1. Volunteering in the male life course (1988–90)

Around 1988, Silke joined a project on ‘Socialisation in Retirement’ as research assistant. The project, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, the German equivalent of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council [ESRC]), was led by Martin Kohli. It aimed to understand how retired men cope with the loss of paid work to structure their everyday lives. Five groups of men aged 60 and older, some of them still pursuing paid work as part-time workers or self-employed men, were contrasted to different groups of volunteers. Silke was responsible for interviewing volunteers in the Rote Kreutz (Red Cross) and the Arbeiter Samariter Bund (Labour Samaritans’ Union, a first aid organisation associated with the labour movement). The ten life history interviews she conducted revealed that the men started to volunteer in their youth or mid-life, not in their retirement. Subsequently, she examined the role of volunteering in the male life course in her masters’ dissertation, carrying out ten additional interviews with young and middle-aged men. She found that volunteering provided stabilisation throughout the life course, especially crises times, such as unemployment or divorce. Silke’s master’s dissertation also examined the significance of voluntary organisations in modernisation processes. Work on the project has informed our thinking about the necessity of understanding paid and unpaid work in a life course perspective and to consider voluntary organisations as shaped by and contributing to social change.

2. The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) in the US (1994–97)

Silke’s next project was her PhD thesis, funded by the Hans Bockler Stiftung (the research foundation of the German Trade Union Federation) and the University of Connecticut. Silke was interested to investigate the challenges of women to get involved and assume leadership positions in bureaucratic organisations. Trade unions had for a long time been male-dominated although this changed due to de-industrialisation and the higher involvement of women in the paid labour force. The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) presented an excellent case study to study efforts of women to change trade unions.