PhD thesis defence by Leon Küstermann
Driven by technological change, globalisation, and climate transitions, structural change has benefited people unequally and, thereby, deepened societal and political polarisation in postindustrial societies. This raises the question of how deterministic the outcomes of structural change are. While there is an increasing scholarly interest in the processes that can exacerbate or prevent disadvantageous outcomes, there are also three biases this dissertation seeks to overcome. Concretely, there has been the tendency (1) to differentiate statically between the winners and losers of structural change, (2) to focus on the most visible yet not the most representative outcomes of structural change, and (3) to assume that the main role of institutions is to compensate the 'losers' for losses after they materialise. Against this backdrop, I consider firms as the societal actors that bring structural change most immediately in the lived experiences of their workers. Concretely, I focus on how firms design jobs for workers with occupational risks and maintain their commitment to these workers in periods of restructuring. Thereby, I argue that firms can either broaden the circle of workers who benefit from structural change or trigger the mechanisms that cause resentment and radicalise people politically. This firm perspective also enables a better understanding of which policy interventions affect the outcomes of structural change, namely those that increase the institutional capacity to support firms managing structural change inclusively in their organisations. I test these arguments empirically in three papers, using survey and administrative register data, overcoming the challenge of studying the role of firms empirically. Ultimately, my dissertation demonstrates how firms and the institutions in which they are embedded not just react to structural change but endogenously shape its direction and outcomes. This has important implications for behavioral and institutional debates about structural change in political science as well as in the welfare state literature.
Leon Küstermann is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute (EUI), where he is part of Anton Hemerijck’s WellSIRe team. Before joining the EUI, Leon obtained an MSc in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford. In his PhD project, he examines why structural economic change leads to more divisive social and political outcomes in some contexts than in others. His dissertation focuses on how firms can both exacerbate and mitigate workers’ sense of threat in the face of structural transformation, and how welfare states can support firms in developing inclusive responses to these changes. In September 2025, Leon joined the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich as an (incoming) postdoctoral researcher, where he continues his research on the political economy of firms and structural change in the 21st century.