Philipp Degens is Interim Professor of Sociology (Dynamics and Regulation of Economy and Society) at the Department of Socioeconomics at the University of Hamburg in Germany. His academic expertise includes cooperatives, civil society and the third sector as well as the debates and options for societal transformation and sustainability.
Philipp is currently working on two projects that combine perspectives from economic, organizational and legal sociology: First, he analyses community-supported agriculture as a specific form of economic democracy, exploring how secondary organizations aim to strengthen the movement and promote individual CSA schemes. Second, he examines different approaches to reconfiguring the institution of property to promote sustainability. For example, he analyses cooperative forms of land tenure and he explores how the discourse on rights of nature irritates conventional notions of ownership and private property.
Philipp is a board member of the “Sociology of Law” section of the German Sociological Association and has been a research associate at the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Futures of Sustainability: Modernization, Transformation, Control“.