Hans-Ulrich Derlien (* 1945 † 2010)

With the demise of Hans-Ulrich Derlien, Governance and the SOG has lost one of its founding fathers and an active participant in and promoter of international cooperation within public administration research. Hans-Ulrich Derlien, who from 1978 until his death in July 2010 held the chair in public administration at the University of Bamberg, represented the very best traditions within German social science. He was trained as a sociologist at the Free University of Berlin where he specialized in organizational and administrative sociology. From 1971 he joined the distinguished research group that produced a series of analyses of the German federal administration. For Hans the training and experience gained here during the early 1970s under the leadership of not least Renate Mayntz left a lasting mark on his scholarly career.

This was true in a double sense. Throughout the years Hans-Ulrich Derlien maintained a keen interest in the civil service as an institution and in its individual members as the mostly discreet assistants to the holders of executive office. He was, always keeping in mind Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy and Beamtentum, strongly aware of the constant tinkering with the civil service concept that, in Germany and elsewhere, took place where professional politicians met and worked with equally professional public servants, whatever their status. He was also, never hiding his skepticism towards the fads and fashions that again and again beset academia, a consistent believer in good research’s dependence on proper empirical analysis relying on the conscientious collection of data. These two streams were principal sources of inspiration for the large comparative The State at Work-project initiated by Hans with Guy Peters and completed with the publication of the double volume of this very title in 2008. We his colleagues and friends have lost a distinguished member of our guild.

Jørgen Grønnegaard Christensen
Department of Political Science
Aarhus University

Ravi Kapil, 1931-2010

The members of the SOG and Governance community will be saddened to learn that Dr. Ravi Kapil passed away on 6 July, 2010 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ravi was one of the founding members of SOG, and also a member of the first editorial board of Governance. I have on my office wall a photograph of the meeting at Oxford in the Spring of 1986 where the journal was planned and organized, and Ravi is prominent in the picture. He also helped organize several extremely good SOG conferences in Paris during the early years of the Research Committee.

Ravi Kapil was born and began his education in India. In 1951 he moved to the United States, completed his MA and PhD at the University of Wisconsin and became an American citizen. He began his career as an academic in several universities in the United States and also in Turkey, but soon began to mix a more practical career with his academic career. In 1973 Ravi joined the OECD in Paris and completed his career there. He was Deputy Director of the Public Management Service from 1985 until his retirement in 1995. This was at a time at which the OECD was becoming a major force in the reform of the public sector in Europe, and other parts of the world. Ravi Kapil played a key role in these developments and in the subsequent development of SIGMA that would facilitate administrative reform in Central and Eastern Europe.

Those of us who knew Ravi will remember him as a generous, thoughtful and energetic man who made many contributions both to the development of SOG and to the development of public administration in many parts of the world. He will be greatly missed by his family living in France and the United States and by the many people who knew him in his professional capacities.


B. Guy Peters
University of Pittsburgh