Obituary written by György Széll, University of Osnabrück, June 2019.
Cor(nelis J.) Lammers
was the president of RC 10 from 1982 to 1986. He was born in Amsterdam in 1928, and passed away in 2009. So, it is only at the tenth anniversary of his death that this belated obituary is written. He studied at the University of Michigan and the Free University of Amsterdam, where he got his PhD in 1963. In 1964 he was nominated professor of sociology at the University of Leiden, where he stayed all his life. He was a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies and of the Fulbright Foundation. Amongst other institutions he was also a visiting professor at the University of Osnabrück in 1989. He was a founding member of the European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS) in 1973. As Veljko Rus he was a member of the International Research Group Industrial Democracy in Europe. In the last years of his activities he left RC 10, and consecrated his research on the sociology of occupation of foreign countries, taking the Netherlands as example. This was a widely under-researched fields. He definitely was one of the leading organizational sociologists of his generation, however, better known in his home country, as his Wikipedia entry is only in Dutch and German so far <https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cor_Lammers>. His strength were his pragmatic and historical studies of organizations. He contributed greatly by his organizational talent to the establishment and development of RC 10. Also, we should never forget his Dutch humour, which often lacks unfortunately today often.
His most important publications in regard to RC 10 are:
Lammers, Cornelis J. (1974/75), 'Self-management and participation. Two concepts of democratization in organizations', Organization and Administrative Sciences, vol. 5 (4): 19-33.
Lammers, Cornelis J. (1988), 'The Interorganizational Control of an Occupied Country', Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 33: 438-57.
Lammers, Cornelis J. (1992), ‘Organizational Democracy’, in György Széll (ed.), Concise Encyclopaedia of Participation and Co-Management. Berlin & New York, de Gruyter, pp. 585-597.
Lammers, Cornelis J. & David Hickson (eds.) (1979), Organizations alike and unlike. International and interinstitutional studies in the sociology of organizations. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Lammers, Cornelis J. & György Széll (eds.) (1989), International Handbook of Participation in Organizations. Vol. I: Organizational Democracy – Taking Stock. Oxford, Oxford University Press.