Ingo Mörth


Ingo Mörth is an Austrian sociologist.

Biography

Ingo Mörth studied 1968-1976 business administration and sociology at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and achieved his PhD in sociology there 1977. He started his scientific career 1973 as Assistant Professor at the Department of General Sociology and Social Philosophy at the JKU, and spent a term as Visiting Professor at the Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut in 1978. After achieving his "Habilitation" for sociology 1984 at the JKU he taught as Associate Professor and Full Professor at the Department of Sociology at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, where he also was head of the Institute of Cultural Economics and Cultural Research. He retired at the Johannes Kepler University Linz in 2011, but is still affiliated as lecturer and researcher there

Work

His main working areas are Sociological theory, sociology of culture, sociology of art, sociology of media, sociology of religion, research in leisure and tourism and in the sociology of education. He is known beyond the German-speaking scientific community especially in the fields of a sociology of religion, sociological theory and sociology of culture.
His theory of religion is a theory of contingency of human existence covered by transcending concepts of meaning, thus making different systems of meaning comparable as religious equivalents. His theory of society as theory of culture defines culture as a main thread of change in modern and post-modern societies, whereas his empirical research looks into the intertwinedness of culture, tourism and leisure.
Mörth founded and developed together with three multilingual online websites on famous social scientists: Pierre Bourdieu, Norbert Elias and Clifford Geertz.
Recently Mörth concentrated on theory and research in the Sociology of Media and the Sociology of Arts, and he was also involved in the planning and development of several projects in the field of arts and culture..

Publications (selection)