Academic Profile

BAGSS provides an excellent environment for doctoral research on some of the most crucial social, economic and policy challenges facing open, knowledge-based economies and societies in a globalising world. These include:

• individual, socio-structural and institutional conditions for life-long learning;
• the societal, economic and institutional sources of variability (and inequality) in cognitive development and educational attainment;
• the ability, opportunity and incentives to constantly update knowledge and skills in an increasingly uncertain economic environment and labour market;
• the design of suitable social and political institutions promoting the development of key production factors such as human capital in a globalising economy; and
• democratic political institutions promoting the effective production of collective goods and democratic accountability in complex multi-level systems.

Problems of this nature cross the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines. BAGSS therefore brings together sociologists, psychologists, educational scientists, political scientists, economists, demographers and statisticians from across two faculties of the University of Bamberg (Social Sciences, Economics and Business Administration and Human Sciences and Education).

The School is organised around four Pillars (please click on the links below for more information on each Pillar, including researchers, projects and partners):

• Pillar 1: Education, Personal Development and Learning from Early Childhood to Adulthood;
• Pillar 2: Education and Social Inequality Across the Entire Life Course;
• Pillar 3: Changes in Human Capital, Labour Markets and Demographic Structures and their Impact on Social Inequality in Modern Societies;
• Pillar 4: Governance, Institutional Change and Political Behaviour.