German Social Science Research Articles

Ethical research in the German social sciences: Exploring the significance and challenges of institutionalized research ethics practices

Ethical research in the German social sciences: Exploring the significance and challenges of institutionalized research ethics practices

Beyond a Shared History: A Biosocial Perspective on Sociogenomics and Racism in Germany

AbstractRecent advances in sociogenomics offer new opportunities to integrate genetic and epigenetic measures into social science research on human lifespan development. Now, German social science cohorts have followed suit with this global trend. We anticipate that the integration of genetic measures into German social science cohorts is likely to be met with hesitation and dismay. Historically, racialized pseudo-science disguised as genetic research was used to justify the political exploitation, oppression, and genocide conducted by colonial and Nazi Germany regimes. In response, German institutions and social sciences actively avoided race-related research. However, avoiding the intersection of socially constructed race and genetics may stall the deconstruction of enduring racial discrimination and the identification of racialized social inequalities. Recent survey studies show that half of the German population still believe in the existence of biologically distinct human “races” and that racism is rampant. This article is aimed at providing a biosocial perspective on sociogenomics and racism in Germany. First, we discuss the biologistic construction of race that became prevalent in colonial and Nazi Germany. We argue that racist legacies are sources of social inequality in contemporary German society. We further review recent human genomic science that clearly demonstrates that there is no biological basis to socially constructed race. Second, we propose a biosocial perspective that integrates how genes “get out of the skin” and racism “gets under the skin”. Transactional genetic effects, which involve human behavior and interactions between people in society, are expected to depend on environmental inequalities tied to systemic racism. We summarize recent sociogenomics studies using polygenic indices and epigenetic profile scores showing that a) genes contribute to complex human traits and b) the expression of genetic variation is affected by socioeconomic and racialized inequality. Finally, we offer a roadmap toward race-critical biosocial research that breaks with the historically informed avoidance of race to reconstruct race-critical concepts, datasets, and scientific systems.

Social Science, the Social Question, and the Formation of Elites: German Social Science Student Associations (1890s-1900s)

This article considers the conflicts linking the social question to the social sciences in Germany around 1900 through the analysis of the student associations for social sciences (Sozialwissenschaftliche Studentenvereine). Students did not seek an introduction to social sciences as academic scientific disciplines in particular, which remained loosely autonomous and suffered from heterogeneous definitions and uses. Much more, students looked for a scientific legitimacy for the resolution of the social question, a task that had to be tackled by the elite they felt destined to join. For a large part of university and political authorities, this interest for the social question could only mean socialism. Therefore, they repressed these associations, especially in Prussia, despite their certain attractivity. The history of these associations allows to understand the attempts to redefine the social role of elites as well as the institutionalisation of the social sciences, which turn out to be closely linked.

Communication & Society: A Critical Political Economy Perspective

This paper presents the English translation of one of Horst Holzer’s works on communication and society. Holzer elaborates foundations of a critical sociology of communication(s) that studies the relationship of communication and society based on the approach of critical political economy. He shows that such an approach relates communication and production, communication and capitalism; communication, ideology and fetishism; and situates communication in the context of social struggles for alternatives to capitalist social forms. The paper is followed by a postface in which Christian Fuchs contemplates why Holzer’s approach has been largely “forgotten” in the German social sciences and media and communication studies, in turn stressing the continued relevance of Holzer’s theory today.

Communication & Society: A Critical Political Economy Perspective

This paper presents the English translation of one of Horst Holzer’s works on communication and society. Holzer elaborates foundations of a critical sociology of communication(s) that studies the relationship of communication and society based on the approach of critical political economy. He shows that such an approach relates communication and production, communication and capitalism; communication, ideology and fetishism; and situates communication in the context of social struggles for alternatives to capitalist social forms. The paper is followed by a postface in which Christian Fuchs contemplates why Holzer’s approach has been largely “forgotten” in the German social sciences and media and communication studies, in turn stressing the continued relevance of Holzer’s theory today.

Max Weber professeur, Max Weber voyageur

The thousands of letters written by Max Weber between 1895 and 1920, now published in the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, throw new light on many sides of his private life and his public activities. One of the less well studied aspects of his life are his numerous long trips to European countries before the outbreak of the First World War. Many of Weber’s letters from Scotland, England, Ireland, France, Spain, Holland, Belgium (but less those from Italy) have as much sociological and anthropological interest as the letters from his trip to America, which have been studied recently by Lawrence A. Scaff. Another aspect of Weber’s personality tackled with in this article are his activities as a teacher and as director of the seminar of economics at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau and Heidelberg from 1894 to 1903, when he resigns definitively from university after having spent since several years, for medical reasons, more time in Italy and elsewhere than in Heidelberg. Weber’s way back to university at the end of the war, at Vienna in summer 1918 and at Munich in 1919/20, could have opened a new period in the history of German social sciences, but unfortunately he died shortly after having started his lessons on the sociology of the state.

Violence as a human condition: Recent contributions from the German social sciences

Raume der Gewalt by Jorg Barberowski; S Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt, 2013, 272 pages, 19.99 [euro], cloth ISBN 978-3-10-004818-9 Topologie der Gewalt by Byung-Chul Han; Verlag Matthes und Seitz, Berlin, 2011, 192 pages, 19.90 [euro], cloth 978-3-88221-495-6 Vertrauen und Gewalt. Versuch uber eine besondere Konstellation der Moderne by Jan Philip Reemtsma; Hamburger Edition, Hamburg, 2013 [2008], 576 pages, 20.00 euro], cloth ISBN 978-3-86854-270-7 'Cats scratch, dogs bite, men kill' (Ruth Kluger) The phenomenon of violence still presents a unique challenge to social theory. Recent discourses on terrorism open new fields for conceptualising the phenomenon. However, it is still the experiences of the 20th century which continue to shape theoretical reflections on violence: the two world wars, the totalitarian political systems of Stalinism and National Socialist Germany, the German concentration camps and Soviet Gulag, Hiroshima and Nagasaki--the list is by far not exhaustive. Ruth Kluger, a survivor of the German concentration camp system, offers a short and lapidary account of these excesses of violence. In a conversation with Jan Reemtsma, she stated that, 'Cats scratch, dogs bite, men kill' (Reemtsma, 2013[2008], p. 15). Her statement expresses both the factuality and the incommensurability of violence in human experience. Violence is beyond explanation, and perhaps there is nothing to explain in the first place. In Kluger's statement, violence becomes a human condition. The three books under review here address the idea of violence as a human condition. All of them start from the observation that violence has far from disappeared from human experience. Yet this observation poses a problem. It is not easily reconciled with the foundational norm of modernity that violence should no longer be a part of social life. Each in its own way, the three books try to make sense of this observation and the problems which it poses for social theory. Broadly speaking, the authors reflect on three main questions: first, why does violence persist in spite of the central promise of modernity that it should disappear from our societies? Second, how do social theory and everyday practice interpret and deal with this incongruity between expectation and experience? Third, what are the specific forms of violence in (late) modernity and the more generic insights they offer about the phenomenon? The authors tackle these three questions to various degrees, from different individual and conceptual vantage points. In this review essay, I discuss their insights, reflect on the challenges violence poses to social theory, and, at the same time, outline some generic reflections on violence based on these books. All of the three books which I discuss were originally published in German, and only Reemtsma's has so far been translated to English. The three books draw to a considerable degree on sources in German language, some of which have not been translated to English either. For this reason, all of the translations of direct quotes from German to English are my own. The history of the 20th century certainly points towards a specific German experience of violence. Indeed, this history is important for the analyses of the books by Barberowski and Reemtsma. For the former, it also figures as an explicit autobiographical reference to family history. However, my aim with this review is not to suggest that there is a specific 'German' approach to theorizing violence. Rather, I seek to render accessible these authors' reflections to an English language readership. The German social sciences have a long and rich tradition of social theory on violence. Jorg Barberowski's Raume der Gewalt (Spaces of violence) explores violence as a spatial concept. A historian and philosopher whose research focuses on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, particularly for the Stalin era, much of his empirical material relates to German and Soviet history. …

Strengthening Institutional Data Management and Promoting Data Sharing in the Social and Economic Sciences

In the German social and economic sciences there is a growing awareness of flexible data distribution and research data reuse, especially as increasing numbers of research funders recommend publishing research data as the basis for scientific insight. However, a data-sharing mentality has not yet been established in Germany attributable to researchers’ strong reservations about publishing their data. This attitude is exacerbated by the fact that, at present, there is no trusted national data sharing repository that covers the particular requirements of institutions regarding research data. This article discusses how this objective can be achieved with the project initiative SowiDataNet. The development of a community-driven data repository is a logically consistent and important step towards an attitude shift concerning data sharing in the social and economic sciences.

German economic and social sciences between the national and the transnational: The Verein für Sozialpolitik, 1872–1952

AbstractThe Verein für Sozialpolitik is the preeminent organization of German‐speaking economists in the world. Aside from a brief interruption between during the Nazi period, it has been central in the development of the economic and social sciences in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland but also globally, since 1872. However, historical scholarship on the Verein has been narrowly focused on different thematic or temporal episodes that emphasize conceptual, generational, or political breaks in Germany's turbulent history. This essay gives a brief historical overview of the Verein and the historical literature. It calls for a re‐evaluation that highlights the persistence of the organization as it navigated between national and transnational developments.

Erratum to: Publication bias in the German social sciences: an application of the caliper test to three top-tier German social science journals

Systematic research reviews have become essential in all empirical sciences. However, the validity of research syntheses is threatened if the preparation, submission or publication of research findings depends on the statistical significance of these findings. The present study investigates publication bias in three top-tier journals in the German social sciences, utilizing the caliper test. For the period between 2001 and 2010, we have collected 156 articles that appeared in the Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (KZfSS), the Zeitschrift fur Soziologie (ZfS) and the Politische Vierteljahresschrift (PVS). In all three journals, we found empirical evidence for the existence of publication bias at the 10 % significance level. We also investigated possible causes linked to this bias, including single versus multiple authorship as well as academic degree. We found only weak support for the relationships between individual author characteristics and publication bias.

Publication bias in the German social sciences: an application of the caliper test to three top-tier German social science journals

Publication bias in the German social sciences: an application of the caliper test to three top-tier German social science journals

Hans-Ulrich Wehler: In Memoriam

Hans-Ulrich Wehler, professor emeritus of the University of Bielefeld and a founding editor of this journal, died July 5 while undergoing emergency surgery – two months before what would have been his 84th birthday. Wehler was a commanding figure among two generations of postwar historians of Germany. His books included his published doctoral study on the national question and German Social Democracy during the Kaiserreich with special attention to the question of Poland and the Polish labor movement (a theme he further established in a substantial article on Polish migrants to the Ruhr); the massive 1969 study “Bismarck und der Imperialismus” that exemplified his application of the “Primat der Innenpolitik” to understanding Germany’s international history ; a brief, controversial history of the Second Reich; and the unparalleled five-volume wide-ranging history of German society and politics from the eighteenth century to reunification in 1990. In addition he produced a continuing stream of essays, many subsequently collected in book form, that sought to absorb the approaches of current social theory to historical analysis and to apply his work to current political issues. All this work rested on an immense mastery of modern historical and social-science literature in English-language and French sources as well as the accumulated corpus of German social science and Geisteswissenschaften. The enthusiasm and passion that markedWehler’s reading and written output also characterized his leadership of the department of history at the then new University of Bielefeld from 1971 until his retirement in 1996, where together with his continuing close associate, Jurgen Kocka, and colleagues such as Reinhart Koselleck and later Sydney Pollard and Jorn Rusen among others, he organized a nucleus of historians that for two decades seemed to embody for many the cutting edge of the profession. With sympathetic colleagues home and abroad, he organized Geschichte und Gesellschaft from 1975 in the conviction, to cite the journal’s opening statement,

The Problem of Historical Consciousness of Young People in Contemporary German Philosophy

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of consideration of the problem of historical consciousness of the youth in modern German philosophy. The article analyzes the basic models of historical consciousness of the youth, established in German philosophy and social sciences and humanities in the late XX and beginning of the XXI centuries. The comparative analysis of static and dynamic models was conducted. The article emphasizes the idea that the problem of historical consciousness of young people is of prime importance in the contemporary studies of historical consciousness . Historical consciousness of the youth is transforming into a self- concept from a separate aspect of the study of historical consciousness. The most important feature of all the attempts of philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of historical consciousness of young people in Germany is a close connection with pedagogy and didactics of history. The article notes that the focus on the narrative approach to the understanding of the nature, structure and features of the transformation of historical consciousness contributed to epistemological and psychological aspects of the studies of historical consciousness of young people, as well as to the desire to consider it especially in the individual context.

Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South by Andrew Zimmerman (review)

Reviewed by: Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South by Andrew Zimmerman Udo J. Hebel Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. By Andrew Zimmerman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. Alabama in Africa follows the promising paths opened up in American Studies and American History by transnational approaches and comparative perspectives. Zimmerman’s profound study traces the circumatlantic convergence of American and German ideologies of race, agricultural labor, and family farming in early twentieth-century West Africa. Focusing on an expedition of Tuskegee Institute cotton experts to the German colony of Togo in the 1910s, it explores the symbiosis intended by German authorities of Booker T. Washington’s concepts of “industrial education” with their own economic goals and political ambitions in the larger contexts of global imperialism. Zimmerman bases his astounding trajectory of the transfer of knowledge and paradigms of labor control from the U.S. to German-colonized Africa on affinities between the implications, ideologies, and interests of the historical transition from serfdom and slavery to free, yet controlled labor in Prussia after 1807 and in the American South after 1865. In view of the mutual influences between German and American social science and social policy especially in the later decades of the nineteenth century, Alabama in Africa examines the role of the cotton experts from the Tuskegee Agricultural Department in the subordination of previously independent African farmers to the coercive programs of the German colonial system. Zimmerman uncovers the participation of the model farms of the Tuskegee experts in the “civilizing mission” of the German colonial authorities in Togo and problematizes the position of the Tuskegee expedition of reproducing the American South in Africa while inspiring Pan-African notions of anticolonialist solidarity. Zimmerman’s narrative raises new questions in connection with Booker T. Washington’s complicity with Southern racism and puts Lenin’s and the Communist International’s contemporary criticism of independent small farming and the “Negro question” into unexpected perspectives. The Tuskegee expedition to Togo and its connection with German imperialist interests serves Zimmerman well as a multifaceted prism to analyze the extension of “the mutually sustaining constructs of ‘cotton’ and ‘Negroes’ to an international level” (65) and to discuss the globalization of “the New South of segregation, disfranchisement and sharecroppoing” (237). The volume contains hitherto unpublished photographs of colonialism at work which make for a significant illustration of the book’s very topic but may have warranted closer interpretation for their specific visual framing of the colonizing venture under scrutiny here, especially with regard to similarities with photographs of Southern slavery and post-Civil War sharecroping. The thorough research in U.S. American, German, and African archives which also projects further work on the circumatlantic transfer of knowledge during a time of global imperialism is borne out by close to one hundred pages of very informative notes, followed by another fifty pages of bibliographical documentation. Alabama in Africa, with its focus on the particular moment of the synthesis of “three of the most powerful forces in the Atlantic world—German social science, African cash cropping, and the racial political economy of the New South” [End Page 138] (248), is a paradigmatic case study in the transnational dimensions of U.S. American, German, and African histories. The book fully succeeds in exposing, in the words of the author’s own conclusion, the implications and power of “transnational networks of capital, social science, racial ideologies, and empire” (239). Udo J. Hebel University of Regensburg, Germany Copyright © 2013 Mid-America American Studies Association

The Development of Post-War German Social and Political Thought

Summary The development of post-war German social sciences is marked by a series of disputes about the nature and implications of positivist methodology. Two of these are selected for consideration here; the ‘positivist dispute’ in German sociology associated with Adorno and Popper, and the more diffuse assault on positivism in the legal sciences. In both cases, self-avowed positivists were in fact hard to find but the debates were important polemical disputes about the past—notably the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich—and the future of the young Federal Republic. It is suggested below that these disputes should be seen in this context and that the polemical claim in both disputes that certain methodological standpoints mandated specific moral and political commitments is more questionable.

Reflective development and developmental research: is there a future for action research as a research strategy in German‐speaking countries?

For about two decades only marginal relevance was attributed to action research as a research strategy by large sections of the German social science community. The growing international debate on key concepts such as community participation, community‐based participatory research and participatory action research were largely ignored. In this paper we want to clarify our concept of action research and to provide arguments for the need to re‐evaluate the research potential of this approach. We illustrate the arguments by an analysis of one of the most successful in‐service education of teachers’ courses in Austria, which is based on action research (‘Education and subject matter didactics for teachers’). The second part of the paper argues that the growing number of practical action research examples in German‐speaking countries indicates a social demand for this type of research. The paper ends with a theoretical discussion of frequent objections against action research in the German research tradition.

Max Weber, Werner Sombart and the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft: The authorship of the ‘Geleitwort’ (1904)

The article starts from an examination of the authorship of the ‘Geleitwort’, the programmatic statement which appeared in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft when it came under new editors in 1904. Recently scholars have begun to view it as an important text by Max Weber recovered from obscurity, but this is a mistake. Examination of major contemporary works by Weber and Werner Sombart – the obvious co-author – as well as the first public disclosure of an entirely new MS. by Weber, show that in all probability the text was drafted by Sombart and then revised fairly lightly by Weber. This story of a combined, if unequal, authorship leads into two broader seams of intellectual history: the relationship between Weber and Sombart, and the history of the Archiv as a journal. An unusual starting point thus casts fresh and unexpected light on some of the most central figures and episodes in German social science at the beginning of the 20th century, not least Weber's seminal essay on “Objectivity” in social science.

Does Germany Need a (New) Research Ethics for the Social Sciences?

This paper evaluates the German, UK, and US approaches to dealing with research ethics in the social sciences. It focuses 1) on the extent to which these research ethic frameworks protect the key rights of research subjects and 2) the extent to to which they take into account the methodology and approaches used in social science and do not simply emulate those of the natural sciences. The U.S. approach stands for a highly regulated, and partly bureaucratic, approach where the ethics review is modeled on the methodology of natural sciences. In the UK, in contrast, a social science research ethics framework has been developed that remedies some of these shortcomings. It is implemented through pressure from funding institutions and aims to respond to the needs of social science research. The German social science ethics framework consists of non-binding codes of conduct, guidelines about good scientific practice, and ethic codes of the German professional associations and funding institutions. We find that ethical behavior in Germany is most typically understood as ethical behavior towards the peers. We recommend the establishment of a new research ethics framework for the social sciences in Germany modeled on the UK's.

Shifting Foundations: women economists in the Weimar Republic

This article draws on a biographical case study of the first women to obtain doctorates in economics at the University of Berlin between 1900 and 1925. Their educational opportunities and experiences were linked to the networks that tied the women’s and social reform movements, as well as to the disciplinary differentiation of the German social sciences and the development of social work. These connections allowed them to exploit particular employment niches before and during the First World War, but the foundations of the expertise upon which women economists could call did not hold in the new political and institutional context of the Weimar Republic. What these early graduates patched together in response reveals a complex of opportunities and limitations presented by their simultaneous exploitation of essentialist and expertise‐based arguments.

An exploratory study of Google Scholar

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss the new scientific search service Google Scholar (GS). It aims to discuss this search engine, which is intended exclusively for searching scholarly documents, and then empirically test its most important functionality. The focus is on an exploratory study which investigates the coverage of scientific serials in GS.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on queries against different journal lists: international scientific journals from Thomson Scientific (SCI, SSCI, AH), open access journals from the DOAJ list and journals from the German social sciences literature database SOLIS as well as the analysis of result data from GS. All data gathering took place in August 2006.FindingsThe study shows deficiencies in the coverage and up‐to‐dateness of the GS index. Furthermore, the study points out which web servers are the most important data providers for this search service and which information sources are highly represented. The paper can show that there is a relatively large gap in Google Scholar's coverage of German literature as well as weaknesses in the accessibility of Open Access content. Major commercial academic publishers are currently the main data providers.Research limitations/implicationsFive different journal lists were analysed, including approximately 9,500 single titles. The lists are from different fields and of various sizes. This limits comparability. There were also some problems matching the journal titles of the original lists to the journal title data provided by Google Scholar. The study was only able to analyse the top 100 Google Scholar hits per journal.Practical implicationsThe paper concludes that Google Scholar has some interesting pros (such as citation analysis and free materials) but the service cannot be seen as a substitute for the use of special abstracting and indexing databases and library catalogues due to various weaknesses (such as transparency, coverage and up‐to‐dateness).Originality/valueThe authors do not know of any other study using such a brute force approach and such a large empirical basis. The study can be considered as using brute force in the sense that it gathered lots of data from Google and then analysed the data in a macroscopic way.