Baumgartner started his academic career at the
University of New Hampshire, where he received his PhD in economics 1976 with the dissertation
The political economy of international economic exchange and development : a systems approach to the structuring of the international economic system. After his promotion Baumgartner was affiliated with the
University of Quebec at Montreal as visiting professor, with the
University of Louvain in Belgium, and with the Institute of Sociology of the
University of Oslo, ending up as research consultant in
Zurich, Switzerland, in the late 1980s, where in the 1990s he worked the IUSA, the Creato-network for environmental planning in Zurich, the Öko-Institut in Freiburg (Germany), and the Institut für ökologische Wirtschaftsforschung (Heidelberg, Germany). In the early 1970s Baumgartner collaborated with
Tom R. Burns and a number of other researchers, such as
Walter F. Buckley, Matthew Cooper,
Philippe DeVille, David Meeker, and Bernard Gauci, among others. They have been developing a new theory complex, which came to be referred to as actor-system dynamics (ASD), a new social systems theory, substantially different from Parson's systems theory and the systems theory later developed by
Niklas Luhmann. == Publications ==