Vacancy for a 4-year Postdoctoral Researcher in ‘Housing Markets and Welfare State Transformations’
(FMG, Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies) The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FMG) is the largest educational and research institution in the social sciences in the Netherlands. The Faculty serves 9,000 students in numerous Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes in Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication Science, Psychology, Social Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, and Educational Sciences. Academic staff are employed in education as well as research. There are over 1,200 employees at the Faculty, which resides in a number of buildings in the centre of Amsterdam.
The Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies is one of the largest departments in the FMG. Research and education are carried out by special institutes.
The College of Social Sciences (CSS) and the Graduate School for the Social Sciences
(GSSS) are responsible for the undergraduate and graduate teaching programmes in the social sciences. Research takes place under the aegis of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), a multidisciplinary research institute.
The postdoctoral-project will be carried out at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), Program Group Urban Geographies, and forms part of the European Research Council funded project HOUWEL: Housing Markets and Welfare State Transformations: How Family Housing Property is Reshaping Welfare Regimes HOUWEL: General description
This project will investigate how the growing reliance on housing markets and family
property wealth in meeting welfare and security needs is transforming contemporary welfare states. In recent decades, governments have encouraged home purchase as a means for households to accumulate housing assets, thereby insuring themselves against hardship.
Meanwhile, increasing market values have enhanced perceptions of housing property as a form of social security, especially as traditional forms have faded away. Welfare regimes have thus been undergoing realignment with growing emphasis on the extension of markets and individual responsibility in satisfying needs. This study will break new ground in examining how housing markets and welfare systems interact in different regime contexts, advancing understanding of the ways housing markets and home ownership assume more or less prominent roles in welfare system pathways. This study will be realized through three subprojects focused on six countries:
1) institutional studies and macro statistical comparisons will evaluate how frameworks of social and welfare security shape, and are being shaped by, housing systems;
2) qualitative field studies will assess how families in different housing and welfare regimes perceive, use and exchange housing assets to enhance economic security and welfare capacity;
3) analyses of international panel data will address how households are being affected by shifting welfare and housing market conditions.
Postdoc Project Description:
Subproject One, Regimes & Systems, will examine the interactions of welfare states and housing systems, and explore the broader relations and pathways that constitute different welfare systems and regimes. This is achieved in two ways. First, a quantitative comparison of aggregate data on housing systems as well as employment, demographic and welfare variables at the national and international level will provide a quantitative framework for understanding changing system relationships in each context. Second, a combination of studies that compare the arrangement and development of institutional frameworks will address differentiated progress in deregulation, marketization and privatization and how they have reshaped the features and operation of housing markets and home ownership in social and welfare systems. This examination of institutional constellations will be used to
contextualize other data and develop a more complex model of welfare regime diversity, incorporating housing markets and family housing property as a welfare pillar.
The Postdoc will be part of a larger group working together on the HOUWEL project. There will also be co-operation with members of another team working on a different, but related ERC Starting Grant (HOWCOME: The Interplay Between the Upward Trend in Home- Ownership and Income Inequality in Advanced Welfare Democracies: Interacting Causes and Consequences of Social Inequality in Different Institutional Settings, Principal
Investigator Dr. Caroline Dewilde). This represents a significant concentration of resources dedicated to comparative housing research at the University of Amsterdam, enabling real and significant progress in this domain.
Requirements:
• Completed PhD degree in a related social sciences discipline
• Affinity with quantitative methods and data analysis in the social sciences;
• Strong publication record suited to experience level;
• Interest in interdisciplinary research, specifically in the domain of housing;
• Willingness to present and publish in the English language, and to teach in the field of Geography/Social Sciences (in Dutch and/or English);
• Language competencies in languages other than Dutch or English will be considered an advantage, in particular Italian and German.
The starting date will be September 1st 2012. The full-time appointment is initially for a period of one year; in case of satisfactory performance it will be extended by a maximum of a further three years (i.e. a total of four years). The gross monthly salary will be € 3,195 in the first year (scale 11.0) in the case of a full-time position (38 hrs / week) plus 8% holiday allowance, 8.3% end-of-year allowance, in conformity with the Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities.
Applicants should send their application consisting of the following by email to
b.a.lawa@uva.nl before March 16th 2012: 1) a motivation letter explaining their interest and commitment, 2) a CV 3) two letters of reference, 4) an example of academic written work (i.e.
a published journal article). All correspondence should be in English and by email. Further enquiries concerning the project itself can be obtained from Dr. Richard Ronald, the Principal Investigator of this project (r.ronald@uva.nl). Information on the AISSR can be obtained from www.aissr.uva.nl.
