Siegwart Lindenberg, born in Munich, Germany, in 1941. Ph.D. from Harvard University, Cambridge. Professor of Theoretical Sociology at the University of Groningen.
Fellow (1 September 2001 – 30 June 2002)
My stay at NIAS as member of the “community failure” group was relatively short but also rewarding in the sense that I profited from the many informal discussions among group members, from the many seminars the group organised, and from the regular Wednesday lunch table discussions which might be an institution to be emulated by other groups in the future. I was able to work on the analyses of my empirical results of community and community failure and was able to finish three papers, all three dealing with issues of solidarity and solidarity failures in organisations. These papers will probably all be published in 2002 (see below); I was able to actively participate in the final international conference of the group in which results from our NIAS theme group could be presented to and discussed with important scholars from outside the group.
For writing my papers, the informal discussions and seminars were very useful, not in the least because the members of the theme group had very complementary kinds of expertise, an advantage we had hoped for when we started planning the group.
I also worked on the introductory chapter of a book on the future of community that will probably appear in 2003. In addition to that, I wrote three papers while I was at NIAS.