Niilo Kauppi

Fellowship 2014

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A political sociologist, Niilo Kauppi is research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He teaches at Sciences Po Strasbourg and the universities of Lausanne and Luxembourg. Kauppi is a former President of the Finnish Political Science Association and vice-chair of ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research), and president of the jury of its Mattei Dogan Prize in Political Sociology. With David Swartz (Boston University), he is convenor of the ECPR Standing Group in Political Sociology. Kauppi is the author and editor of 11 books and over 70 articles in political sociology, European politics, social theory and intellectual history. His current research interests include higher education policies and knowledge governance. Recent publications are ‘Knowledge Warfare: Social Scientists as Operators of Global Governance’, International Political Sociology (8/3/2014), A Political Sociology of Transnational Europe (ed.) (ECPR Press, 2013) and Transnational Power Elites: The New Professionals of Governance, Law and Security (ed. with Mikael Rask Madsen) (Routledge, 2013). Kauppi is also a Senior Editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia in Politics.

Globalising Practices in the Governance of Higher Education and Research

USIAS Fellows : Dietmar Braun, Merle Jacob and Niilo Kauppi

It is common knowledge among policymakers that European knowledge societies need to focus their energies on harnessing their investments in the creation of scientific knowledge to promote welfare and enhance economic growth. What is less well understood is that realizing this objective will depend on the production and absorption of knowledge on the governance of higher education and research. Reasoning from this insight, this project is built on the vision of realizing a cross cutting research programme in the governance of higher education and research.  Currently these two areas are studied and administered separately. The project is staffed by three senior researchers with competences in science policy, higher education and research funding.

Our goal is to deepen understanding of how the practices that are intended to govern higher education and research are disseminated within the European Research Area. We propose to do this by investigating the diffusion of governance practices at three sites: science policy brokering; research funding and higher education ranking tables. The empirical and theoretical focus of the research is grounded in the observations arrived at from an earlier pilot study which investigated the role of the European Science Foundation in the dissemination of practices for the governance of research among European countries.