Hannes Siegrist

Professionalization/Professions in History

In modern historical scholarship, the professions include the occupations of doctors, lawyers, professors, and engineers, among others. Professions are characterized by special functions, strategies, and structures, motives and representations, forms of knowledge and sociocultural styles. Professionalization refers to processes affecting the social and symbolic construction of occupation and status. The history of the professions investigates the ways in which functional groups and status groups are regulated and institutionalized. It shows how meanings, functions, and structures develop in social and temporal context and how professions, in the restricted sense of the term, differ from the status groups and occupations of entrepreneurs, merchants and clerks, skilled manual workers (crafts, metiers) and the so-called semi-profession. Historical research on professions and professionalization has tended to oscillate between individualizing historical perspectives and systematic social science perspectives. Historical and comparative research shows that, while the professions are often concerned with the same or similar functions, problems, and tasks, these may be interpreted in different ways and institutionalized in different contexts. Similarly, depending on the characteristics of a particular profession and on the particular historical circumstances, the paths, cycles, and types of professionalization and deprofessionalization may vary. By taking these points into consideration, scholars have relativized both teleological understandings of professionalization and static conceptions of the professions.

Comparative history of cultures and societies. From cross‐societal analysis to the study of intercultural interdependencies

The key element in comparative history is the problem of cultural and social differentiation and difference on the one hand, assimilation and similarity on the other. Comparative historical science relativizes local, national and regional conceptions of history and interpretations of self and other by systematically linking historical experiences, paths of development and socialization processes. The historical comparison of societies and cultures is a specific, multi‐perspective and interactive way of reconstructing and representing the past. The article presents an outline of the history of comparative historical science and discusses its epistemological basis, research topics, main concepts and methods. It analyses the shift from cross‐societal analysis to the study of intercultural interdependence and shows why comparative social history became a pioneer of cultural and international history in Europe. The author concludes that comparative historical science should concentrate on the problems of spatializing social and symbolic organizations and institutions and the problems of inter‐societal and intercultural interactions and relations.

Bourgeoisie and Middle Classes, History of

The history of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes concerns the development and the transformation of social formations that are made up of those occupying intermediary social positions. These social formations and their members take on mediating or leading functions in society, economics, politics, and culture. The historiography of the bourgeoisie and middle classes takes as its point of departure the development of the modern bourgeoisie out of the older urban bourgeoisie (burghers) of Europe. It concentrates on Western and Central Europe and on the USA, the history of which has, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, been shaped to a large degree by the bourgeoisie and the middle classes. It asks how the functions and meaning of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘middle classes’ have changed in these core areas, how, since the late nineteenth century, the conception has diffused to the periphery of Europe and worldwide, and how, in the process, it has transformed and run up against certain limits. Finally, it analyses the attempts to eliminate or transform the bourgeoisie in socialist countries, and the reconstruction of modern middle classes in postsocialist societies. Historical and systematic concepts of the exclusive bourgeoisie and the inclusive middle classes are preoccupied with the central region of the society in question, that is with that which takes shape between the extremities. The fundamental assumption is that society is not formed and integrated ‘from above’ (aristocracy, upper class, oligarchy), ‘from below’ (working class, the propertyless, the uneducated), or ‘from outside’ (foreign domination).

Geschichte und aktuelle Probleme des geistigen Eigentums (1600-2000)

Die Geschichte des geistigen Eigentums fragt, wie sich die Vorstellung von „Eigentum“ in der Sphare der symbolischen Formen, des Ausdrucks, der Ideen und der geistigen Werke zu verschiedenen Zeiten verbreitet und manifestiert.1 Geschichte fragt nach Entwicklungsverlaufen, Kontinuitaten und Bruchen. Die sich zur Zeit vollziehenden Veranderungen in der Welt der Medien und des geistigen Eigentums erscheinen auf den ersten Blick als Ausdruck eines tiefgehenden historischen Bruchs von der Gutenberg-Ara zum digitalen Zeitalter. Der Historiker, der die aktuellen Prozesse und Probleme in einer langfristigen Perspektive betrachtet, erkennt indessen auch manche Kontinuitaten. Die Entwicklung des geistigen Eigentums ist vom 18. Jahrhundert bis heute von Spannungen zwischen „privaten“ und „offentlichen“ Interessen sowie durch Konflikte zwischen Berufs- und Statusgruppen gepragt.

Der Akademiker als Bürger. Die westdeutschen gebildeten Mittelklassen 1945–1965 in historischer Perspektive

War das 19. Jahrhundert die eigentliche Aufstiegsepoche der burgerlichen Akademikerberufe (Siegrist 1988; Cocks & Jarausch 1990; Kocka 1988), so war die erste Halfte des 20. Jahrhunderts das Zeitalter der Krisen und Verunsicherungen (Jarausch 1990). Durch den tiefgreifenden Wandel von Staat, Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur und Gesellschaft, der sich unter heftigen Konflikten vollzog, wurde die Position und Legitimation der Funktions- und Werteeliten in Frage gestellt. Die fachlichen Grundlagen, die Verhaltensstandards und das Selbstverstandnis der akademischen Berufe (Professionen) wurden angezweifelt und die wirtschaftliche, politische und soziale Stellung wurde zeitweise erschuttert. Die Akademiker selbst schwankten in ihrer Haltung und Politik zwischen einer elitaren Uberheblichkeit und einer unsicheren Unterwurfigkeit.