Others like Wolfgang Christian Schneider, Andreas Gestrich de:Andreas Gestrich, Mathias Beer und Katja Erdmann-Rajski worked in connection with the department and used similar methods of research.
The research of this Stuttgart school of studies in human behaviour was to a certain extent parallel to the History of Mentalities from France, to the Cultural Sociology (Kultursoziologie de:Kultursoziologie) from Germany and Denmark, and to the Historical Anthropology or Alltagsgeschichte from Germany which arose in the 1990s.
Referring to Ruth Benedict, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault, the patterns of human behaviour were called “configurations” (→Configurational analysis (Konfigurationsanalyse)).
These historical case studies could lead to questions concerning the significance and change of behaviour at present and in the future.
A particular characteristic of the Stuttgart studies of historical behaviour was the comparative turn towards non-Western societies like Indonesia, Japan, and China.
Eichberg emphasized the irreducible otherness (alterity) of foreign behavior; “extraneous” patterns withdraw from the explanations of the external observer and develop, also in modernity, on ways quite different from Western standard.
Nitschke de:August Nitschke tried to find explanations for the historical dynamics of different cultures by models of energy and time expectation; this met with observations of self-organization (→Synergetics (Haken)) as reported in physics and biology.
Common for the Stuttgart school was a skeptical distance towards the traditional explanation of historical change by ideologies, individual intentions, general social structures or one global process of sociocultural evolution.
Beer, Mathias (1990): Eltern und Kinder des späten Mittelalters in ihren Briefen.
Eichberg, Henning (1973): Der Weg des Sports in die industrielle Zivilisation.
Erdmann-Rajski, Katja (2000): Gret Palucca: Tanz und Zeiterfahrung in Deutschland im 20.
): Werner Müller zu seinem 75.Geburtstag, Unter dem Pflaster liegt der Strand 11.