Allmendinger, Jutta

Jutta Allmendinger

In April 2007 Jutta Allmendinger will be the first woman ever to take the helm of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, the biggest social research institute in Europe.

She's often described as impatient. But Jutta Allmendinger doesn't make much of this ascription. She freely admits her "great aversion to all the machinery around us that eats into our time". But she wouldn't call herself "impatient" on that account by any means: "As long as I see development, I'm patience personified."

Of educational and professional careers

Jutta Allmendinger has been concerned with development ever since her student days in sociology and social psychology at the University of Mannheim. "I was interested from early on in the makeup of people ‘in society', what brings and keeps them together – and the existing differences there. For there are very diverse forms of social coexistence. And there's no getting at the foundations of societal, of structural, processes without sociology."

Born in the town of Mannheim, Allmendinger spent most of the 1980s in the United States. She did her doctorate there at Harvard University: a comparative study of the evolution of "career mobility" in the US, Norway and West Germany.

The analysis of careers – especially individual educational and professional histories – has preoccupied her ever since. Time and again she comes back to exploring the nexus between individual lives and the welfare state – which was the subject of her post-doctoral thesis at Berlin‘s Free University in 1993.

Research and teaching go hand in hand

But this sociologist, who joined the faculty of Munich's Ludwig Maximilians University in 1992, is no whit less ardent about teaching than about research. In her courses she strives to give her students something akin to the positive experiences she had studying in the States. "In the USA they treated students like gems, and most definitely not with an eye to the tuition fees – I didn't have to pay much in Madison or Harvard, for that matter. It was much more an appreciation for their growth potential and their achievements, it was also curiosity, as well as the professors' identifying with their pupils. I feel the lack of this sort of appreciation and, as a result, this way of working with ‘kids' at German universities." In 1996 Jutta Allmendinger received the Munich University award for outstanding achievements in teaching.

A new spirit of service

Wissenschaftszentrum

Along with research and teaching, "service" is the third "integral part of academic life", which the now 50-year-old academic would be loath to give up. For the past four years she has served as director of the Institute for Employment Research (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, IAB for short) of the Federal Employment Agency in Nuremberg. Indeed, "service" was writ large in the recent restructuring of the institute.

Allmendinger's "services of all kinds" have given the IAB a facelift. "I'll leave it to others to describe and assess what I've accomplished for the IAB and what I haven't. It seems to me the IAB has simply changed in many ways. Together we've gone through a great many changes in a very brief space of time, many of which came from outside, of course: the whole German research system is seeing a sea change, which has reached the IAB, too. It involves working more closely together with universities and increasing transparency about what has been achieved and what hasn't. Our subject-matter has changed somewhat, too, and internal teamwork intensified. Many halls are humming, it's fun."

Incidentally, under Jutta Allmendinger the proportion of women on the senior staff at the Nuremberg research institute has shot up from 0 to 39 per cent. "The IAB is in a fair way to getting a ‘corporate spirit' without my so much as having to think of using cheers like ‘We are the champions'. They'd be harmful to the development of employment research anyway, which demands plurality and many champions and lives on that."

Where will she go from there?

Now a new challenge lies ahead for Allmendinger – and it's quite to her taste: to meld teaching, research and service even closer together. In April 2007 she's going to take the helm of the Berlin Social Science Research Centre (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung – WZB) with a staff of 140 German and foreign researchers. What's her agenda for her term of office? "The WZB will certainly pool its forces with Berlin's universities' to bolster international research in Berlin, and we'll certainly internationalize further beyond Europe."

In her new situation, Jutta Allmendinger intends to keep her sights set on education. "I'm particularly interested in the educational shortcomings in such a rich country, seeing as we have everything it takes to solve the problems: why aren't our scholastic results on a par with, say, Finland? At any rate, it's not because the gross national product's too low or the gene pool deficient. I'd like to contribute to the new education panel by continuing this research – and advising policymakers accordingly." In order to get a positive trend going – with the requisite impatience.

Selected books by Jutta Allmendinger: Co-edited with Werner Eichhorst and Ulrich Walwei: IAB Handbuch Arbeitsmarkt – Analysen, Daten, Fakten. Frankfurt et al.: Campus Verlag, 2005. (Ed.): Karriere ohne Vorlage. Junge Akademiker zwischen Studium und Beruf. Hamburg: Edition Körber-Stiftung, 2005. Co-edited with Thomas Hinz: Soziologie der Organisationen. Sonderband der Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 2002. Co-edited with Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer: Soziologie des Sozialstaates. Gesellschaftliche Grundlagen, historische Zusammenhänge und aktuelle Entwicklungstendenzen. Weinheim/Munich: Juventa, 2000. Lebensverlauf und Sozialpolitik. Die Ungleichheit zwischen Mann und Frau und ihr öffentlicher Ertrag. Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1994 (post-doctoral thesis). Co-edited with Karl Ulrich Mayer and Johannes Huinink: Vom Regen in die Traufe: Frauen zwischen Beruf und Familie. Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1991. Career Mobility Dynamics. A Comparative Analysis of the United States, Norway, and West Germany. Berlin: Edition Sigma, 1989 (doctoral dissertation)