From government to governance : Political Steering in Modern Societies*

Renate Mayntz was born in Berlin on April 28, 1929. After her graduation (Abitur) in Berlin in 1947 she took up studies at Wellesley College (USA) and received her B.A. in 1950. In 1953 she concluded her graduate work at the Free University of Berlin with a doctorate in sociology (Dr. phil.). Her first research appointment was at the UNESCO Institute of Social Research in Cologne (1953-1957). In 1957 she qualified for lecturing in sociology at the Free University of Berlin (Habilitation). Following a year as Rockefeller Fellow in the U.S., where she studied developments in the sociology of organization, Renate Mayntz taught at Columbia University as Visiting Assistant Professor in the academic year 1959/60. On her return, she started teaching at the Free University of Berlin, where she was offered a chair in 1965. In this period, she became increasingly interested in public administration and questions of administrative reform and served on a number of advisory commissions to the West German government. From 1966 to 1970 she was a member of the German Council forEducational Reform and between 1970 and 1973 of the Commission for the Reform of Public Administration (Studienkommission für die Reform des öffentlichen Rechts). In 1971 she left Berlin, accepting a chair at the School of Public Administration (Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften) in Speyer. Two years later she moved once more, accepting a chair at the University of Cologne, where she also became director of the Institute for Applied Social Research (Institut für Angewandte Sozialforschung). Twelve years later she vacated this position in order to become, in 1985, the founding director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung in Cologne. She retired in 1997. In the course of her academic career, Renate Mayntz has repeatedly had foreign teaching assignments: at the University of Edinburgh in 1964, at the Facultad Latino-Americana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Santiago de Chile in 1965, at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1968, and at Stanford University in 1983/84. From 1974 to 1980 she served in the Senate of the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). In 1977 and again in 1979 she received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Uppsala/Sweden and Paris X-Nanterre. Renate Mayntz is the author, co-author or editor of 43 books and more than 100 scientific articles.