The nine professorships deal predominantly with questions related to the field of (comparative) cultural sociology from a micro-sociological and macro-sociological perspective, with qualitative and quantitative methods, and as regards the research topics with the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of economy and financial markets, with education, the sociology of work and of labour markets as well as with religious and social movements, law as social practice, questions of conflict, crime and security and processes of community-making. Three of the professors are anthropologists which allows for comparisons between Western and non-western societies.