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Quo vadis employment relationship? : insights from the deployment of algorithmic management in conventional employment settings
No full textDefence date: 11 June 2025Examining Board: Prof. Anton Hemerijck (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Oscar Molina-Romo (Autonomous University of Barcelona, External Supervisor); Prof. Valentina di Stasio (European University Institute) Prof. Martin Krzywdzinsk (WZB Berlin Social Science Center)This dissertation examines the impact of algorithmic management on the employment relationship. It argues that, although algorithmic management is often presented as a tool for enhancing efficiency and fairness, it has the potential to exacerbate existing power imbalances and undermine workers' rights. The dissertation comprises five empirical studies, structured as publishable articles, that provide evidence supporting these claims. These articles draw on two large-scale European surveys and qualitative case studies of various companies employing algorithms to manage operations and labour. To offer a comprehensive view of the ongoing transformation, the dissertation incorporates perspectives from both workers and managers. The findings suggest that algorithmic management can lead to several adverse outcomes for workers, including increased job insecurity and turnover, diminished autonomy and control, heightened surveillance and monitoring, reduced trust in management, limited opportunities for worker participation and voice, and, in some cases, detrimental effects on occupational health. The dissertation concludes that, while algorithmic management may not necessarily result rely on automated managerial processes, it can still exacerbate the already asymmetrical power dynamics within the employment relationship. This imbalance may provoke resistance or, due to the historical trajectory of the employment relationship, lead to resentful compliance, fostering a new form of employers’ hegemony that contributes to greater inequality. Concluding, policymakers are urged to strengthen regulatory frameworks that empower workers to mitigate the negative impacts of algorithmic management. It is argued that the success of such initiative will depend upon a generalised reinforcement of workers’ rights and participation in decision-making processes as well as on practical measures to ensure the enhancement of their capacity to take part in such processes
Making sense of techno-society : essays on digitalised social relations and their impact on social cohesion
No full textDefence date: 30 June 2025Examining Board: Prof. Arnout van de Rijt (European University Institute); Prof. Klarita Gërxhani (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam); Prof. Stephen Benard (Indiana University Bloomington); Prof. Beate Völker (Netherland’s Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement; Utrecht University)Digitalisation, while offering new opportunities for connectivity, also introduces new challenges and unintended consequences for social relationships. My thesis broadly investigates the following question: How does the digitalisation of social relations affect social cohesion? I draw on Durkheim’s definition of social cohesion, which emphasises the presence of strong social bonds and the absence of latent conflicts along the salient social categories. In the first chapter, I examine how the predominant shift to online interaction during the pandemic affected social networks and loneliness during and after the pandemic. It uses longitudinal data with a nationally representative sample. In the second chapter, I investigate whether gender status bias observed in in-person settings carries over to video conferencing by conducting laboratory and online experiments. In the third chapter, I explore individuals’ experiences and narratives regarding the use of video conferencing. Drawing on 21 semi-structured interviews, I examine how individuals experience different features of video conferencing in relation to gender differences in interpersonal behaviours. The findings from the first and second chapters suggest that the digitalisation of social relations may have adverse effects on social cohesion. Increased reliance on online interaction without sufficient offline interaction may undermine weak ties, potentially hindering interconnectedness across social groups and increase loneliness (Chapter 1). Additionally, gender status bias may persist in video conferencing, reflecting underlying social divisions within digital spaces (Chapter 2). The third chapter, however, found that gender status bias might not necessarily translate into gender differences in interpersonal behaviours in video conferencing, which may promote gender equity. Overall, this thesis highlights both the opportunities and challenges that the digital transformation of social relations poses to social cohesion
Tenure inequalities : the ubiquitous crisis of housing financialization
No full textDefence date: 09 June 2025Examining Board: Prof. Anton Hemerijck (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Waltraud Schelkle (European University Institute); Prof. Herman Mark Schwartz (University of Virginia); Prof. Ive Marx (Universiteit Antwerpen)This thesis studies the transformations of housing provision as a result of housing financialization in advanced economies and the consequences of these transformations on welfare and inequalities. Therein, I argue that governments have largely disinvested the promotion of affordable housing and have promoted homeownership through mortgage credit instead. This change has led to a process of housing financialization, whereby mortgage credit gained a systematic macroeconomic weight and whereby house prices soared. I argue, through comparative sequence analysis, that housing financialization has significantly increased economic inequalities. By sustaining strong risesin price-toincome ratios of housing property, housing financialization has led to a process of stratification between households deemed creditworthy and others, even in the most equal countries. Meanwhile, declining political support for the provision of affordable rental supply, rising price-to-rent ratios and rising demand for rental supply have led to worsening conditions for renters, albeit less severely in countries that significantly decommodify rental markets. I use the concept of tenure inequalities to capture the combined processes of social stratification by tenure – whereby richer households increasingly become homeowners and low- and middle-income households increasingly remain renters – and the rising disadvantages of renters compared to homeowners. As a result of tenure inequalities, young individuals, excluded from the protected sections of rental markets as outsiders increasingly rely on parental resources to secure stable and affordable housing, reflecting growing familialization even in traditionally defamilialized countries. Finally, housing financialization, far from incentivizing redistribution to offset increased market inequalities and strengthening human capital, sustains strong anti-redistributive coalitions amongst homeowners, whilst strengthening territorial cleavages.Chapter 3 'An exploratory case for causal explanations: Belgium ' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'Belgium’s successful ride on the elephant? : the diverging effects of high homeownership rates on inequalities' (2023) in the journal 'Housing, theory and society'
Youth political representation in Latvia and Estonia : from electoral entry to parliamentary action
No full textDefence date: 08 September 2025Examining Board: Prof. Simon Hix (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Aksel Sundström (University of Gothenburg, External Supervisor); Prof. Filip Kostelka (European University Institute); Prof. Jānis Ikstens (University of Latvia)This dissertation investigates why young people remain underrepresented in parliaments and what happens once they are elected. Within the broader study of political representation, it examines three dimensions of youth representation: electoral prospects, career trajectories, and contributions to parlia mentary discourse. The analysis focuses on Latvia and Estonia - two underresearched post-transition democracies. The first article explores nomination practices in Latvia, asking how candidates’ preference vote earning capacity influences renomination and list placement in an OLPR system, and how age moderates these effects. Drawing on original data from three parliamentary elections (2014-–2022), the findings show that parties often relegate young candidates to ornamental positions, creating a “double whammy” of poor list placement and fewer preference votes. Yet OLPR also provides opportunities: for younger candidates, strong personal vote performance matters more than for their older peers, sending unexpected signals to party elites and improving advancement prospects. The second article shifts to post-entry careers. Examining 175 MPs aged 40 and under who en tered Latvia’s parliament between 1993 and 2014, sequence and clustering analyses reveal four typical trajectories: Parliament Anchors, Career Climbers, Local Shifters, and Political Exiters. Multinomial regression results show that ascriptive characteristics, party affiliation, and temporal context shape career outcomes. Broader trends - such as early system fluidity, subsequent stabilization, and recent volatility - also influence the sustainability of parliamentary careers. The third article turns to substantive representation in Estonia. Using floor speeches from 2011-–2023 classified into 56 policy topics with the manifestoberta XLM-RoBERTa model, it examines whether young MPs diversify debates. Results reveal modest but meaningful differences: younger MPs focus more on democracy and supply-side economic policies, and greater youth presence is associated with a more balanced topic coverage. Taken together, the dissertation shows that youth are not merely marginalized “list fillers.” They can leverage institutional openings, pursue varied careers, and broaden legislative debate. While young MPs alone do not reshape democratic institutions, the evidence suggests that newer, post-transition democracies may be more open to youth inclusion compared to established democracies that have received more scholarly attention
Our own devices : recovering human agency through the right to repair
No full textDefence date: 18 November 2025
Examining Board: Prof. Peter F. Drahos (European University Institute); Prof. Nicolas Petitt (European University Institute); Prof. Joshua A.T. Fairfield (Washington & Lee University School of Law); Dr. Lachlan D. Urquhart (Senior Lecturer, University of Edinburgh Law School)This thesis investigates the emerging Right to Repair as a legal and political response to the increasing enclosure of digital and software-dependent technologies. It develops a normative framework grounded in the concept of human agency, drawing upon a range of philosophers and theorists. Repair is framed beyond a practical intervention and means to certain ends (extended product lifespan, reduced costs, increased competition) and including epistemic and political dimensions (as an end in itself). The politics of repair challenges and resists what the thesis defines as technological servitude. This is a condition in which material objects are transformed into services, and user autonomy is subordinated to centralised control by device manufacturers through a combination of software dependency, Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity, contractual restrictions, and technological protection measures (TPMs). Through comparative analysis of legal and policy developments in jurisdictions including the European Union, United States, and Canada, the thesis explores how the Right to Repair is being articulated across legal, economic, and technological domains. Following an introduction to the Right to Repair, it is structured in three parts: the first theorises the concept of human agency in relation to property objects and tangible engagement with devices; the second examines the structures and histories that have enabled and created the conditions for technological servitude; the third maps the contours of the Right to Repair as it is emerging in law and practice, proposing pathways for reclaiming agency through legal reform and collective resistance. The thesis is further grounded in many practical examples from various domains, including agricultural equipment, medical devices, the automotive industry, and consumer electronics. These insights are based (in part) on the author’s observations as a Right to Repair advocate involved in policy discussions in Canada, the United States, and Europe over the past seven years. These case studies and examples expose the systemic barriers to repair in diverse sectors and contexts, illustrating the stakes of repair as a mode of restoring functional human agency and democratic participation in a contemporary life.Chapter 5 'A history of technological protection' and Chapter 6 'Anti-circumvention law' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as a technical report 'Technological protection measures and the law: impacts on research, education & preservation' (2024) under the project Knowledge Rights 21.
Chapter 10 'Destandarisation of property' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'Technologies of servitude: understanding firmware TPMs as interests in personal property' (2022) in the journal 'Canadian journal of law and technology'
Innovation and insolvency : the treatment of IP licenses in restructuring procedures
No full textDefence date: 17 November 2025
Examining Board: Prof. Mathias Siems (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Rafael Arenas García (Autonomous University of Barcelona); Prof. Peter Drahos (European University Institute); Prof. Martin Gelter (Fordham University)Additional material (two annexes/datasets) of the thesis are available upon request via email to the author [email protected] and insolvency literature has so far predominantly examined access to capital, scrutinising whether national insolvency frameworks favour debtors or creditors and how this dynamic influences innovative activity. While debtor-friendly regimes are often praised for providing a ‘fresh start’ for insolvent entrepreneurs (thereby lowering the costs of financial failure and encouraging high-risk, high-reward ventures), much of the research has concentrated on debtor protections and the general body of creditors’ recovery, neglecting the importance of individual non-insolvent third parties, such as licensees, for innovation. In this regard, national insolvency frameworks rarely address intellectual property (‘IP’) licenses and typically default to general executory contract rules per inertia, with only a few jurisdictions adopting specific legislation on their treatment. The present work seeks to address this gap, arguing that, in today’s knowledge-based economy, maintaining ongoing access to knowledge (licensed IP rights) can be as crucial as securing the initial capital for innovation. Many actors depend on the continued availability of licensed rights as a fundamental component of their business models; yet, their interests are frequently neglected in favour of financial restructuring and fresh-start policies. Moreover, the global proliferation of IP licensing, combined with complex interdependencies, exacerbates the regulatory gap, potentially stifling innovation and prompting questions as to whether special insolvency legislation is necessary. Employing a comparative law and economics perspective grounded in new institutional economics, this study examines how different national restructuring regimes influence economic outcomes, shape parties’ strategic behaviours, and might impact innovation ecosystems. It identifies the strategic hold-ups and moral hazards’ issues arising ex-ante and ex-post, emphasising the limitations inherent in private ordering unless substantial and often impractical investment safeguards are made. The research concludes that regulatory inertia poses significant risks to innovation and acknowledges the lack of an optimal national legislative model. In parallel, the findings suggest that those jurisdictions with special provisions governing termination are better equipped to mitigate the most critical risks. On the basis of these conclusions, and given the renewed interest in the insolvency harmonisation project, the thesis proposes EU-targeted policy recommendations along those lines.Chapter 2 'International IP licensing : role, legal nature and insolvency implications' and Chapter 6 'Thesis conclusions' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'Mirroring the American bankruptcy code? : IP licences in the European insolvency harmonisation project' (2024) in the journal 'GRUR international
Cultural (in)commensurability between Catholic Europe and Japan in the early modern period, c.1582-c.1614 : the buke community, Jesuits, and the Tenshō Embassy
No full textDefence date: 23 June 2025Examining Board: Prof. Giancarlo Casale (European University Institute); Prof. Angelo Cattaneo (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche; Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea); Prof. Kiri Paramore (University College Cork); Prof. Lucy Riall (European University Institute)The Jesuit Mission in Japan (1549-1639) and the so-called Tenshō Embassy (1582-1590) – the first (Catholic) European-Japanese direct encounters in history – have been written conventionally and predominantly from European and/or missionary perspectives, based largely on Jesuit sources. Such an approach has prevailed despite the clear cross-cultural nature of the encounters. This thesis offers a view from a Japanese standpoint, examining the question of cultural (in)commensurability through the Embassy and in the buke (warlord class)-Jesuit negotiation that resulted from 1614 in the Tokugawa shogunate’s expulsion of Jesuits and other (Catholic) Europeans from the country. The thesis discusses 1) the agency of the adolescent “legates” while in Italy in 1585, 2) their behavioural context through the buke’s traditional code in Japan, 3) the Jesuits’ “understanding” of the buke’s political ethics behind their missionary practices, 4) the fermentation of distrust in the Jesuits among the buke community from the 1600s, and 5) ethos and pathos that constituted the fabric of the buke-ruled society. Overall, the thesis proposes the view that a certain habitus – a teleological(-theological) manner of perception, reasoning, and action – rendered the Jesuits (and the Embassy’s hosts generally) incapable of acknowledging Japanese alterity per se and of building a good rapport with buke rulers. The buke community’s political-cultural forces, which were organically grounded on historical events and practices but were interpreted by the Jesuits rather superficially and wilfully, proved to be vital in the way the buke-Jesuit negotiation unfolded. Methodologically, the thesis offers a case study that demonstrates how the Jesuits constructed a unilateral knowledge – what may be called positive ignorance – of the Other in Japan for Europe and subsequent historiography. Filling the lacunae by complementing the Jesuits’ history with various buke members’, the thesis underscores the significance of the cultural (in)commensurability however much impalpable it may have been in history and historiography.Chapter 2 'Contextualising the “good manners” of the legates' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'Japanese context of the ‘good manners’ of the legates of the Tensho embassy in Italy (1585) : the Buke Kojitsu, the Ise, and Kyūshū' (2023) in the journal 'Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale'
Militant trajectories of Turkish female jihadis : mobilization, logistics, and the role of women-only spaces in jihadi struggle
No full textDefence date: 28 August 2025Examining Board: Prof. Olivier Roy (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Agnès Favier (European University Institute); Prof Bayram Balcı (Sciences Po Paris; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Prof. Thomas Hegghammer (All Souls College: University of Oxford)This dissertation traces the militant trajectories of Turkish jihadi women. It looks at their lives before, during, and after the territorial collapse of the Islamic State (IS). I argue that women’s participation was a continuation of preexisting networks – cultivated in women-only spaces and extending from earlier militant Islamist traditions, including those in the Afghan and Chechen jihad. By recentering Turkey as one of the pivotal yet neglected nodes in the global jihadi ecosystem, I offer a corrective to Arabocentric academic literature. I ask three interrelated questions: In what ways has Turkish women’s participation in IS built on pre-existing militant Islamist traditions? In which ways did women participate in and shape everyday militant life within IS? What role do women-only spaces play in shaping women’s pathways to global jihad? Based on a unique dataset of over 150 Turkish female cases, this study draws on a triangulated methodology: multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork (interviews, focus groups, participant observation), digital ethnography (social media content, martyrdom announcements, online biographies), and thematic analysis of over 2,000 pages of Turkish-language court files and militant Islamist publications. This layered approach allows an in-depth understanding of how Turkish women joined IS not as ideological novices, but agents who actively shaped the dynamic of jihadi policy-making with Turkish-speaking circles. The dissertation is structured around the themes of historical continuity, mobilization pathways, gender-segregated spaces, and post-IS trajectories. Drawing on Joan Scott’s concept of gender as a constitutive category of power, I explore how religious symbols, institutional arrangements, normative codes, and subjective identity converged to shape female jihadism as we know of today. By foregrounding women as militants, this study shows how the gendered infrastructures sustain armed ideological projects
Towards a new definition of rurality : rural agrarianism, attitudes, and voting behaviour in Spain
No full textDefence date: 06 June 2025Examining Board: Prof. Ellen M. Immergut (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof Elias Dinas (European University Institute); Prof. Ruth Dassonneville (Université de Montréal); Prof Pedro Riera Sagrera (University Carlos III of Madrid)This dissertation examines the political attitudes and voting behaviour of rural populations in Spain, focusing on the growing support for far-right and mainstream right-wing parties. While challenging conventional views on the rural-urban divide, it introduces a more refined typology that distinguishes between ”Rural Agrarian” and ”Rural Industrial” contexts. By adopting this perspective, the three papers and the theoretical chapter aim to move beyond the simplistic rural-urban binary, exploring how local economic structures and cultural distinctions shape political preferences, how these preferences are transferred across generations, and how they create political and outgroup resentment. The research employs both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to investigate these dynamics. Drawing on recent and historical electoral data, political manifestos, and two survey experiments, this thesis explores how far-right parties engage with rural voters and how rural concerns are represented descriptively and substantively. Spain offers a compelling case study, given its history of industrialisation, rural depopulation, and the resulting diversity of rural landscapes, which serve as a microcosm for broader trends across Western Europe
Non-performing loans at the intersection of EU prudential regulation and consumer protection : unpacking the tension
No full textDefence date: 28 April 2025Examining Board: Prof. Mathias Siems (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Joanne Scott (European University Institute); Prof. Noah Vardi (Università degli studi Roma Tre); Prof. Olha Cherednychenko (University of Groningen)Non-performing loans (NPLs) are private loans not being serviced according to the contractual agreement between borrowers and financial institutions. Following the 2008 financial crisis, NPLs have become a significant concern for EU prudential regulation. Conversely, consumer protection law, aimed to protect the weaker party, is primarily invoked to the extent that it is instrumental in achieving the objectives of prudential regulation. This EU approach fails to address the tension between prudential policy and consumer protection. Against this background, this thesis unpacks the tension, exploring how prudential policy interacts with consumer protection laws and how this tension affects consumer protection in five European jurisdictions characterised by high levels of household indebtedness: Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. It does so with a multi-method approach to capture the interdisciplinary nature of NPLs, which significantly overlaps legal, economic and political research. Notably, it utilises process tracing tools, qualitative content analysis, descriptive statistics, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. The thesis begins by identifying NPLs as a regime complex, using existing theories on the interaction between fragmented supranational laws, different legal instruments, and the relationship between the supranational and national levels. It then borrows the analytical framework on cross-policy interaction introduced by Underdal in the context of international environmental law to unpack the tension between prudential regulation and consumer protection at three levels: the ‘outputs’, the ‘outcome’, and the ‘impact’. The prudential policy’s ‘output’ effect is observed at the EU level in the process, leading to the introduction of pre-emptive measures in the Mortgage Credit Directive and the Consumer Credit Directive to avoid accumulating new NPLs. It is also observed in the EU’s approach to personal insolvency within the context of EU economic governance, which prioritises debt recovery over a fresh start. The prudential policy’s ‘outcome’ effect is observed by analysing the CJEU’s judges’ behaviour. CJEU’s judges, in their reasoning, navigate between two positions: on one hand, they adopt a fragmented approach that leads to consumer-friendly rulings, while on the other hand, they recognise prudential concerns as a valid reason for restricting consumer protection. Finally, the prudential policy’s ‘impact’ is traced to the (in)effectiveness of consumer protection in Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain by analysing the outcomes of non-final courts, alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, and the imposition of fines by prudential regulators. This thesis uncovers that when faced with strong pressure from the ECB, firm EU prudential public policy, and the push to implement more effective debt recovery laws, national enforcers consistently favour financial institutions in consumer law cases related to non-performing loans. This thesis reveals that the complex and often distorted relationship between prudential regulation and consumer protection, along with the lack of a governing principle to guide their interaction, creates a structural bias that prioritises the survival of the financial system. This aligns with Pistor’s Legal Theory of Finance. Finally, the thesis discusses the broader implications of the findings. It explores a framework solution to actively manage the conflict between prudential regulation and consumer protection. The current approach supports a relationship between the two, but only if it benefits prudential regulation. However, prioritising prudential regulation alone compromises both consumer law and financial regulation. This thesis, therefore, suggests policy integration as a possible solution beyond coordination and coherence