Biography
Jonas Friedrich is a Great Minds Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St. Gallen. He completed his PhD in Organization and Management in 2025 with a dissertation on “Democratic Organizing for Sustainability Transformation." His doctoral and postdoctoral work examines democratic firms, cooperatives, foundation-owned firms and purpose-driven enterprises as organizational forms that connect workplace empowerment, sustainability and ethics with broader questions of political economy and societal transformation.
His research has been published in journals including Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Theory, and has received recognition, including the EBS Best Paper Award. In his current postdoctoral project, he studies how democratic governance can be scaled in large cooperative firms, with a particular focus on participation, digital governance and sustainable mobility.
At the STG, Jonas Friedrich develops two research projects in dialogue with Prof. Johanna Mair: Democratic Organizing and the (Non-)Reduction of Inequality, and Double Democracy: Organizations as Vehicles of Societal Governance. Together, these projects ask when democratic firms reduce or reproduce inequality, and how cooperative economies can shape democratic infrastructures beyond the boundaries of the firm, market and state. His broader interest lies in understanding how organizations can become vehicles for more democratic, sustainable and equitable economies.