Patrick Haack, Universität Zürich

About Patrick

Patrick earned a Master’s degree in Politics and Management from the University ofConstance (Germany), having also studied in Spain (University of Granada) and Canada (York University). Since October 2008 Patrick is a doctoral candidate at the faculty of economics, University of Zurich (Switzerland). He worked at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH in Eschborn, Germany and has been employed at the policy consultancy  Burson-Marsteller in Berlin, where he was in charge of CSR projects for various clients. Furthermore, Patrick has gained practical expertise in the corporate communications department at the EADS head  office in Munich, Germany.

PhD project

Arguing Away the Legitimacy Deficit in Global Governance?

Public Deliberation and the Politicization of the Firm

This Ph.D. project analyses the legitimacy build-up of corporate engagement in global governance. Taking as a starting point the proposition that legitimacy needs to be understood as a socially constructed concept, the central issue of the project resolves around the question what corporate legitimacy actually is, and how to gain and maintain it in a transnational context. It advances the notion that corporations gain legitimacy by actively participating in public discourses vis-à-vis civil society, therefore shifting away the perspective from legitimacy as an attribute of social order to the communicative mechanisms and processes of legitimation. Taking the UN Global Compact as an illustration of how corporations become involved in political activities on a global level, the project offers a psychological microfoundation of legitimation which links specific dynamics at the individual level to phenomena at the organizational level (i.e. the politicization of the firm) and the societal level (i.e. the emergence of a CSR-infrastructure beyond the nation state).

Supervisors

 Prof. Dr. Andreas Georg Scherer

Publications and conferences

Publications

Talking Intervention: Foreign Policy Frames and their Conditional Impact on Individual Attitudes, VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken, 2008

Conferences

Paper Presentation at the 5th ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research) General Conference, Potsdam (Germany), September 10-12, 2009. Author of the paper: “Arguing Away the Legitimacy Gap in Global Governance? The Case of the UN Global Compact”. Co-author: Prof. Dr. Andreas Georg Scherer

Paper Presentation at the 25th EGOS Colloquium 2009, Barcelona (Spain), July 2-4, 2009. Author of the paper “Analyzing the Constitutive Conditions of a Self-energizing Effect of CSR Standards: An Explorative Case Study on the ‘Equator Principles’”. Co-authors: Dr. Dennis Schöneborn, Christopher Wickert.

Paper Presentation at the 25th EGOS Colloquium 2009, Barcelona (Spain), July 2-4, 2009. Co-author of the paper “How Terrorist Organizations Transcend their Inherent Improbability: A Communication Perspective on the Organizational Dimension of Terrorism”. Main author: Dr. Dennis Schöneborn.

Presentation at the Doctoral Consortium of the Reputation Institute’s 13th International Conference on Corporate Reputation, Brand, Identity and Competitiveness in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), 28 May 2009. Author of the paper: The Communicative Construction of Corporate Legitimacy: The Case of the UN Global Compact.

Presentation PhD-Workshop at the DNWE (Deutsches Netzwerk Wirtschaftsethik) Annual Meeting, Bonn (Germany), April 24-25, 2009.

Presentation at the 20th Annual Conference of the German Peace Psychology Association at the University of Konstanz, June 15-17, 2007.

Contact

patrick.haack [at] doctoral-academy [dot] net