Prof. Dr. Ute Fischer

• Social policy (including unconditional basic income)
• Inequality
• Development of democracy
• media
• social cohesion
• civic engagement
• social transformation
• post-growth
• qualitative research methods

"SoR Paten" - The role of mentors as extracurricular actors within the network

of the network "Schule ohne Rassismus - Schule mit Courage", a study commissioned by the network "Schule ohne Rassismus, Schule mit Courage", together with Dierk Borstel, duration 5/2023-5/2024

Opponents of the coronavirus measures are just one example of how social groups are drifting apart. More and more citizens seem to be losing trust in the state and the media as well as their ties to the community. The project sheds light on the background to this phenomenon, attempts to sound out the danger to social cohesion, understand the criticism of these groups and use it to derive necessary political reforms and develop approaches for a new dialog.

Both as teaching research in the Bachelor's degree course "Social Work" and the Master's degree course "Social Sustainability and Demographic Change" as well as on an ongoing basis in the research workshop, documents from relevant circles are analyzed, e.g. from Querdenken or Reichsbürger.

Sports clubs and coronavirus - stocktaking and conclusions for the district of Unna (collaboration: Sina-Marie Levenig)
The coronavirus pandemic and the protective measures taken have changed the lives of many people. Everyday life was severely restricted, especially during the lockdown phases, and routines that were taken for granted were suspended. This also included sport. Active sports were particularly affected by the closure of sports facilities. Competitions and team games were completely canceled from the end of March 2020 and only resumed in autumn 2020. Training was also prohibited or severely restricted, depending on the sport. But sports clubs are more than just active sport, they are communities where people come together and bond. This club life itself - social gatherings, celebrations and meetings - was also suspended or severely impaired at times.

The consequences can be seen in the changed, mostly lower membership numbers, as well as in the number of trainers, judges and helpers. Sporting performance deficits are still the most obvious change, but social skills and behaviors such as caution and social distancing as a result of the hygiene measures are further consequences.

The KreisSportBund Unna e.V. took this initial situation as an opportunity to conduct a short study from September to December 2022 to investigate the specific situation in the sports clubs in the district of Unna and to derive the need for support from this. The aim of the study was to develop measures from the perspective of the effects of the pandemic in order to provide the clubs with the best possible support.

The investigation consisted of a preliminary study in the form of interviews with municipal and community sports associations and a survey of the 392 sports clubs in the district.

The main result was that the existing problems were exacerbated by corona. These are essentially the recruitment of trainers and securing such basic foundations as the maintenance and renovation of training facilities. In some cases, however, clubs were able to use the crisis to restructure themselves and attract more public attention and members, as well as to strengthen club life.

Acts of violence and attacks with a racist background are often an expression of anti-democratic attitudes, they spread fear not only among the victims concerned and undermine the democratic basis of a society. In the district town of Unna, too, there have been isolated racially motivated attacks on party offices and graffiti on walls in recent years. However, the town did not want to stand idly by and responded to this situation by setting up a round table.

The one-year research project, which is being funded by the University of Applied Sciences as part of internal research funding until October 2012, takes this situation as the starting point for an investigation into the options for action and actual efforts of a specific municipality to strengthen civil society structures. With the help of stakeholder interviews, the existing visible democratic commitment and the less visible political attitudes will be analyzed in order to reveal the city's democratic resources. The analysis of the situation also includes presenting racist acts and actors as well as their networking in terms of their potential danger. On the basis of the data analyses, the municipality can plan its actions in a targeted and independent manner. The project also aims to investigate how special measures and actions are received by the population, whether they are noticed and what effect they have. To this end, passers-by will be interviewed and school diaries interpreted in an accompanying teaching research project in the Bachelor's in-depth module. The results of the research will be used to develop a strategy for the development of a courageous urban culture. The establishment of a municipal solidarity network to strengthen vigilance and responsiveness in threatening situations is to be supported in an advisory capacity. Starting points for interventions will be identified together with responsible actors in the city and selected social work providers. For schools in particular, a curriculum analysis will be used to develop a "civil courage profile line", which will be reflected as a thematic bracket in various subjects throughout the school years and should help to constantly anchor democracy-promoting issues in regular lessons.

The city of Unna serves the overarching question as an empirical example of answers to the question of how a vibrant democratic culture can be promoted, what obstacles need to be overcome and how people who are susceptible to the easy answers of extremist associations and networks can also be won over.

Services now account for the majority of jobs in Germany. In view of the trend towards a service economy, they are considered to have a high degree of innovation potential. Attractive and professional jobs have been created and continue to grow. However, this is offset by a lack of recognition of performance in some occupational fields. Employees in these sectors develop a low self-perception of their professional work. This empirical research project examines the skills and satisfaction of employees, particularly in the care, hairdressing and retail sectors, the quality of services and the appreciation of these services at an individual, company and societal level. New models and concepts of practice-oriented support for these occupational groups are being developed to increase recognition, productivity and innovativeness. The Technical University of Dortmund, the German Police University Münster and gaus GmbH Dortmund are involved in this joint project.

In this empirical research and consulting project, biography-, migration- and gender-specific potentials and obstacles for start-up processes were analyzed and, based on these results, consulting concepts for migrant women were developed and evaluated in accompanying model consultations. The partners in this joint project included the University of Münster, the Technical University of Dortmund, gaus GmbH Dortmund, Unique GmbH Berlin and the Center for Turkish Studies Essen.

One important result was that the stereotypical interpretation of their skills and plans by the advisory institutions proved to be an obstacle to start-ups by migrant women. Furthermore, a tendency towards upward social mobility of Turkish female founders in particular deserves further attention.
Methodologically, the research part of the project consisted of content-analytical procedures, the procedure of sequence analysis from objective hermeneutics for interview evaluation and a discourse-analytical perspective on the advisory institutions and micro-policies. The concept development in the implementation and counseling part of the project was based, among other things, on (psycho-)analytical counseling approaches.

The aim of the project was to investigate current trends in the creation of meaning through work. In addition to the meaningful significance of gainful employment, the interdependence of other fields of practical life - in the family and in relation to the community - was investigated. The results show that the different perceptions of opportunities to prove oneself in the three fields are both the cause of persistent tendencies of social inequalities and the causes of current crisis phenomena with regard to birth rates, employment opportunities and opportunities to gain autonomy in the educational process of the male and female subject. Social incoherences present themselves as a disruption to the system of order as well as causing massive contradictions in individual biographies. As a socio-theoretical approach, this project was able to work out the interweaving of the constitution of the subject with the analysis of social, political and economic crisis situations of the present as well as the cultural patterns of interpretation on which the decisions of action in practice are based.

Methodologically, six case reconstructions were developed using objective hermeneutic sequence analysis from approximately 20 interviews with women and men from two generations. Re-analyses of material and results of biographical and gender research sought to achieve an epistemological gain with regard to the so-called compatibility discussion and the theory of gender-specific division of labor.

Probably the most striking result was the finding in the Ruhr/Saxony regional comparison that it is not the degree of discontinuity in the employment history that determines the interpretation and habitus but, on the contrary, the crisis-solving skills acquired through socialization that determine how discontinuity is dealt with. Regional origin was identified as one of the decisive influencing structures on this habitus.

From approximately ten transcribed interviews with men and women in Saxony, three case descriptions (together with my colleagues Dr. Sascha Liebermann and Caroline Großer) were presented in the research report. These results are also based on the method of sequence analysis.

This empirical project began with the phenomenon of a disproportionate rise in unemployment among women in the new federal states compared to men after German reunification. In addition to an analysis of these differences, the GDR transformation also offered the opportunity to shed light on social development dynamics and underlying mechanisms of structuring social inequality as well as the relationship between the persistence and transformation of routines of action and patterns of interpretation. The interplay of three levels of observation - state regulation, the regional specifics of labour markets and the level of interpretation of female labour market actors - made it possible to crystallize factors that promote and hinder the equal participation of women in qualified professional work. It was shown that gender-related interpretations and actions exhibit a continuity in a historical dimension that goes back far before the existence of the GDR.

Methodologically, the work represents a combination of quantitative labor market analysis and qualitative interview analysis. Using labor market data at a differentiation level of occupational and economic groups, it was possible to draw a precise picture of the status quo of gender-specific segregation (in the two study regions) at the time of the collapse of the GDR up to the study period (1994). The analysis was carried out using the data processing program Excel. The sequence analysis of the transcribed interviews resulted in four case reconstructions from approximately 40 cases, which succinctly show the structures of interpretation in relation to both the historical circumstances and the current crisis.

The regional culture-oriented work sociology project reconstructed biographical dynamics in a Ruhr area city in numerous detailed sequence analyses. The subtle milieu studies show differences in opportunity structures in the shaping of life paths.

At the beginning of the 1990s, teleworking as a form of work increasingly came to the attention of the public, not only on the part of the trade unions. In this short project, headed by Dr. Hans-Jürgen Weißbach, the question of motivation on the part of companies and employees for teleworking and its consequences were examined. A key result of the study is the rejection of a one-sided view of teleworking as a 'coercive instrument' to secure jobs. For the more highly qualified teleworkers in particular, teleworking proved to be a flexible form of work that offers employees a high degree of freedom.

Methodologically, the results were obtained by means of problem-centered expert interviews in content-analytical evaluation.

At the beginning of the 1990s, when a shortage of specialists and managers was already apparent, the Karstadt department store group approached the University of Dortmund with the question of how the female workforce potential could also be tapped for higher company hierarchies. Answers were sought by means of a standardized written survey of female managers and their SPSS-based data evaluation, as well as in interviews with managers at locations throughout Germany and their content-analytical evaluation. Communicative validation and methodological triangulation were the methodological basis for the communication processes in the company, both with the company management and in workshops with female employees. The barriers to promotion identified in this way, especially for female managers, were partially dismantled within the Group following the scientific study.