Prof. Dr. Rainer Schützeichel

Rainer Schützeichel 03.10.1958 - 25.10.2023

Prof. Dr Rainer Schützeichel passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on 25 October at the age of 65. The Faculty of Sociology has lost a colleague who was both highly esteemed in his field and a great interpersonal contact. The news of his death has caused consternation and great sadness in the Faculty.

Rainer Schützeichel has taught sociological theory, historical sociology, economic sociology and sociology of religion at the Bielefeld Faculty of Sociology since 2013, which he felt was his academic home shortly after his arrival in Bielefeld - and which he significantly enriched both academically and personally in the following years. Before his appointment to Bielefeld, Schützeichel had been working as an academic co-worker at the FernUniversität Hagen since 2000, where he completed his doctorate in 2001 and his habilitation in 2011. Between 2005 and 2012, Schützeichel held professorships in Bielefeld, Bochum, Hagen, Munich (successor to Ulrich Beck), Duisburg, Aachen and Koblenz-Landau.

Rainer Schützeichel's extraordinary powers of comprehension and phenomenal ability to concentrate have enabled him to buck the trend towards specialisation by delving into heterogeneous topics and issues, meticulously analysing the respective research situations and making his own profound academic contributions. In 2007, he published a handbook on the sociology of knowledge and knowledge research - the first of its kind in the German-speaking world, with over 60 individual contributions. The Handbook of Emotions and Social Theory (2006), which he edited, contributed to anchoring the concept of emotion, originally at home in psychology and Philosophy, in the social sciences as well. The introductory volume Historische Soziologie (2004) analysed the German tradition and the current state of Anglo-American research and formed an important basis for the revival of historical sociology in Germany that began in the 2010s. The Bielefeld Working Group on Historical Sociology and Process Research, which was founded in 2015 and merged into the Working Group on Historical Sociology in 2021/22, was based on his initiative. In 2015, Rainer Schützeichel published the volume Prozesse - Formen, Dynamiken, Erklärungen together with Stefan Jordan, which undertook an interdisciplinary stocktaking of the concept of process and, not least in his own essay, offered important points of view for further discussion. The work also attracted attention and recognition in neighbouring disciplines. In several essays, Rainer Schützeichel dealt with the topic of church and religiosity, in particular with the fact that religiosity is increasingly developing outside the established churches. His most recent publication in the university's publication record analysed historical differentiation processes in church music using the concept of the configuration of musical worlds. A current research project deals with the question of how professional knowledge, e.g. of doctors, psychologists and social pedagogues, is changing in view of the "self-expertisation" of clients on the one hand and the transnationalisation of professions on the other.

All of this and many other research projects reflect an almost inexhaustible intellectual curiosity that was always looking for new challenges. A unifying element of Schützeichel's work is his particular attention and sensitivity to different patterns and nuances of meaning of basic social science concepts such as process, relation, situation, field, (social) causalities, action, culture, meaning, configuration, time and knowledge. A scrupulous reflexivity in the use of basic social science terms was important to him. His long-term goal was an ontology of the social, a fundamental theoretical redefinition of the social sciences, which he intended to tackle in a three-volume work after his retirement. The fact that this will no longer happen must be considered a great professional loss.

Notwithstanding his extensive research workload, Rainer Schützeichel also made a name for himself as an academic teacher. The interest in his courses was so great that his seminars sometimes had to take place in lecture halls. When teaching students, he attached just as much importance to awakening their curiosity and reflexivity as he did to developing their intellectual personality. Despite his already high teaching load - which he recently refused to reduce - Rainer Schützeichel devoted a considerable amount of his time and energy to discussing, advising and supervising students, their projects and final theses. The great recognition he enjoyed among the students is due to his special commitment to teaching and supervision as well as his dedication to the needs of the students.

Rainer Schützeichel was highly valued and recognised by his faculty colleagues for his comprehensive expertise and intellectual precision, as well as his balancing personality and exceptional helpfulness. Due to his professional authority combined with friendliness and fairness, his involvement in appointment committees, doctorates and post-doctoral habilitations, as well as in providing expert advice on research projects, was in great demand. From 2015 to 2022, he also served as managing editor of the Bielefeld-based Zeitschrift für Soziologie.

For ten years, Rainer Schützeichel played a key role in shaping and moulding faculty life. He was an outstanding scholar and a particularly passionate and committed academic teacher who was highly valued and recognised by colleagues and students alike. And he was a wonderful colleague and person in every respect. His death is a painful loss and leaves a huge gap. It was a great honour to know him and to work with him. We bid him farewell with great sadness and deep gratitude.