Credit: Michael Kappes
Marcel Kappes is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Economics and Social Sciences (GESS) at the University of Mannheim and a research assistant at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) in the project “Immigrants' Career Changes in German Organizations.” He obtained a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Sociology from the University of Mannheim and spent a semester abroad at Linköping University, Sweden. During his studies, he worked as a student assistant in several projects at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and in the MZES project “Religion, Religiosity, and the Social-Emotional Integration of Muslim Youth.”
Marcel's research interests include social movements, organizational sociology, sociology of culture, and sociological theory. In his master thesis, he used the Dynamic of Collective Action data set to examine whether the willingness and ability of social movement organizations to switch their protest issues increase their ability to form coalitions with each other.
His current dissertation investigates what motivations social movement organizations have to change their identity, what the outcomes of these identity changes are, and what social movement organizations do to keep their authenticity in these processes.