Leoni Kotwan

Civil Organizations | Organizational Crime | Evidence-based Compliance | Careers | Sustainable Knowledge Transfer

Leoni Kotwan is a research assistant and PhD candidate at the Max Weber Institute for Sociology at Heidelberg University.

Overall her research and teaching are situated in organizational sociology, with a particular emphasis on the third sector. Her preferred research and survey methods are comparative or contrasting case studies and organisational analyses. She generally pursues mixed-method approaches, combining knowledge-oriented and empirically guided qualitative and quantitative methods and evidence-based procedures.

As part of her dissertation, she examines and researches her core topic in organisational sociology, namely how formal organisational structures and underlying organisational cultural values promote rule-breaking behaviour (in the form of organisational crime) and inhibit compliance measures (as a form of collective omission) in civil aid organisations.

Another focus of her academic work is organisational and field-specific comparison, in which she examines not only organisational research but also sociological dynamics of change in the labour market, careers and professional fields.

In addition, as part of the FI TCH university research project ‘Transforming Cultural Heritage in 3D’ (TCH3D), she is dedicated to the socially sustainable transfer of cultural knowledge in various organisational educational contexts.