Christof Brandtner, PhD

christof.brandtner@wu.ac.at

Christof Brandtner will join WU Vienna as Professor of Nonprofit Management and Governance in March 2027 and is currently an Associate Professor of Social Innovation at emlyon business school. He is also a Fellow in Innovation, Equity, and the Future of Prosperity at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR IEP) and co-founder of the Civic Life of Cities Lab (CLC).

His research examines how civil society organizations shape the emergence, diffusion, and implementation of social innovations in cities. It has appeared in journals including the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Organization Studies, Urban Studies, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and Voluntas. His book Cities in Action: Organizations, Institutions, and Urban Climate Strategies was published by Columbia University Press in 2026.

Brandtner has won awards from multiple sections of the American Sociological Association and from EGOS. There, he co-organizes a standing working group on place-based communities and organizations. He serves on the editorial boards of Organization Studies and the Academy of Management Journal.

An alumnus of WU's SBWL Public and Nonprofit Management, Brandtner studied organizational and economic sociology at Stanford (PhD) and urban innovation at the University of Chicago (postdoc). When he's not nerding out about abductive research or wildly gesticulating at the SDGs in a classroom, he tries to juggle his daughter, Alma, and green-cheeked conure, Paquita - so far, without success.