Inequality, Transformation, and Conflict
Director: Prof. Dr. Steffen Mau
Research Program: Inequality, Transformation, and Conflict
Research at the department addresses fundamental processes of social change and their consequences for inequality and conflict in contemporary societies. It is guided by the premise that large-scale transformations—economic restructuring, cultural change, political realignments, and technological innovation—alter established social hierarchies and institutional arrangements. These shifts generate new constellations of advantage and disadvantage and create conditions under which social tensions are mobilized, reframed, or suppressed.
The program’s central objective is to analyze how structural inequalities intersect with collective identities and political conflicts. It examines how changes in labor markets, welfare states, demography, migration patterns, and the moral fabric of society shape social positions and influence political orientations and forms of participation. Research at the department pays particular attention to societies that have experienced profound systemic ruptures, including post-socialist contexts such as Eastern Germany, where long-term transformation effects continue to structure social life and political conflict. Our research adopts a structural understanding of political conflict, emphasizing that contemporary divides are often rooted in social inequality, cultural meaning-making, and shifting political alignments.
The department’s research program is theory-driven, revisiting classic questions of social inequality while connecting them to contemporary approaches in political sociology. It engages with structural, action-based, institutional, and political-psychological perspectives with the aim of developing a dynamic and comprehensive theory of social conflict, transformation, and change. The research program relies on a broad and integrative data strategy, combining large-scale survey research, qualitative and ethnographic approaches, comparative and mixed-methods designs, as well as innovative computational social science methods.
Research Areas:
- Social change and transformation
- Inequality and social structure
- Social and political conflict
- Migration and borders
The Max Planck Society has appointed sociologist Prof. Dr. Steffen Mau (Humboldt University of Berlin) as a new Director. This appointment is a major step toward strengthening social science research on key global challenges.
Expanding research on inequality and conflict
