Martin Baethge Obituary

© The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Martin Baethge, Professor of Sociology at the University of Göttingen and until recently an active member of the editorial committee, passed away quite unexpectedly after a short illness on 4 January 2018 at the age of 78. As a researcher and teacher, Martin Baethge significantly shaped the profile of sociology at Göttingen for almost five decades. He studied sociology, pedagogy, philosophy, and politics at the University of Göttingen and the Free University of Berlin. With his dissertation ‘Economic interests and education policy. A contribution to economic and educational sociology concerning the relationship of economic interests and education policy, as illustrated by the example of the education policy-related activities of enterpreneurial umbrella organisations’, Martin Baethge came to the University of Göttingen during the heated disputes of the 1960s; in 1969, he was awarded his doctorate for this publication in Hanover. The title of his dissertation alone makes it clear that it paved the way for Martin Baethge’s future research: He was always concerned with the perspectives of working people, democratisation processes, shaping and steering policies, organised work that shapes occupations, and vocational training. He was always scrutinising working conditions, criticising claims to power and the hegemony of economically powerful players, and demanded participation opportunities for everyone. The focus of his attention were the ‘losers’ of social modernisation processes; young people and adults who had difficulty accessing socially valuable commodities, such as finding vocational training, further education, and gainful employment. In 1973, he was appointed as professor of sociology at the University of Göttingen, a post he held until 2004. Martin Baethge confronted the world of work and vocational training in many different publications. He criticised the persistence of social institutions in the structures and regulation mechanisms of a classically industrial society; he called for reforms, mainly with respect to vocational training based on a traditional industrial model; and he urged people to challenge their positions. His work was always shaped by conceptual clarity, analytic astuteness, and pointed messages. One of Martin Baethge’s works from 1978, ‘Training problems for young people and problems young people have starting’, was a topic that was to shape his sociological research for years to come. In the last two decades, these works were firmly anchored in national educational reporting, where he made his voice heard regarding issues concerning unequal opportunities when transitioning to training; he also called for missing system perspectives in the transition structures, and while doing so, he did not shy away from political confrontation. Martin Baethge contributed to educational reporting from the outset, helping to shape both the concept and the content. His final works focussed increasingly on growing integration problems within vocational training, problems concerning the professional integration of immigrants, the shift of coordinates in the vocational training system, and the associated new challenges in steering vocational training. He was always an active, stimulating, and politically-minded partner, both here and in related projects that dealt with outcome and steering issues within vocational training. Apart from vocational training issues—the general common theme of his works—Martin Baethge mainly addressed the radical changes to industrial work caused by technological reforms and linked his analyses on operational rationalisation processes to the demand for social reform prospects, which always included a more social working world. For him, science was also always connected to discovering problem areas and pointing out action perspectives. Publications such as ‘The Future of Employees’ (1986) and ‘Goodbye to Industrialism’ (2006) were widely recognised beyond sociology. Looking at digitalisation processes in society and the working world, he developed new ideas for researching and shaping service work in a world of digital change with unwavering energy, even in the last few months of his work. In parallel to these heavily theoretical issues, he also tried to introduce solutions to political and practical problems, where he also addressed key international Open Access Journal for Labour Market Research