Mark Hay and Joep Hofhuis awarded NWO Open Competition SSH-XS funding

Since the war in Ukraine, the question of financing war and reconstruction has returned to the forefront of academic inquiry. Mark has developed an innovative methodology to studying resource extraction for war at a watershed moment in the history of war, the Napoleonic age, which ushered in the era of total war. Through testing this new methodology to the case study of Prussia, 1806-1814, not only will he critically engage with historiographical debates on the durability and decline of the Napoleonic order in Europe, but he will also be able to add historical depth to current day debates. The project by Mark is called “Reconceptualising Napoleonic resource extraction for war: Prussia, 1806-1814, and the provincialization of France”.

‘Colourwashing’ is the practice of communicating positive diversity related messages with the goal to increase an organisation’s reputation, without a relation to actual or intended diversity activities. Colourwashing increases public scepticism towards diversity communication, and harms existing efforts to increase workplace inclusion. Joep will use machine learning algorithms in his project “From colourwashing to diversity champion: Using machine learning to examine the relationship between organisational diversity communication and diversity outcomes”. With this, he will generate datasets on the prevalence of diversity communication in social media posts and annual reports of multinational organisations and compare them to actual diversity outcomes. This will provide new knowledge on the how and why of colourwashing in organisational communication, and how to reduce it in the future.