Crossing Borders, Shifting Boundaries

This book investigates the impact of social phenomena such as recently created nation states, emerging international confederations, cross-national migration, and contemporary global forces on ethnic and national identities in Europe and beyond. The articles in this volume are written by leading international scholars, based on a variety of theoretical and empirical approaches, and offer a multifaceted discussion of the challenging issue of collective identities.

Auteur
Franz Höllinger is Professor at the Department of Sociology at Karl-Franzens-University in Graz, Austria. Markus Hadler is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, USA.

Échantillon de lecture
Introduction This Festschrift is dedicated to Max Haller on the occasion of his 65th birthday. The subject of this book - the relationship between national and transnational identities in Europe and beyond - has been a central area of Haller's research. His interest in the question of collective identities and the problems involved in the process of the political integration of Europe originates from his attentive observation of the socio-political developments in this region. However, his commitment and dedication to this issue may also be related to his personal background. Max Haller was born on March 13, 1947 in the town of Sterzing in South Tyrol, a German-speaking region which was part of the County of Tyrol and the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy for centuries until it was annexed to Italy after the First World War. Spending his childhood as a farmer's son in a small mountain village in South Tyrol, he has maintained close emotional bonds to his home during his lifetime. However, after finishing the Gymnasium in Sterzing, his cultural affinity to German-speaking areas and his early ambition to follow an academic career as a sociologist directed him to Vienna. From 1966 to 1974 Max Haller studied sociology, philosophy, psychology, and history of arts at the University of Vienna, completing the discipline of sociology with a doctoral thesis about the role of young women in work and family (Die Frau in der Gesellschaft. Eine soziologische Studie junger Frauen in Beruf und Familie, advised by Prof. Leopold Rosenmayr). Already in this first scientific work Haller demonstrates his talent of focusing his attention on social phenomena that are undergoing dramatic change and thus subject to intensive political and public debates (in Austria and Germany, the rise of labor force partici-pation of women and the related changes of gender-roles, parent-child-relationship and family life started in the 1970s). In the last two years of his University-studies, Haller was a post-doc fellow at the Institut für Höhere Studien (Institute for Advanced Studies) in Vienna. After his graduation to Dr. phil. in 1974 he started his professional career as Assistant Professor at the Institute's Department of Sociology. The Institut für Höhere Studien (IHS) in Vienna was and continues to be a prestigious post-doctoral training and research institute in the areas of economy, sociology, and political sciences. IHS was important for Max Haller's career development in two regards: First, the post-doc-training and his participation in various research projects allowed him to enlarge and deepen his knowledge of empirical research methods. At the same time, the intellectual climate at IHS stimulated his interest in social scientific theories as well as in sociopolitical issues and problems. In 1979, he was promoted to the head of its Department of Sociology. One year later, in 1980, Haller accepted the opportunity to collaborate as co-director in the large-scale empirical research project Vergleichende Analysen der Sozialstruktur mit Massendaten (VASMA; English: Comparative Analyses of Social-Structure Using Mass-Data) at the University of Mannheim, Germany, under the direction of Walter Müller. In 1983 he defended his Habilitation Theorie der Klassenbildung und sozialen Schichtung (Theory of class-formation and social stratification) at the University of Mannheim. In the same year, he was appointed to Scientific Director of the Zentrum für Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen (Center for Survey Research, Methodology and Analyses), the largest and most renowned center for survey research and quantitative methods in the social sciences in Germany, located in Mannheim. Only two years later, in 1985, Max Haller accepted a profes-sorship at the Karl-Franzens-University of Graz. Since then he is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology at Graz University and in charge of the area of Macrosociological Analyses and Methods of Empirical Research. Parallel to the chronological sequence of work-places, we can find a sequence of three principal areas in the sociological work of Max Haller: During the first two stages of his academic career - the periods he spent in Vienna and in Mannheim - Haller's research activities focused on macro-sociological analyses of change in occupational structures, systems of social stratification, and trends of social mobility in highly developed Western societies. Starting from the case of Austria (Klassenbildung und soziale Schichtung in Österreich, 1982. English: Class Formation and Social Stratification in Austria), he gradually extended his area of investigation to Germany, France, the United States, Italy, and the highly developed countries of the world in general (Klassenstrukturen und Mobilität in fortgeschrittenen Gesellschaften, 1989; English: Class-Structures and Mobility in Advanced Societies). His scientific publications of this period are characterized by sophisticated statistical analyses of sociological mass-data and their interpretation by using relevant sociological theories regarding social stratification. The dominant position among social scientists in the German-speaking language area was that distinctions between social classes would erode in advanced post-industrial societies and that the concept of "class" (class-structure, class-formation) should be abandoned in favor of the more fluent and less ideologically-charged concept of "strata" (stratification). Contrary to this view, Max Haller emphasized that the concept of "social classes" should be maintained and is applicable to post-industrial societies. The high quality of Haller's research in this area is reflected in the fact that his publications were well-known and discussed in the international research community; two of his articles, Marriage, Women and Social Stratification, 1981, and Patterns of Career Mobility and Structural Positions in Advanced Capi-talist Societies. A Comparison of Men in Austria, France and the United States, 1985 (with W. König, P. Krause and K. Kurz), were published in the prestigious journals American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review. The second principal area of Max Haller's work is the analysis of social attitudes and value-change in different areas of social life (politics, family, work, religion, environment etc.) by using cross-national comparative sur-vey data. Closely related to Haller's research activities in this area is his engagement in the creation of research cooperatives and research programs providing the organizational requirements for carrying out high quality social surveys on a regular basis. Haller was involved in this new area of research for the first time when he was responsible for the conception and implementation of the German ALLBUS (Social Survey for Germany) in his position as scientific director of ZUMA in Mannheim (1982-1984). At that time, he established contacts with sociologists from Great Britain, the United States and Australia who were in charge of the national surveys in their countries in order to establish a continuous cross-national comparative…