Renate Mayntz

Renate Mayntz (née Pflaum) (born 28 April 1929), also known as Renate Mayntz-Trier, is a German sociologist and a pioneer of organizational sociology in Germany. She was the director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies from 1985 to 1997, and is now director emerita.

Education and career Mayntz was born in Berlin and lived in Augsburg during her childhood. Her father Walter Pflaum was a professor of mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. She attended Technical University of Berlin for a year from 1947, majoring in chemistry before moving to the United States, where she continued studying chemistry at Wellesley College. Upon receiving her bachelor's degree in 1950, she went back to Berlin and became a member of the Europa-Union Deutschland. From 1951 to 1953, Mayntz switched fields and studied sociology at the Free University of Berlin (FUB), receiving her doctorate from the university under the supervision of Otto Stammer. She then worked at the UNESCO-Institute for Social Sciences in Cologne until 1957, when she obtained her habilitation in 1957 at the FUB. Mayntz was a visiting assistant professor at Columbia University from 1958 to 1959. She became a lecturer at FUB in 1960 and remained there until 1971, when she was a full professor. In 1962, Mayntz married the German painter Hann Trier. She taught at the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer from 1971 to 1973 and at the University of Cologne from 1973 to 1985. In 1985, Mayntz became the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, where she remained until her retirement. In 1999, Mayntz won the Schader Award, Germany's highest accolade for a social scientist, and in 2004 she was awarded the Bielefelder Wissenschaftspreis. In 2006, she was awarded the Prize of the German Sociological Association. She received honorary doctorates from Uppsala University in 1977,