Dietmar Braun
Dietmar Braun is Professor of Comparative Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques et Internationales of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) since 1996. Prior to coming to Lausanne he was research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Societal Studies in Cologne, Germany and Assistant Professor at the Political Science Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. Until 2012 he was active for the Swiss Science Foundation. In 2013 he was Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute. In 2014 he was awarded a Fellowship at the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Studies (USIAS).
He has worked on historical and comparative analysis of research funding organisations, notably introducing principal-agent theory into the discussion of research funding. He has done comparative analysis of the introduction of new public management as a new form of governance in universities, pioneering a debate that still continues until today and introduced a widely used and discussed heuristic scheme of university governance.
More recently Professor Braun has been working on university governance of scientific innovation, dealing specifically with the cognitive dimension of scientific development and the influence of “authority relations” on this development. He studies governance conditions of discipline-building in universities, the role of governance conditions in research systems on scientific migration to new research fields, and contradictions in the management of universities. He has introduced the application of an expected utility model to scientific choice of new cognitive fields and is working on political coordination in research policy-making and the European dimension of research funding.
