Frane Adam

Frane Adam (born November 23, 1948) is a Slovenian sociologist, editor and former dissident political activist. During the early 1970s, he was one of the leaders of the student protest movement in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia.

Adam was born in Pivka, in Slovenia, which was then part of Yugoslavia. He studied at the University of Ljubljana, where he became one of the most prominent activists of the Slovenian student movement, which arose as part of the pan-European protests in 1968. In 1972, he was arrested by the communist authorities together with the poet Milan Jesih. Their arrest prompted the student occupation of the Faculty of Philosophy in Ljubljana.

Adam received his doctorate in 1981 at the University of Zagreb. He continued his academic career as a research fellow at the universities of Konstanz and Bielefeld.

In the 1980s, together with Gregor Tomec, he became one of the first Slovenian and Yugoslav sociologists who studied the phenomena of contemporary social movements, with an emphasis on youth subcultures. In the eighties of the last century, he was active in the civil society movement in Slovenia and became one of the members of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights.

From 1989 to 1992, he was the president of the Slovenian Sociological Society.

He was also an associate at the Scientific Center for Social Research in Berlin.

He is currently teaching as a professor at the Community College in Nova Gorica. [8] He also teaches at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana. He is also an associate at the Institute for Development and Strategic Analysis in Ljubljana.

His research interest is focused on comparative studies of elites and democracy, on theories and indicators of development success, as well as on the influence of social capital on knowledge transfer and regional innovation systems.