Horst Bosetzky was a German sociologist and novelist who was born on February 1, 1938 in Berlin, Germany. He gained widespread recognition for his crime novels. Bosetzky grew up in the Neukölln district of West Berlin. After completing his apprenticeship as an industrial clerk at Siemens, he studied economics, sociology, and psychology at the Free University of Berlin between 1963 and 1968. To finance his studies, he wrote several crime stories for serialized magazines. In 1964, he joined the SPD party. In 1969, he received his Ph.D. in sociology with a thesis on the foundations of a sociology of industrial administration, exploring the possibilities and limitations of viewing large industrial enterprises as bureaucratic organizations.

From 1973 to 2000, Bosetzky was a professor of sociology at the Fachhochschule für Verwaltung und Rechtspflege (University of Applied Sciences for Administration and Law) in Berlin. He is considered one of the main proponents of the approach of micropolitics in organization theory, which emphasizes the role of power in organizations. He has made significant contributions to the study of organizations, particularly through his coinage of terms such as "camaraderie bureaucracy", the "Don Corleone principle" and the "Prince of Homburg effect", which capture the essence of micropolitical processes in organizations. Bosetzky passed away on September 16, 2018 in Berlin.