Venster op de sociologie in oostenrijk

Samenvatting

An account of sociology in Austria, stressing postwar developments. Austria has a long sociological tradition, dating back to the pioneering days before WWI. In addition to great figures marginal to sociology such as S. Freud, L. Gumplowicz, and M. Adler and A. Schaeffle, it produced a respectable body of sociological work by M. Jahoda, P. F. Lazarsfeld, C. Buhler and others in the areas of family, youth and work and unemployment. These promising beginnings were cut off by the Nazi Anschluss. After the war Austrian sociology revived and created a numher of institutions: (1) the Soc Sci Res Instit. (Sozialwissensch aftliche Forschungsstelle), directed by L. Rosenmayr, which conducted surveys of youth and leisure; (2) the Institute for Res in Religious Sociology (Institut für Kirchliche Sozialforschung) which published a study on churchgoing in Austria by E. Bozenta (it found that the Austrian churchgoing rate is 34.5%, lower than the Netherlands and Ireland and higher than France and Italy, and workers' churchgoing rate is higher in new industries than in the older industries where the workers have a tradition of socialist atheism); and (3) the Instit for Higher Studies and Scientific Res. (Institut für Höhere Studien and Wissenschaftliche Forschung), created with the aid of the Ford Foundation, which brought to Vienna 'big names' like T. Parsons, P. F. Lazarsfeld and C. Buhler. An account is given of a 1955 study of Vienna's declining pop by a group of young Dutch sociologists, which caused some lively Austrian reactions to the description of Vienna as Die Todesurne (the urn of death). I. Langnas.