The Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft is funding UpdateSocial as a scientific project (The Future We Want!).

Initiated by the Sustainable Transformation Management Lab and Volkshilfe Upper Austria, "The Future We Want" aims to create new solutions and address the countless social challenges society faces. As the challenges become increasingly complex, we urgently call for greater collaboration and a stronger dialog across individual sectors. UpdateSocial intends to support the social innovation ecosystem in Upper Austria and build a stronger community that is ready to embrace transformation. People in all areas of our society have either already come up with an idea to tackle a particular challenge, or are looking to create new solutions. As such, the initiative will serve as a cornerstone for a growing organic movement to drive the digital and sustainable transformation in the social services sector forward, particularly in areas including providing home care to aging relatives, an inclusive society, and social climate protection. The goal is to pool civil society's abundance of ideas with charitable organizations, the private sector, and public administration and get all of these sectors to work together and create an innovative momentum that includes everyone. The most important foundation is to form alliances in order to continue working on feasible solutions based on these alliances. Potential ideas will receive support and be scaled up. The project's main focus in 2023 involved the Ideas Workshop (April 2023) and a support program spanning several months. Following the project's success and using other formats, the program is set to continue in 2024 and thereafter.

See: https://updatesocial.org/, opens an external URL in a new window to learn more.

The study will analyze the economic requirements and impact of mobility transition within the Austrian rail sector and automotive supply industries, focusing particularly on employment effects resulting from this transition. By combining expert interviews and economic input-output analyses, we will examine how existing strengths in the Austrian transportation industry can be expanded on and made more sustainable in order to meet mobility transition challenges, while also creating employment.
The study's findings will contribute to the debate regarding how to structure a future-oriented and sustainable mobility strategy in Austria.

Project Information

Funded by the Vienna Chamber of Labour, opens an external URL in a new window, the project is a joint initiative between the ICAE and LIFT_C.

Project Management

Stephan Pühringer
Lukas Cserjan
Anna Hornykewycz

Project Team

Matthias Aistleitner
Laura Porak
Julia Eder
Marlene Sommer 

Project Duration

2024-2025

In the face of escalating multiple crisis phenomena, i.e. the interplay of social, economic, political and ecological crises, it is no longer a question of whether socio-economic transition (SET) or socio-ecological transformation will take place, but how. Overshooting planetary boundaries, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, or ocean acidification, requires far-reaching changes in production, consumption, and lifestyles. At the same time, however, enormous socioeconomic inequalities and shortfalls in health, education, political participation, and gender equality persist, both nationally and internationally. Thus, on the one hand, the SETER project deals with the preconditions and different scenarios of sustainable socio-economic transition.

On the other hand, the project focuses on the role of the currently prevailing economic thinking (ER) in this process. More specifically, it will examine in detail how mainstream economic thinking, which largely analyzes economic action in isolation from social and environmental implications, is an additional and central obstacle to the necessary profound transformation. The impact of economic thinking will be located and analyzed in the field of knowledge production and transfer, but also in the field of political reform debates and public discourses. In recent years, it has become clear that (i) a narrow understanding of economic rationality, (ii) the unquestionability of economic growth, (iii) the sole focus on competitively organized markets as the superior form of economic interaction, and (iv) the associated primary focus on individual incentive structures significantly limit the possibilities and scenarios of sustainable socio-economic transformation.

Against the background of the absolute necessity of socio-ecological transformation as a central social and economic challenge of the 21st century, the main question is whether this transformation will be structured or disruptive. SETER addresses the interactions and interdependencies between economic thinking and models and practices of socio-ecological transformation from an interdisciplinary perspective and contributes to a better understanding of the obstacles and potentials in this field. Through a series of collaborations with institutions and research networks, different formats and methods will be developed to complement political decision-making processes and public debates with alternative and sustainable economic ways of thinking, based on concrete examples and scenarios.

Project Management

Stephan Pühringer

Project Team

Matthias Aistleitner
Sophie Hieselmayr
Lukas Bäuerle
Anna Hornykewycz
Hendrik Theine
Carlotta Terhorst
Alexander Stäudelmayr