Principal Investigator at UWH and WP5 lead
Dr Simone Schiller-Merkens is the principal investigator of DEMETRA’s German team and also main coordinator of work package five. She is a Senior Researcher at the Reinhard Mohn Institute of Management (RMI) and member of the International Center for Sustainable and Just Transformation (tra:ce) at Witten/Herdecke University. She received her doctoral degree/PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Cologne, and held senior research positions at the University of Mannheim and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne. She is one of the external scientific partners in a project on economic democracy in the food sector (2024-2028), funded by the Swiss National Foundation and led by Philipp Balsiger (University of Neuchâtel). Her research interests include social transformation of the economy from below, in particular through alternative organizations, prefigurative organizing, economic democracy, social movement activism, and moral market entrepreneurship. She has published in journals such as Organization, Historical Social Research, Scandinavian Journal of Management and International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, co-edited a volume on “The Contested Moralities of Markets” in the book series Research in the Sociology of Organizations (2019), and is one of the co-editors of an upcoming special issue on “Social Movements and Organizing towards (Un)Desirable Futures”, Journal of Management Studies (2027). She is an active member of the EGOS (European Group of Organizational Studies) community, and co-organizes the EGOS Standing Working Group “Social Movements and Organizations” (2021-2026). For further information, please visit: https://www.uni-wh.de/detailseiten/kontakte/simone-schiller-merkens-2711/f0/