Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 48 (2022), 3

The discipline of sociology has a long international tradition of both theoretical
and empirical research on processes of ethnic differentiation and the manifold con-
sequences that accompany them (see, for example, Weber 1980 [1921]; Du Bois
1995 [1899]; Barth 1969). However, it was not until the 1960s that the notion of
ethnicity began to spread more widely in the sociological context and established
itself as a fundamental concept. As late as the mid-1970s, Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan (1975, 1), in their classic reader, promoted “ethnicity” as “a new term” helping to understand what was meant by “black politics” or “to find a satisfac-
tory place for the French-speaking element in an undivided Canada” (Glazer and
Moynihan 1975, 2). The relevance of this new sociological category was high and
equivalent to the classical category of social class. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the
political demands for a “representative bureaucracy” (Kingsley 1944), which exposed
the problems of the relationship between public administration and “ethnic groups
or minorities”, were also responsible for this increase in significance. One example
was the context of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. 1 In German-language
sociology, the concept of ethnicity has been gaining in importance since the 1980s,
thus returning to a certain extent from the American debate, decades after Max
Weber (1980 [1921], 237) had sharpened the concept to his famous sociological
definition of an ethnic commonality belief [«ethnischen Gemeinsamkeitsglauben»].