January 22, 2004

Thelen receives Planck Research Award

Kathleen Thelen, associate professor of political science, has received the Max Planck Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences.

The award, financed by the Ministry for Education and Research in Germany, is presented by the Max Planck Society in cooperation with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. It is awarded to researchers from Germany and abroad for outstanding, internationally recognized achievements in science and the humanities.

The $150,000 award is intended to facilitate scholarly research and international cooperation. Award winners enjoy intensive and long-term cooperative relationships with their partners in other countries.

Thelen’s comparative research focuses on the political economies of the advanced industrial nations. One major strand addresses the impact of globalization on contemporary labor politics and industrial relations institutions in the developed democracies. Thelen’s work has shown that conventional wisdom that high unemployment and capital mobility undermine labor power even in traditionally strong labor countries such as Germany and Sweden fails to capture the most important trends of the last decade. Instead, she finds much greater resiliency in bargaining institutions than many contemporary globalization theories suggest.

Another strand of research examines the origins and evolution of cross-national differences in skill formation and vocational education and training. Her latest book, entitled “How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan,” is forthcoming in 2004 with Cambridge University Press.

A fellow of the Institute for Policy Research, Thelen has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin (2002-03), the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas in Mexico City, the Society for Comparative Research, the National Science Foundation, the Robert Bosch Foundation, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

She is chair of the national Council for European Studies and serves on the executive boards of the Comparative Politics, European Politics and Society, and Qualitative Methods sections of the American Political Science Association, as well as on the editorial boards of World Politics, Political Science Quarterly, Governance, and Economic and Industrial Democracy (Stockholm).