The Anthem Companion to Robert K. Merton

By Charles Crothers and Larry Stern

Robert K. Merton’s sociological work spans several decades: 1920s (childhood), 1930s (anomie, science, unanticipated), 1940s (housing studies, mass communications, structural-functional analysis, professions, focus groups), 1950s (reference groups), 1960s (ambivalence) and later decades (structural analysis, sociological semantics, cultural sociology). He particularly contributed to sociology during a period when several specialties were being set up and yet his work spans both general and specialist sociologies. He is recognized as the father of anomie/strain theory, focus groups, sociology of science, role set theory, analytical sociology, structural-functional analysis, ambivalence studies and sociological semantics, but always endeavoured to keep the multifarious threads of sociology together. Merton stood at the junction of many other crossroads: classical and modern sociology; American and European sociology; theory and research; philosophy of social science and applied sociology; pure academic sociology and applied sociology; cognitive and social; social sciences and humanities; social sciences and science. Yet the different components of RKM’s work relate to each other. RKM had a major effect on the baby boomer generation of sociology who joined the ranks of sociology at a time of great expansion of university positions across many developed countries. Other generations of sociologists so far less exposed to his work should gain much from consideration of the essays in this volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839981180

Book preview

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: MERTON’S SELF-EXEMPLIFYING CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTIONS

Charles Crothers, Lorenzo Sabetta, Lawrence Stern

This chapter is an introduction to Robert K. Merton’s life, work and position in the sociological landscape, and to this Anthem Companion, which explores aspects of these topics in detail. Here, we provide an overall framework within which the various specialist essays can be located.

Over his 70-year career,¹ Merton worked across a wide array of substantive areas including, in chronological order, historical sociology of science, anomie theory and the sociology of deviance, ethnic studies, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology and social predictions (self-fulfilling and suicidal prophecies), housing/community studies, mass media/communication studies, bureaucracy and organizations, the professions and, toward the end of his career, an emerging programme in what he referred to as ‘sociological semantics’. Much this substantive work exhibits a marked discontinuity which is the typical pattern in the growth and development of knowledge – often a substantive concern was put aside, only to be picked up, reworked and extended later in his career.

What did remain constant were his theoretical concerns and modus operandi – while they evolved over time – that centered on analysis of diverse types of social structures, and especially how social structures both enable and constrain – provide incentives for and sanctions against – the social actions that people choose to undertake in their everyday lives. In addition, Merton then examines the consequences – both intended and unintended – of these actions for individuals, groups, organizations, and for society itself.

Throughout his career, Merton coined a slew of sociological concepts and terms, presented in the more than 20 books and 200 scholarly articles that he either authored, co-authored or edited, including ‘unanticipated consequences of social action’, ‘manifest and latent functions’, ‘the self-fulfilling prophecy’, ‘focus groups’, ‘role models’, and ‘the Matthew Effect’, to name but a few. Merton also served in various roles on various learned societies, funding agencies, advisory boards, and federal commissions and advocated for establishing the professional and cognitive identity of the fledgling discipline of sociology.

These contributions varied in quality and consequence and generated a secondary literature comprising a large volume of citations. He is one of the most cited scholars of the twentieth century. His classic Social Theory and Social Structure (STSS) has been cited more than 5,000 times not to mention the uncited influence of his work which has become so well known that it is known in Merton’s own phrase as ‘obliterated by incorporation’. There is a discussion of Merton’s impact towards the end of this chapter.

Besides the many using Merton’s work in their own studies, there is a more specific commentary literature which besides general works includes volumes on Merton’s sociology of science and his sociology of deviance. However, the most recent of these are some decades old and the time is ripe for further consolidation.² Our goals, then, for this Companion are to highlight and bring together recent work that provides historical and analytical accounts of Merton’s theoretical, methodological and substantive writing, as well as his teaching and service work. Contributors to this volume focus upon different aspects of his work at different stages of his career. Besides the usual sources of the available literature, many of these chapters draw heavily on unpublished materials – which include notes from his lectures and seminars, syllabi, drafts of publications, letters of recommendation, correspondence with many colleagues, agendas, audio tapes, memos and similar material – that Merton provided to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library housed at Columbia University.³ Simonson’s chapter focuses on Merton’s early life, political inclinations and work on, among other things, issues of race, up through this first decade at Columbia. Fox provides a historical account of Merton’s and his colleagues’ housing studies, conducted in the 1940s, which included the first analysis of interracial housing. Swedberg’s chapter reveals Merton’s modus operandi in the seminars he taught regularly at Columbia in addition to his lectures. Crothers develops an account of the historical trajectory of Merton’s Status and Role theory. Fasanella and Sabetta examine Merton’s steadfast advocacy of the interplay between theory and methodology, tracing its wider implications. Lee’s contribution provides an account of Merton’s role in the development of what has come to be an important research method, the focus group. Separate analyses of Merton’s pioneering work in the sociology of science are presented by Malczewski and Dubois. Fleck provides an overview of Merton’s contributions to cultural sociology, including the nascent development of what Merton referred to as sociological semantics. Finally, Zuckerman draws some conclusions about Merton’s publishing modus operandi through consideration of five cases of ‘unpublished’ work. This leaves other major areas of Merton’s work that, while not dealt with here in detail (although they are alluded to at various points), have been covered elsewhere, especially his media studies (see Simonson and Hartzell 2019), sociology of deviance (see, e.g., DeFlem 2018; Crothers 2021: 26–33), organizational sociology (Haveman 2009), ethnic relations (see Crothers 2021, 52–53) and professions/medical (see Crothers 2021, 80–81).

In addition to reporting ongoing and recent work related to Merton, we also seek to point to areas where further developments built on Merton are relevant. In particular, we hope to entice younger scholars to read (or re-read) the corpus of Merton’s work in a more comprehensive and innovative manner, and to extend it. In doing so, a series of retrospective essays by both Merton and Zuckerman⁴ may be particularly useful since they explicate the ‘problematics’ of particular concepts and indicate areas where there are opportunities for forward development.

In addition to particular special areas of interest held by Merton, there are some wider issues which this volume only lightly addresses: especially whether or not Merton advanced a ‘general sociological theory’, whether or not his work might be regarded as ‘classical’ and the remarkable self-exemplifying reflexivity of his writings.

There have been several discussions on the general theory issue (Stinchcombe in Coser 1975; in the Clark et al. 1990 volume and in Sztompka 1986 and Crothers 1987, 2021). Clearly, Merton never claimed to have produced such. Nor did he make any attempt beyond the set of broad stipulations (Merton 1975a) to develop a more systematic architecture, and his magnum opus STSS did not include several of his most important contributions – some written before and some alongside the several editions of that book, let alone his substantial work since the 1968 edition (especially Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action, opportunity structures and cumulative advantage). As a later section of this introduction suggests, building further on Stinchcombe’s building on Merton, several of his middle-range theories can be assembled to provide a loosely linked toolkit of analysis which can guide social analyses. In this meaning of general sociological theory, built up from empirical analyses and the gradual generalizing of concepts, Merton could be said to be a general sociological theorist. His theoretical work is also underlaid by a series of stipulations (Merton 1975a), such as:

– that structural contradictions and tensions are built-in to the social world, not happenstance;

– that conflicts, as a rule are structurally-induced and stitched into the fabric of society;

– that patterned-misperceptions and mis-attributions are endemic to the development of knowledge;

– that individuals, confronted with structural ambivalences and enmeshed in a web of cross-pressures must actively navigate and negotiate specific outcomes; and

– that irony, through the operation of unintended and unanticipated consequences of social actions is ubiquitous – is the order of the day.

Running through all of Merton’s oeuvre is a concern to overcome the dichotomies (objective/subjective, micro/macro, static/dynamic, determinism/agency, etc.) which so beset sociological thinking.

Merton is not usually regarded as a classical sociology writer and is included as ‘contemporary’ or ‘modern’ in collections on sociological theorists. The roster of classics is still usually seen as those of the generation of Weber and Durkheim or earlier, but Merton might well be seen as a ‘modern classic’ writer (Kalleberg 2007). He stands at the cusp between the two eras, often taking classic sociology ideas and converting them to press into service in contemporary social research. Merton sees classics arising in social sciences and humanities largely because they are less efficient than the natural sciences in building earlier ideas into ongoing thought. He therefore advocates reading and studying such works. In cultivating the development of such theories, Merton enumerates several functions of classical social theoretical writings:

These range from the direct pleasure of coming upon an aesthetically pleasing and more cogent version of one’s own ideas, through the satisfaction of independent confirmation of these ideas by a powerful mind, and the educative function of developing high standards of taste for sociological work to the interactive effect of developing new ideas by turning to older writings within the context of contemporary knowledge. (1968, 37)

Our argument is that readers should take up this orientation to Merton’s writing, and it is reflected in many contributions to this volume.

As these arguments immediately above show, Merton’s work is resolutely self-exemplifying and reflexive. He provides analytical tools not only for the study of social groupings but also to analyse sociologists (and other cognate analysts) carrying out such analyses. The interplay between ‘sociology of science and sociology as science’ in Merton’s work is authentic and consequential (Calhoun 2010). This key characteristic of Merton’s approach arises from Merton’s career-long interest in the sociology of knowledge and science, including applied social researchers and pollsters. These studies focused upon the actual practice of scientific work – how scientists go about their business within socially structured contexts – and have highlighted key issues that can be fruitfully used as a guide to an analysis of his own or any other scholar’s work. Among other things, Merton argued that

– sociologists need to blend both erudition and originality in their work;

– our founding fathers can be continually re-read with profit as their ideas take on contemporary significance, just as our contemporary theorists extend our intellectual base;

– problem-finding is not merely a matter of affixing the question ‘why’ to an empirical uniformity;

– discontinuities in the development of ideas are as common as continuities;

– the history and the systematics of sociology are different but can be made complementary.

The remainder of this introductory essay (which draws considerably on Crothers [2011]) focuses on Merton’s background, professional career and social and intellectual contexts that informed his work and provides an overview of his main ideas, the impact and assessment of his contributions to the sociological landscape.

The Person

Robert K. Merton was born on 4 July 1910 to working class Jewish immigrant parents in Philadelphia. His family included an older sister, and while close to her and his mother, Merton’s relationship with his father was distant (Simonson 2010, 128ff.). He became a frequent visitor from the age of around 6 to the nearby Andrew Carnegie Library, the Academy of Music, Central Library, Museum of Arts and other close-at-hand cultural and educational centres, and was educated at the South Philadelphia High School for Boys. His father scraped out a living as a shopkeeper, carpenter and then truck driver. From a young age, he was an avid reader and by the age of 12, he performed as a magician at neighbourhood social functions, putting his earnings aside to help with school expenses. During his teenage years, he changed his given name, Meyer R. Schkolnick, to Robert King Merton (RKM), which he considered a more appropriate ‘stage name’ (see Merton 1994b).

In 1927, Merton won a scholarship to Temple College in Philadelphia where he first studied philosophy, then taking a major in sociology under the influence of George Simpson who excited his interests in the discipline and in empirical investigation. In 1931, he won a Paine fellowship to Harvard University for graduate work in sociology. He went to study under Pitirim Sorokin, and in 1932, he was awarded his M.A. degree.⁵ He completed his doctoral dissertation in 1935, and in 1936, he became an instructor and tutor at Harvard, spending several years working on a range of topics which provided a platform for much of his later work (see Simonson [2010] and his chapter in this volume on Merton’s earlier decades; see also Nichols (2010) on the ‘Harvard’ era in Merton’s career).

In 1939, Merton was appointed as an associate professor at Tulane University, New Orleans, and was quickly promoted to full professor and Chair of a growing department. In 1941, he became an assistant professor at Columbia University, New York, at the invitation of prominent social theorist Robert MacIver. Merton’s ‘joint’ appointment to the Columbia faculty with Paul Lazarsfeld was a fortunate accident. When a full professorship had fallen vacant in 1940, the Department was split between Robert Lynd and Robert MacIver and could not agree on a nomination. A compromise was effected by the University President (Nicholas Murray Butler) who split the position into two assistant professorships – one emphasizing social theory and the other empirical research; Merton was appointed to the former and Lazarsfeld to the latter. For a while, the two had little contact, but then followed an intellectual seduction. Lazarsfeld invited Merton and his wife to dinner but diverted him that evening to assist with his research enterprise on audience-testing a government pre-war morale-building radio programme and thus began a very long and close collaboration.

Merton was subsequently promoted to associate professor (1944) and full professor (1947), succeeding Lazarsfeld as Chairman of the Department in 1961 (and on and off for a number of years) and often deputizing for him as Associate Director of the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR: which was strongly associated with the Department) from 1942 to 1977 when the BASR was closed. In 1963, he was appointed as Franklin Henry Giddings Professor of Sociology, in 1974 acquired the rank of ‘University Professor’ and from 1979 was ‘Special Service Professor’ and ‘University Professor Emeritus’. From 1966 to 1989, Merton was Russell Sage Foundation’s first ‘Foundation Scholar’.

Merton died in 2003 of a multiple attack from several cancers. He was survived by his (second) wife (sociologist Harriet Zuckerman), three children (one of whom is Economics Nobel Prize winner Robert C. Merton), nine grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.

Intellectual Career

Merton’s scholarly output was considerable and its publishing history⁶ was quite varied and complex. Particular characteristics of his work included close and active editing of other scholars’ writings, active book reviewing and a love of words and language which led to the creation (or redeployment) of many widely used evocative neologisms.⁷ The fame of his teaching was widespread and has been written of in many accounts (e.g. Caplovitz 1977, 142; Marsh 2010; Fox 2020; Swedberg 2019 and his chapter in this Companion). He disliked organizational involvements, but nevertheless played a prominent part in professional activities, serving as Presidents of several scholarly associations (see Crothers 2021, Chapter 1), and in consultancies with the American Nursing Association, American Jewish Committee, media stations and military agencies during World War II.

Merton’s research and writing programme can be broadly divided into five phases (Crothers 2021, 14), which approximate to the various decades of his academic working life and to the decades of his own age periods. However, as with any such schema, it is used only to provide a general framework for understanding the progression of his interests and the relationships among its various phases.

The ‘1930s’

During his undergraduate days, Merton became well-schooled in then-contemporary American sociology. At Harvard, this was extended by intensive reading of European sociology, including a systematic review of French sociology which he wrote up in his first publications (Merton 1934a, 1934b). Merton’s first foray into empirical research had come when, as George Simpson’s research assistant at Temple, he conducted (what eventually came to be known as) a ‘content analysis’ of references to ‘Negroes’ over some decades in Philadelphia newspapers. After enrolling at Harvard, Merton also conducted fieldwork during the summer between semesters among the homeless of Boston under the auspices of the Works Project Administration. In addition, Merton collected quantitative data that illustrated changes in science, technology and medicine for his mentor Sorokin. His own doctoral work involved quantitative analyses of shifts in the foci of scientific interests, along with shifts in the occupational interests of the English elite which involved hand-tabulating 6,000 biographies from the Dictionary of National Biography, and the experiments recorded in the Transactions of the Royal Society (Merton 1938; see Cohen 1990 for collected commentary and also Zuckerman 1989).

His theoretical work, especially in the sociology of deviance and also race relations, largely flowed out of his class lectures and the developing theoretical concerns of the small sociological community at Harvard, which included Talcott Parsons, then an assistant professor, and a cadre of fellow graduate students, most importantly Kingsley Davis (see Nichols 2010). Two theoretical pieces, the ‘Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action’ (1936) and the essay on ‘Social Structure and Anomie’ (1938), sketched out Merton’s more general sociological stance and had a far-reaching impact within sociology. In the latter essay on the generation of deviance, Merton developed the subversive view that capitalism breeds systematic failure as the core of his ‘anomie theory’: in societies which highly stress achievement goals and yet where there are class-differentiated limitations in means for obtaining success, there can be structural pressure on those with more limited resources to indulge in ‘innovative’ (and often illegal) means to achievement.

The ‘1940s’

The ‘second’ phase of work in the 1940s included several empirically based studies arising from research projects carried out in the BASR at Columbia University (many sponsored by the Army), especially in the areas of morale and propaganda studies, media sociology and the sociology of housing (see Fox and Zuckerman in this volume for explorations of Merton’s study of interracial housing). Merton also participated in an extensive post-war review of various empirical studies sponsored by the American army during World War II, teasing out and developing Herbert Hyman’s concept of ‘reference groups’.⁸ His methodological interests during this period included writing on fieldwork in community settings and the methodology of ‘the focused interview’ (1956) – the platform on which the very widely used ‘focus group’ methodology was later built by the market and social research industries (see Chapter 7 by Lee). He elicited theoretical advances in terms of reference-group behaviour and the social processes of friendship formation. His Mass Persuasion study and other writings examined the role of applied social science in the formation of policy (e.g. 1949d; see Simonson 2004, 2006).

During this decade, Merton continued his interest in race relations covering topics including ethnic inter-marriage, discrimination and the American creed, planned communities and the self-fulfilling prophecy (which is predominantly about racial and ethnic relations). He extended:

– his interest in the sociology of science in his article articulating the normative structure of science,

– his paradigm for the sociology of knowledge,

– and with his two articles on bureaucracy spawned a Columbia research programme on bureaucracies/organizations with dissertations (and subsequent publications) in this area by postgraduate students Selznick, Gouldner, Blau and Lipset.

In addition to this work on research projects, Merton assembled the various writings that constituted his composite theoretical and methodological stance within sociology and which formed the themes of STSS (1949a, 1957, 1968). This included work on the methodology of functional analysis and the interplay of theory and research (see Chapter 6 by Fasanella and Sabetta), together with the selection and arrangement of much of the array of theoretical writing, commentary and empirical studies he had produced to that point.⁹

The ‘1950s’

The ‘third phase’ in the 1950s included a broad programme which had a greater theoretical emphasis and less explicit methodological concerns than his previous set of work. A key piece in his empirical programme was a comparative study of medical education at three medical schools: Cornell University Medical College, Western Reserve Medical College and Pennsylvania Medical College. In this period, Merton also continued his work on updating and extending various theoretical essays laid down previously, in a series of ‘continuities’ chapters which were included in a much-expanded version of STSS published in 1957. He also developed his ‘role-set’ theory (on which, see Chapter 5 by Crothers) and taught the first course on theory construction in sociology (see Chapter 4 by Swedberg). Work on the properties of groups was facilitated by a graduate seminar conducted by Merton that entailed a close textual analysis of the writings of Georg Simmel (see Jaworski 1997).

Merton also played an important role (flowing from his Presidency of the American Sociological Association 1957) in developing two major texts that brought together much of then-contemporary American sociology. These were Sociology Today (1959), which comprised a set of some two dozen chapters each of which attempted to lay out the significant sociological analytical problems and the state of the art in addressing these concerns for each of a range of specialist areas, and four editions of Contemporary Social Problems (1961, 1966, 1971 and 1976), which reviewed the relationship between social issues and sociological knowledge.

The ‘1960s’

Merton’s ‘fourth’ phase of work, beginning in the late 1950s and extending through the 1960s, is marked by a noticeable restriction in the span of his writing interests, and a concentrated return to his ‘first love’ – the sociology of science. The return was staged on the highly visible occasion of his Presidential address to ASA (1957). Whereas his earlier (1930s) work in the sociology of science had focused on the interrelationship between the social institution of science and other areas of society, Merton’s later sociology of science centred on the key internal features of science as an autonomous institution. Central to his image of science was the idea that scientific discoveries were, in principle at least, multiples (likely to be uncovered by two or more competitors) and that the reward systems of science provide institutionalized incentives that impel scientists to seek recognition for their discoveries by others in forms such as citations or eponymous labels or awards which acknowledge intellectual debts. As a result of the fateful conjunction of these two principles, scientists expend energy in attempting to secure their property rights of public recognition of their discoveries – if necessary, through occasionally clamorous ‘priority disputes’ while often also denying that they were concerned with such trifles. If the pressure for discovery is too great, social pathologies (e.g. fraud and plagiarism) may result (see Chapter 8 by Malczewski and Chapter 9 by Dubois).

Much of his work from the late 1950s was conducted within the Columbia programme in the Sociology of Science and supported by the National Science Foundation. As the programme developed, a new cohort of Columbia sociologists, including Harriet Zuckerman, Stephen Cole, Jonathan Cole and later Thomas Gieryn, joined with Merton in conducting empirical studies of the evaluation systems across several scientific disciplines, of age structures and the differential effects of codification in science.

Merton also published On the Shoulders of Giants (1965) which, couched in a delightful Shandean mode, traced the historical trajectory and the various uses of this metaphor over time. This has some links to his more formal analysis of science as an institution as the ‘Shoulders of Giants’ aphorism is a key metaphor through which the scientific norm of humility is expressed; the main message of the book, though, emphasizes the non-linear development of scientific concepts. At much the same time, he drafted with Elinor Barber a book on the travels and adventures of the term-cum-concept Serendipity – but this was not published for another 40 years (2004).¹⁰

During this period, Merton also attempted to come to terms with broadening streams in the development of sociology, both through his sociological accounts of social theory and through theoretical restatements in which he signalled the importance of recognizing the ‘sociological ambivalences’ that are generated by social structures (1976: essays first published in 1963). Alongside these two major foci of interest there continued a stream of tasks associated with being a prominent figure in American sociology, especially providing commentaries, forewords and updating previously published material. A third, and final, edition of STSS was produced in 1968.

The ‘1970s’ and Since

The ‘fifth’ and final phase, beginning in the 1970s and running up until his death, covered much in a ‘reminiscent’ vein – often as contributions to festschriften or in the form of obituary material for colleagues he had outlived. Some of Merton’s other writings can be seen as rearguard actions in which he defended parts of his earlier writings against recent criticism, while other writing tasks arose from his ‘elder statesman’ position. During this period, there was a further flowering of Merton’s contributions to belles-lettres as a humanist. Theoretical interests continued, with Merton signalling a change in emphasis from a preferred functional analysis mode to a structural analysis approach (1976: see below in this chapter), while also developing his work in the sociology of knowledge through his extended essay on Insiders and Outsiders (1972) and on ‘socially expected durations (SEDs)’ (1984). This period also saw the programmatic development of ‘sociological semantics’ as a research programme (see Zuckerman 2010, 2011) that ‘takes words, phrases, aphorisms, slogans and other linguistic forms as subjects of inquiry’ (see Chapter 10 by Fleck).

In the late 1960s as the rise of a range of social movements (many based as Merton noted on inscriptive qualities and centred on the development of ‘identities’) began to not just appear on the sociological agenda but also to influence trends in the discipline. RKM addressed some of the sociology of knowledge issues which arose in a long essay (1972: based on a presentation to ASA in 1971) on insiders and outsiders. Given the then-contentiousness of the topic, the presentation was accompanied by some controversy. Merton’s analysis drew on his earlier work in the sociology of knowledge and was a critique of extreme (but also less extreme) versions of Insider and outsider doctrines (much more the former) that hold that only particular members of groups have monopolistic (or privileged) access to understanding of the interests, experiences and knowledge of that group. As social groups become more conflictual with mainstream society, they resort more to such doctrines; and to provide a platform for understanding such conflicts, the sociology of knowledge becomes of heightened interest in sociology. Merton maintains, to the contrary, that this could well lead to a slipping slide to solipsism, in which exclusions of knowledge claims become able to be made only for tighter and more proscribed groupings given the complexly interlocking structure of status-sets in modern societies. Merton’s analysis of SEDs points to the various ways in which people’s activities, and the play of institutionalized social patterns, are governed by expectations and norms of their expected durations.

Reviewing this set of career stages, it could be asked if Merton notably changed his theoretical approach in tune with any phases in his research trajectory. For the most part, there was relatively little change, since his basic sociological orientation was clearly laid down during the first decade of his writing and its basic features can be discovered within the set of his early essays and investigations. However, there have been changing emphases: an earlier interest in ‘action’, followed by the self-conscious concern with functional analysis which dominated his ‘1940s’ period, while by the ‘1970s’, he worked in a broader ‘structuralist’ mode. Another change seems to have been that the social psychological and rhetorical analysis approaches more often involved with BASR studies of communications in the ‘1940s’ were complemented in several essays from the ‘1950s’ onwards with a more conscious emphasis on ‘social structure’. His writings on ‘sociological semantics’, especially as reprised in very late writings (see Fleck’s chapter), extended his conceptions of cultural structures and provided contributions to ‘humanist’ studies.

Social and Intellectual Contexts

Merton’s very settled career at Columbia insulated him from too much direct outside influence, especially from his immediate New York context. However, he was heavily involved with a widespread communication network with colleagues both close-at-hand and at-a-distance, together with a range of other institutional arrangements, including positions in associations and commissions (e.g. his early 1960s trip to Soviet Union under the auspices of the Washington: National Institute of Social and Behavioral Science). Yet, the imprint of several successive societal periods on his intellectual life is visible. They include the following: the Depression, WW2 and the spectre of totalitarianism, the post-war economic boom, the period of university expansion and Cold War, the student rebellions and social (identity) movements of the 1960s/1970s, and the collapse of Communism. Although Merton always kept a clear eye on the long-term future of Sociology, some of his work directly linked to ongoing events and other contributions were discussions of how societal events influenced Sociology. Clearly, the Depression affected him and led to short-term research as well as reinforcing a long-term concern with issues of social justice (see Simonson this volume). Merton threw himself into war-related social research work and into assessing possibilities in post-war social reconstitutions (see Chapter 3 by Fox), and especially civil rights. However, later in his life he was more removed. Keeping some distance from the campus troubles of the late 1960s, while monitoring from ‘behind the scenes’, and he did not engage extensively¹¹ with those intellectual and social movements emanating from younger generations and imported from Europe, which had set-up a new phase in American sociology.

Merton established his own official intellectual lineage in the ‘Acknowledgments’ to his STSS, where he thanks:

– Charles Hopkins, his brother-in-law, friend and teacher of life skills;

– George Simpson, his undergraduate teacher at Temple College (for introducing him to sociology);

– Pitirim Sorokin, his graduate teacher at Harvard (for bringing the range of European social thinking to his attention);

– George Sarton, historian of science and early sponsor (for close assistance with his historical studies of science);

– Talcott Parsons, graduate advisor and colleague (for his enthusiastic pursuit of theoretical concerns);

– Paul Lazarsfeld, Columbia colleague (for his long-term close engagement with Merton over the analytical issues of formulating a sociology that interfaced theory and research).

But these are only his ‘masters-at-close-range’. Much of Merton’s concern was, as Coser puts it, a ‘self-conscious effort to ransack the whole house of European erudition’ (1975, 89). Merton drew very widely on a very wide array of European social theorists. He chose Durkheim as a role model, especially with respect to the strategy of following an open-ended train of inquiry across a scatter of topics.¹² Durkheim was a major source in the development of Merton’s anomie theory of deviance, the functional mode of analysis, the emphasis on the facticity of social structures, the importance of wider cultural categories and more generally his methodological approach. Weber’s work played a significant role in Merton’s development of what came to be known as the ‘Merton hypothesis’ – the religious impetus to the development of seventeenth century science and, more generally, the autonomy, but also interpenetration, of different social spheres – as well as his analysis of bureaucracy, and the importance of interpretive aspects of social action. Mannheim, too, had some degree of influence on Merton’s approach to the sociology of knowledge and Merton found Simmel an important source for work on group properties. Further, Merton’s close reading of Marx led to a concern with, more generally, how conflict is built-in to the very fabric of society and, in particular, the operation of social class. Each of these theorists was actively used and their ideas reformulated as Merton developed an approach to particular theoretical problems (see for example Swedberg’s chapter).

Merton’s use of earlier American theorists is less marked, but nevertheless significant. Further, sources were drawn from social anthropology (Linton, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, Murdock), contemporary sociology, which he closely monitored, and a range of historians and social critics. Sorokin’s notions of culture and immanent cultural change are used and extended. Chicago influences such as Thomas’s ‘definition of the situation’ were drawn on. Homans wrote about ‘bringing men back’, to which Merton’s response was that ‘they never left’ – they were analytically construed as status-occupants which generated a set of problematics that Symbolic Interactionist and exchange theorists, which RKM thought complementary to his approach, left aside. Much of Merton’s work – though by no means all of it – can be seen as an extension of Parsons’s work: there is a similar foundation in terms of ‘action theory’ and similar analyses of broader structures. Although the ‘Frankfurt School in Exile’ inhabited the Columbia campus during the early 1940s, and despite Merton’s involvement with Lazarsfeld in advising on the ‘Authoritarian Personality’ research, there seems to be have been little direct theoretical influence from them.¹³

Although Merton’s own self-image was of a lone scholar at work in his study, there were two immediate intellectual contexts which strongly influenced his work. One was the effervescence around sociological thinking fostered by a cadre of professors and graduate students at Harvard during the 1930s (see Nichols 2010) and the other the longer term dynamics of the Columbia Sociology Department (see Lipset 1955; McCaughey 2003). In addition, there were the even wider contexts of the historical development of American sociology (Calhoun and van Antwerpen 2007).

Discipline Building and Sociological Theory

When Merton began his professional career, sociology in North America was either empiricist or involving broad theory derived from Continental writers, which was far too general to guide more detailed sociological research and overlapped too much with the history of social theory. Merton had a life-long concern to chart out a course that sociology might follow to allow the complexities of social life to be handled rigorously within both qualitative and quantitative frameworks. Besides his theoretical and methodological work, Merton had a (oft-ignored) life-long involvement in empirical projects across several subject matters (see in particular Fox in this volume and 2020).

An early methodological contribution was a pairing of short essays that dealt with each side of the interplay between theory and research (‘The bearing of sociological theory on empirical research’ and ‘The bearing of empirical research on sociological theory’: see Merton 1945b, 1948b; 1949b: see also Fasanella and Sabetta’s Chapter 6). The first essay differentiates several conceptions of theory, especially contrasting theory proper with general sociological orientations on the one hand and empirical generalizations and ad hoc explanations on the other. In the paired essay, research is seen as initiating, reformulating, deflecting and clarifying theory. In particular, Merton urges alertness to the possibility of ‘serendipity’ (a theme he revisited in his ultimate book, 2004): the unanticipated discovery of theoretically strategic facts. In a later essay on the ‘History and Systematics of Social Theory’ (1968), he indicates the potential for theoretical insights to be gained from (re)reading classical writers and the ‘humanistic’ aspects of Sociology. And more generally, in several essays on conflicting and competing approaches in sociology, he argued for a conception of sociology as a multi-paradigm or ‘theoretically pluralist’ science, in which theories derived from different theoretical approaches can shed complementary, rather than incommensurate, insights into social phenomena.

The (pre-Kuhnian) conceptual device of ‘paradigms’ was advanced (on several occasions, thus marking its importance in his thinking) to encourage the systematic consolidation of areas of study. Examples are his paradigms for functional analysis in sociology and the sociology of knowledge, and as worked examples (delimited paradigms), those relating to anomie, intermarriage and prejudice–discrimination. Paradigms are seen as not just notational devices, but as ‘logical designs for analysis’ which ‘bring out into the open the array of assumptions, concepts and basic propositions employed in a sociological investigation’ (1976b, 211). They are ‘preliminary efforts to assemble propositional inventions of sociological knowledge’ (1976b, 211). Most particularly, a paradigm provides the agenda of problematics in an area.

Within the framework provided by a paradigm, Merton was able to show how different theories can complement each other. In a comparison of four alternative theories of deviance, he shows (1961/1976, 31–37) how each highlights a particular area of phenomena while leaving other aspects in shadow. While some theories can be combined, some clash or give rise to competing hypotheses and others ‘talk past each other’. For example, the differential rates of deviance generated by anomie-and-opportunity structures explain the original development of deviance, whereas labelling theory explains the perpetuation of subsequent deviant careers.

The central methodological precept for which Merton is undoubtedly most famous is his advocacy of