Name Franz Rothenbacher | Education University of Mannheim | |
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Books The European populatio, The Central and East, Statistical Sources for Social Re | ||
Franz Rothenbacher (born 14 December 1954 in Schelklingen) is a German sociologist.
Contents
Academic career
Rothenbacher studied sociology at the University of Mannheim from 1975 until 1981. For the next year and a half he was research assistant at the special research group 3 Microanalytic Foundations of Social Policy, Frankfurt a.M. and Mannheim (Sonderforschungsbereich 3 Mikroanalytische Grundlagen der Gesellschaftspolitik). From mid-1982 until 1988 Rothenbacher worked as lecturer and research fellow at the chair for sociology of Wolfgang Zapf at the Faculty for Social Sciences of the University of Mannheim. In 1988 he received a philosophers doctoral degree in sociology. Since 1989 Rothenbacher is a social researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the infrastructural department Eurodata.
Research
Rothenbacher in the beginning was interested in the long-term analysis of social change in Germany, also known as modernization. He analysed central long-term macrosocial processes of change in the social subsystems of family, health, housing, and in a cross-sectional perspective the structures of social inequality. He intended to apply the perspective of social reporting or of social indicators to historical processes and structures.
At the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) Rothenbacher contributed to the implementation of the infrastructural department Eurodata and the European statistics library. The research tradition of modernization (Peter Flora) and of the territorial structuring of Europe (Stein Rokkan) formed the basis for extensive long-term and comparative data collections for the European countries which appear in the data handbook series The Societies of Europe. For this series Rothenbacher wrote both volumes on the West European and the volume on the East European population.
Other research interests of Rothenbacher include European social reporting, the comparative analysis of the European public services, and finally local historical research, as well.