World Society Foundation

The aim of the World Society Foundation is to support scientific research on world society – its emergence and historical evolution, its structure, its dynamics and its current transformations. Our current sponsoring policy is to promote international conferences on world society topics and to provide grants for research papers to be presented at these conferences in order to sustain a network of scholars interested in transnational and global research topics. 

The Foundation has introduced its World Society Foundation Award for Research Papers on World Society. The WSF Award honors outstanding research papers on world society that address a specific topic announced by the Foundation in its international conference programs. 

The World Society Foundation also publishes the book series World Society Studies (Lit Verlag, Münster, Wien, Zürich). The World Society Foundation is domiciled in Zurich, Switzerland. 

The current members of the Board are: Mark Herkenrath, Hans-Peter Meier, and Christian Suter (President). 

Brief history

The World Society Foundation was established in 1982 by Peter Heintz (University of Zurich, Switzerland) with the purpose to support scientific research on world society and its transformation, including the study of different worldwide systems and their interaction as well as the different system levels and their interaction. In the foundation charter (Zurich, September 1, 1982) the founder emphasizes that the social sciences are “primarily concerned analyzing particular societies and their environment, as well as the relationships between such societies. This means that the world is generally not studied as a complex society.” The aim of the World Society Foundation is to fill this gap. 

During the first 25 years of its activity, the World Society Foundation sponsored mainly entire research projects focusing on the various processes of social integration and disintegration within worldwide systems – world culture, world economy, world politics, and intergovernmental systems – and on how global processes affect the perceptions and actions of individual and collective actors worldwide. More than 100 research project have been financed by the Foundation during this period.

In the early 2000s the board of the Foundation looked for new forms and instruments for its sponsoring activity and started to promote international conferences on world society topics and to provide travel grants to researchers. Through this reorientation, the Foundation's board has intended to give better access to researchers from the Global South, who have been markedly underrepresented in the distribution of project grants. In doing so, the Foundation has supported more than 500 researchers from approximately 50 countries worldwide during the past 20 years. Within the framework of the conference sponsoring activity, a special focus has been placed on topics of particular interest for countries of the Global South, such as the emergence of a rapidly growing middle class there, or the growing relationships among non-core Global South countries.

Former members of the Board include: Peter Heintz, Karl W. Deutsch, Hans-Joachim Hoffmann-Nowotny, Bruno Fritsch, and Volker Bornschier.