Founder and Director UCLA Center for Civil Society
Helmut K. Anheier is an academic currently serving as Dean of the Hertie School of Governance. His research interests include methodological questions of sociological research with different units of analysis, organizational theory and the interaction of globalisation and civil society more broadly. Anheier was educated at the University of Trier in Germany and at Yale, and after completing a PhD in 1986 based on 15 month of field work in West Africa for data gathering. Dr. Anheier worked in the late 1980s as a social affairs officer at the United Nations. His academic career included posts at Rutgers and the London School of Economics, where Anheier held a Centennial Professorship[5] and founded and directed the Centre for Civil Society; he then moved to UCLA where he established the Center for Civil Society. From the year 2000 on he published several articles and encyclopedia entries about the normative dimension of "civil" society as an anlytical concept for sociological investigations and re-introduced the notion of "civility". At UCLA he was from 2001 - 2009 Professor of Public Policy and Social Welfare. Anheier is today chair of Sociology at Heidelberg University and Academic Director of the Center for Social Investment at the same University.
