Sebastian Diessner, assistant professor at the Institute of Public Administration, has won a grant from the Leverhulme Fund together with three researchers from the United Kingdom. The grant, worth 350,000 euros, is for the research project: 'The Political Economy of Knowledge-Based Growth.'
Diessner and fellow researchers David Hope (King's College London), Hanna Kleider (King's College London) and Niccolo Durazzi (University of Edinburgh) analyse the knowledge economy. Diessner: 'Since the end of the twentieth century, we have seen a clear shift from large-scale production to services. We have also seen the emergence of mass systems of higher education. Labour relations have become more liberalised and information and communication technologies have taken a central role in companies' production strategies. The research project aims to understand and compare these trends within capitalist democracies.'
Research project in three parts
The research consists of three parts dealing with the definition and measurement of the knowledge economy (work package 1), the policy assumptions of the knowledge economy (work package 2) and the political consequences of the knowledge economy (work package 3). The project runs from October 2022 to September 2024.
With the money from the fund, Diessner's team will hire two postdocs and carry out survey experiments. He himself is one of the principal investigators of the project. 'My main responsibility will be in work package 2, which investigates the policy foundations of the knowledge economy in the areas of higher education policy, labour market policy, innovation policy and work-family policy in different capitalist democracies.'
