"SoKO – International Societal Involvement" Working Group

The name of our working group, “SoKO,” is on the one hand an abbreviation of the German “Soziale und Kulturelle Ordnungen” (“Social and Cultural Orders”). On the other hand, the word refers in the African Bantu languages to a place where people meet and exchange food, such as rice and cassava, and goods to provide for their families. Accordingly, our working group “SoKO” is meant as an interdisciplinary place where theology and the social sciences meet to engage in scholarly exchange. This exchange can serve to enrich our own individual dissertation projects as well as our understanding of the societies and societal issues we are studying.
With the aim of seeing “reality [...] in the light of the great ideas of liberty, equality, reason, and the progressive elimination of suffering and injustice,”1 we investigate the social and cultural orders of various countries. Our main emphasis is on order in the sense described by Walter Eucken, which is focused on people: “Eucken’s central imperative and that of the entire Freiburg School is the call for a ‘humane order.’”2 Several alumni of this university, such as Joseph Höffner, emphasize the constitutive relationship between the system of economic order (taking a more comprehensive view, one might say social orders) and the liberty and dignity of humankind. Since the concept of order in this systematic form is unique to the German-speaking world, we have the opportunity to exchange ideas with experts on this topic on location. In addition, the concept of order affords us a structured overview of economic, social, religious, and political orders, which is important for the research projects of the doctoral candidates participating in this working group. We want to improve our understanding of economic, politial, religious, and social orders and their cultural backgrounds in the countries we are studying and learn from their successes and failures. In doing so, we place special emphasis on interdisciplinary questions of social justice, globalization, and sociopolitical topics in a culturally diverse and increasingly pluralistic society. Our motivation is to make a scholarly contribution to improving situations, to analyze, to engage in theoretical debate, and to work out solutions.
We will meet regularly to discuss the development and current state of our dissertation projects as well as to support each other with feedback and suggestions. In addition, we plan to invite guest lecturers from other universities and research institutions to extend our knowledge on social and cultural topics. Moreover, visits to other institutions will give us the opportunity to observe diverse social, political, and economic issues directly in practice. The aim of all of this is to create an academic network that contributes to efficient academic work.

¹ Münch, Richard (1991): Dialektik der Kommunikationsgesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main, p. 34 (my translation).

² Blümle, Gerold/ Goldschmidt, Nils (2010): Zur Aktualität der Euckenschen Ordnungsethik für eine Erneuerung der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft, in: Vanberg, Viktor j./ Gering, Thomas/ , Tscheulin, Dieter K. (Eds.), Freiburger Schule und die Zukunft der sozialen Marktwirtschaft, Berlin, p. 21, pp. 13–32 (my translation).