that postcolonial development contexts were decisive in bringing business responsibility onto the transnational agenda.

Postdoctoral project

This project will investigate how workforce training and management development functioned as sites where corporate responsibility and development ideology intersected across late colonial and postcolonial contexts between 1920 and 1975. It will examine how multinational enterprises and international organisations such as the ILO navigated competing pressures around knowledge transfer, technology localisation, and the formation of local workforces and managerial elites. How did the gap between public development rhetoric and internal practice shape the broader political economy of corporate responsibility? Candidates are encouraged to develop their own case study within this framework, whether focused on a specific regional context, a specific multinational or an international organisation (especially the ILO), or a comparative regional perspective across Africa, Asia or Latin America.

The postdoc will work independently on their research agenda while contributing to project coordination, data management and research communication within the TRIBECA consortium. Integration into the Leipzig Graduate School offers additional opportunities for teaching and supervision. The candidate must have hands-on experience with corporate archives and with handling and analysing digitised primary sources. Strong writing skills and the ability to work across languages relevant to the case study are expected.