Workshop Religion, Ethnicity, and Economic Performance. New Concepts and Empirical Applications
How do religion, ethnicity and economic performance relate to each other? How is religious or ethnic affiliation reflected in economic performance, and vice versa? Is there any connection between the three at all? New historical research has shown that secularization remains a vague phenomenon and religion has not lost its impact on social and economic processes. Similarly, sociological and economic studies have emphasized the continuous economic importance of religious factors through the present day. Economic performance of religious and ethnic minority groups often vary greatly from the majority population. This phenomenon raises fundamental questions of how religion and ethnicity influence economic performance in different societies, at different times.
More specifically, it can be argued that religious and ethnic affiliation affects social norms, institutions, social networks, as well as cultural practices such as business practices (e.g. Islamic banking) or the formation of trust. In a wider sense, it also provokes more complex questions of how the experience of migration, discrimination, inclusion and exclusion, and in-group dynamics shape economic orders and business cultures of ethnic/religious groups.
This workshop aims to bring together and discuss research from a historical, social science and cultural studies perspective, guided by the following overarching questions:
- How does religious and ethnic affiliation influence economic performance, for example by shaping social and cultural norms or institutions?
- How does economic practice affect the cohesion and historical development of religious and ethnic communities?
- What theoretical, methodological and empirical insights can we learn from an interdisciplinary approach to the study of religion, ethnicity and economic performance?
Financer
DFG: Sonstiges
Duration of project
Start date: 03/2015
End date: 05/2015
