At the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland, researchers from different disciplines and generations convene at St.Gallen Collegium. Fellows pursue their own research and a joint project focusing on a theme related to one of the Grand Challenges of our time. In 2025/2026, the Collegium worked on “Re-Interpreting Freedom”; in 2026/2027 we focus on “Digital Sovereignty.” For the third Collegium year 2027/2028 (September 1, 2027-May 31, 2028), St.Gallen Collegium will award fellowships to scholars whose work addresses the theme: "Performance: The What, How, and Why of Optimization"
About the Theme
The call for “more performance” has returned with force across European business and politics as a reaction to perceived decreasing productivity of many economies. It simultaneously reflects changing values and preferences of their societies as to what, how, and why shall be optimized. Companies announce this openly: Nestlé declares it wants to be more performance-driven; UBS insists that performance must again be at the center. Politics has followed suit. The Schweizerischer Arbeitgeberverband warns of a spreading culture of Lifestyle Freizeit. The German CDU campaigns on Leistung muss sich wieder lohnen — performance must pay. Commentators demand “work instead of woke.” The word does considerable heavy lifting. The concept itself is rarely examined.
Performance, as we use it today, has a relatively recent history. The historian Nina Verheyen has argued that measurable, comparable individual performance took its current shape in the nineteenth century, shaped by the rise of mass schooling, industrial labor, and the welfare state. Earlier traditions tied performance more closely to the work itself — to craft, to care, to standards of excellence carried out within a practice and judged by its own internal norms. The shift towards abstracted, quantified output was not inevitable. It was constructed, and it can be interrogated. Much of what gets called individual performance has irreducibly relational features. Contributions emerge between people, in context, supported by predecessors, colleagues, institutions, and inherited knowledge. Measurement systems do not simply reflect performance — they constitute what counts as performance and render other kinds of contribution invisible. The colleague who unblocks others, the institutional memory carried by long-serving staff, the care work that makes everything else possible: these tend to fall outside what is captured and rewarded. The map is not the territory, but in performance cultures, the map increasingly determines whose work counts.
The language of performance also carries significant moral weight. A meritocratic reading treats outcomes as broadly deserved and shortfalls as broadly personal. Harvard moral philosopher Michael Sandel has argued that this framing generates hubris among those who succeed and humiliation among those who do not — with consequences for social solidarity that extend well beyond the individuals concerned. Whether and how strongly this dynamic operates across different institutional and cultural settings is itself a pressing research question, one that has gained new urgency in recent debates on polarization, resentment, and the fraying of social cohesion.
The performance of an economy is also shaped by forces no individual or firm controls. Demographic change is perhaps the most consequential of these. What does prosperity mean if, by 2050, approximately 30% of the Swiss population is over 65, compared to just 9% in 1950? What does it mean for productivity, innovation, and care if Germany's population begins to shrink and declines by an estimated 13% by mid-century? How can societies harness the potential of longer lives rather than treating extended longevity solely as a fiscal burden? These questions demand that we rethink how and what counts as economic performance — and for whom.
The question of who defines what counts as performance, and who benefits from the categories thereby created, is partly political and philosophical, not only technical. St.Gallen Collegium invites researchers from all fields who are interested in a solution-oriented, interdisciplinary discourse on performance. Possible avenues of research include:
– The history and genealogy of performance: How did measurable, individual performance become the dominant frame for assessing human contribution? How does this relate to our freedom and sovereignty as individuals and as institutions? What was lost and what was gained in that transition? What alternative traditions — of craft, vocation, care, or collective achievement — might inform different approaches today?
– Performance as a legal standard: The law’s measure of capacity and the limits of what can be demanded. Across legal domains, performance is not only observed and rewarded but normatively constructed: the law determines what can reasonably be expected of individuals — and where that expectation must stop. Tax law assesses citizens by their ability to pay (wirtschaftliche Leistungsfähigkeit), choosing proxies — income, wealth, consumption — for a capacity it cannot directly observe; social insurance law mirrors this by defining incapacity and the residual capacity one must still use; employment law fixes a standard of diligent performance owed under contract. How do constitutions and legislatures turn the diffuse idea of performance or potential performance into operable legal measures?
– Measurement and its limits: What do performance metrics actually capture, and what do they systematically miss? How do measurement systems shape behavior, institutions, and the distribution of recognition and reward? How can organizations design evaluation systems that are both rigorous and honest about their limitations? How does the dominating institutional logic influence our conception of performance?
– Relational and collective dimensions of performance: How do individual contributions depend on and emerge from collaborative structures, shared knowledge, social norms, and institutional context? How can organizations, firms, and states better recognize and sustain the forms of work that enable others to perform?
– Performance, merit, and social cohesion: How does meritocratic ideology shape attitudes towards inequality, solidarity, and belonging? What are the psychological and political consequences of cultures that attribute success and failure primarily to individual effort? How do these dynamics differ across class, gender, migration background, and generation?
– Demographic change and the future of performance: How should economies, welfare states, and organizations adapt their performance frameworks in the face of ageing populations and shifting dependency ratios? What does it mean to harness the productive potential of longer working lives — and what forms of contribution risk being undervalued in the process?
– Performance in politics and public life: How has performance rhetoric shaped contemporary political culture? What are the effects of applying private-sector performance logics to public institutions, welfare provision, and democratic governance?
We are particularly interested in projects that interrogate the interplay between the historical and the contemporary, the individual and the structural, and the normative and the empirical — and that bring genuine disciplinary depth to bear on questions with broad societal relevance. We are looking for innovative solutions to the challenges associated with today’s performance-oriented mindset.
