Gary T. Marx


Gary T. Marx is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and retired from the University of Colorado in 1996. He has worked in the areas of race and ethnicity, collective behavior and social movements, law and society and surveillance studies.

Background

Marx was born on a farm in central California, raised in Los Angeles from the age of two, and attended John [Marshall High School |John Marshall High School]. He has degrees from UCLA and University of California at Berkeley. He taught at Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations, moving to MIT in Urban Studies and Planning. From 1992, he spent four years as head of the Sociology Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Marx was married with children, to Phyllis Anne Rakita Marx for over 50 years, until her death in 2013. They moved to a farm on Bainbridge Island near Seattle in 1996.

Contributions

Marx's early work was on race relations in the United States, during the Civil Rights Movement. He has also contributed to studies of collective behavior and social movements, and studies of policing and policing methods. In 1967, he was a consultant sociologist for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and participated in the writing of the controversial internal staff paper, "The Harvest of American Racism," which concluded that some of 1967's rioting was political in nature and inferred that it was justified. Although this paper was largely rejected by senior staff, its major theme—that the rioting was caused by racism—was consistent with that of the commission's final report, and Marx, while recognizing some of the final report's weaknesses, has generally been a strong and consistent supporter of the report.
He worked extensively on surveillance issues, illustrating how and why surveillance is neither good nor bad, but context and comportment make it so. He has sought to create a conceptual map of new ways of collecting, analyzing, communicating and using personal information. Explanation and evaluation require a common language for the identification and measurement of surveillance's fundamental properties and contexts.
His work has appeared or been reprinted in over 300 books, monographs and periodicals and has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Czech, French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Dutch, German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Portuguese, Persian, Macedonian, Slovak, Swedish, Belarusian; and other languages.
Marx has been a consultant to, or served on panels, for the House Committee on the Judiciary, the House Science Committee, the Senate [Labor and Human Resources Committee], the Government Accountability Office, the Office of Technology Assessment, the Justice Department, and other federal agencies; various state and local governments; the European Community and European Parliament, the House of Commons of Canada, The National Academy of Sciences, the Social Science Research Council, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the U.K. Association of Chief Police Officers, public interest groups, foundations and think tanks.

Awards

  • Guggenheim Fellowship
  • Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
  • Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
  • Undercover received the Outstanding Book Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences
  • Doctor Honoris Causa from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
  • Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems
  • Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Social Interaction
  • George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.

    Major works

  • Protest and Prejudice: a Study of Belief in the Black Community
  • Racial Conflict, Tension and Change in American Society
  • Muckracking Sociology: Research as Social Criticism.
  • Society Today.
  • Sociology: Classic and popular approaches
  • Undercover: Police Surveillance in America
  • Collective Behavior and Social Movements
  • Undercover Police Surveillance in Comparative Perspective

  • Selected newspaper articles, letters, and op-eds

  • New York Times, June 29, 1980.
  • Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1983.
  • New York Times, August 28, 1984.
  • Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1985.
  • Christian Science Monitor, January 14, 1986.
  • New York Times, February 24, 1986.
  • New York Times, August 29, 1986.
  • New York Times, February 15, 1987.
  • Los Angeles Times, April 1, 1987.
  • Newsday, October 23, 1988.
  • Los Angeles Times, December 25, 1988.
  • Christian Science Monitor, March 13, 1989.
  • Wall Street Journal, April 20, 1989.
  • Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1989.
  • New York Times, August 31, 1989.
  • Law Enforcement News, September 15, 1989.
  • Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1989.
  • Washington Post, December 11, 1989.
  • Washington Post, January 29, 1990.
  • Newsday, July 6, 1990.
  • Law Enforcement News, February 14, 1991.
  • New York Times, August 24, 1989
  • Christian Science Monitor, June 2, 1992
  • Computerworld, April 20, 1992.
  • Privacy Journal, November 1998.
  • Los Angeles Times, May 28, 2002.
  • Newsday, January 16, 2005.
  • ID Trail Mix, Aug. 2005.
  • ID Trail Mix. January 2007.
  • A stillborn Op-Ed article.