Research

This research examines institutions, governance, and authority in modern industrial and post-industrial societies, with particular attention to moments of crisis, oversight, and legitimacy contestation. It focuses on how organisations confronted with political, legal, or public scrutiny adapt their structures, narratives, and practices in order to preserve credibility and authority. ​A central object of analysis is knowledge-governing organisations – including philanthropic foundations, research bodies, and para-institutional actors – which operate as hybrid formations situated between private economic power and public responsibility. The project approaches these organisations not as static entities, but as historically contingent arrangements whose authority must be continuously negotiated and defended

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Analytical Focus.

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The research investigates legitimation strategies, reputational management, and crisis communication as historically situated practices, reconstructed from archival documentation, correspondence, and institutional self-representation. Rather than treating legitimacy, governance, or authority as fixed attributes, the project analyses how these are produced, contested, and recalibrated under conditions of scrutiny. The perspective is explicitly structural and comparative, situating philanthropy and related forms of private power within broader histories of capitalism, state formation, and social governance, rather than within a narrowly national or exceptionalist frame

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Methodological Approach

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The project adopts an inductive, archive-based research design, proceeding from sustained engagement with primary sources rather than from a priori hypotheses or normative theoretical models. Archival material constitutes the primary site of analysis, with theory mobilised in response to empirical patterns rather than imposed in advance

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Theoretical Toolkits

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Sociological and institutional theories – particularly elite theory, neo-institutionalism, and constructivist political sociology – are employed as analytical toolkits, used selectively to clarify empirical dynamics and refined where required by the material. The project is explicitly empirical in orientation, while remaining conceptually ambitious

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Concept Formation

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Moments of institutional stress – including investigations, scandals, and legitimacy crises – serve as key empirical entry points for analysing longer-term processes of order formation, organisational adaptation, and authority construction. Conceptual contributions are developed from archival findings and tested across cases, rather than treated as abstract or normative frameworks