Gerhard Kleining

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Gerhard Kleining (2009)

Gerhard Kleining (* 1926 in Nuremberg ) is a German sociologist . He is the founder of qualitative heuristic social research. From 1976 to 1993 he was Professor of General Sociology at the University of Hamburg . He has since retired, but is still scientifically active with publications and at conferences.

biography

Gerhard Kleining was drafted into the German Wehrmacht as a soldier at the age of 18 during the Second World War in 1944 , without having completed his Abitur . In May 1945, at the end of the war, he was taken prisoner by the Americans, from which he was released four months later. From 1945 to 1948 he studied art history as a major and English and psychology as a minor at the University of Erlangen with a special permit . In 1949 he received his doctorate in art history with a thesis on changes in the Central European architectural style between the years 1050 and 1350.

After private stays in Switzerland and Italy , at the end of 1949 he got a job at Siemens in what was then a very small advertising department. In 1954 he moved to the Reemtsma Cigarette Factory Group . He first sent him on a six-month research trip to the USA in order to get to know the empirical social research there, which is still largely unknown in Germany . In this way he came into contact with the most famous American sociologists and social psychologists. This resulted in a long-term scientific cooperation with Harriett B. Moore . Back in Germany, Gerhard Kleining became head of market research at Reemtsma in 1955 , a position he held until he was appointed professor at the University of Hamburg in 1976 .

Scientific career

Although he was mainly concerned with commercial, applied market research at his job in business , he also found time for fundamental sociological and social-psychological analyzes. His main scientific topics, on which he published in the fifties and sixties, were social image and social structure . After having carried out both qualitative and quantitative studies in industrial market research, his research and teaching at the university focused on qualitative social research . In 1982 he published his basic essay "Outline of a methodology of qualitative social research" in the Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology . This paper presents qualitative heuristics as a systematic methodology for qualitative empirical social research. The second mainstay of his academic activity in Hamburg was the study of dialectics in philosophy and sociology. He gave lectures and seminars on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx as well as on the theory of the Frankfurt School . Since his retirement, together with a group of Hamburg sociologists and psychologists, he has devoted himself to the resumption and refinement of introspection as a qualitative method of knowledge under the name of dialogical introspection .

Qualitative-heuristic social research

Kleining describes the procedure in qualitative social research with four basic rules: openness of the researcher, the research subject is only known at the end of the research process, maximum structural variation of the perspectives and analysis of commonalities. His approach is, on the one hand, a continuation of two classic directions in German thought psychology, the qualitative methods of the Würzburg school ( Karl Bühler , Oswald Külpe ) and the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology ( Max Wertheimer , Wolfgang Köhler ). On the other hand, his methodology can also be understood as a further development of the concepts of Grounded Theory ( Anselm L. Strauss , Barney Glaser ), with epistemological justifications from the dialectic of Hegel.

Scientific importance

After quantitative methods had dominated academic discussions in psychology and the social sciences in Germany for almost thirty years since the Second World War , there was a certain renaissance of qualitative methods in the 1980s, also under the influence of socially critical trends in the social sciences and psychology. With his programmatic outline essay from 1982, Gerhard Kleining provided one of the first and most important impulses for these new approaches to qualitative social research in academic research and teaching. In doing so, he made a significant contribution to establishing the institution in the German-speaking area. A commemorative publication was published on his 77th birthday in 2003, to which his most important students and employees contributed. His closest colleague at the University of Hamburg was the sociologist Gerhard Stapelfeldt .

Publications (selection)

  • Outline of a methodology of qualitative social research , in: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Jg. 34,1982, pp. 224–253: urn : nbn: de: 0168-ssoar-8619
  • Textbook discovering social research. From hermeneutics to qualitative heuristics. Beltz, Psychologie VerlagsUnion, Weinheim 1995, ISBN 3-621-27285-2 .
  • Qualitative-heuristic social research. Writings on theory and practice. Fechner, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-929215-02-0 .

literature

  • Hagemann, Otmar / Krotz, Friedrich (ed.): Search and discover. Contributions in honor of Gerhard Kleining. Rhombos, Berlin 2003.

Web links

swell

  • Witt, Harald (2004, September). From commercial market research to academic teaching - an unusual career. Gerhard Kleining in an interview with Harald Witt [248 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Social Research / Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 5 (3), Art. 40. Available from: http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/3-04/04- 3-40-d.htm
personal data
SURNAME Kleining, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sociologist; Founder of qualitative heuristic social research
DATE OF BIRTH 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg