Wolfgang Weber (1939–2019) Professor of Human Resource Management and Founding Editor of the German Journal of Human Resource Management

Abstract

In a speech at an honorary reception to mark his 80th birthday, his successor as University President described Wolfgang Weber as ‘rock solid’. This characterizes just one aspect of the honoree’s personality. Wolfgang Weber thanked him warmly and announced that he would continue to research and write ‘as long as possible’. Unfortunately he was not granted a long time. Wolfgang Weber died on 1 December 2019. His friends, companions, colleagues and students will miss and remember him – not only his steadfastness and tirelessness but also his clarity and foresight, his calmness and restraint, his wonderful sense of humour and his intense humanity. Wolfgang Weber1 was born on 17 February 1939 in Moravian Schönberg (today Šumperk, Czech Republic). His academic career began studying business administration at the University of Mannheim in the 1960s. He was an assistant at the chair of August Marx, one of the founding fathers of German Human Resource Management. He did his doctorate under Werner Kirsch on the topic ‘The identification phenomenon and its importance as a determinant of human behaviour in organizations’ (Das Identifikationsphänomen und seine Bedeutung als Determinante menschlichen Verhaltens in Organisationen; Weber, 1971). Wolfgang Weber played a key role in the reorganization of business studies at the University of Mannheim and he held Eduard Gaugler’s chair during Gaugler’s rectorate. He also did his habilitation at the University of Mannheim. The title of his postdoctoral thesis is: ‘In-company further training: Empirical analysis of company and individual decisions on further training’ (Betriebliche Weiterbildung. Empirische Analyse betrieblicher und individueller Entscheidungen über Weiterbildung; Weber, 1985). In 1976, he accepted a call to the newly founded University of Paderborn. In 1982, Wolfgang Weber moved to a chair at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and then returned to Paderborn again in 1985. There he taught and researched until he retired in 2005 as the Chair of Business Administration, especially Human Resource Management (Lehrstuhl für Personalwirtschaft). As a scientist, Wolfgang Weber decisively shaped the business sub-discipline of human resource management in Germany and paved the way for the rapid growth of this area of study. He remained committed to the Mannheim tradition of critical rationalism – his research was behavioural and empirical. Behavioural science means opening up the human aspects of economics in order to understand and explain behaviour and action in 900087 GJH0010.1177/2397002219900087German Journal of Human Resource ManagementObituary research-article2020