Robert K. Merton
Robert King Merton was an American sociologist who is considered a founding father of modern sociology, and a major contributor to the subfield of criminology. He served as the 47th president of the American Sociological Association. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor. In 1994 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science.
Merton's contribution to sociology falls into three areas: sociology of science; sociology of crime and deviance; sociological theory. He popularized notable concepts, such as "unintended consequences", the "reference group", and "role strain", but is perhaps best known for the terms "role model" and "self-fulfilling prophecy". The concept of self-fulfilling prophecy, which is a central element in modern sociological, political, and economic theory, is one type of process through which a belief or expectation affects the outcome of a situation or the way a person or group will behave. More specifically, as Merton defined, "the self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior, which makes the originally false conception come true".
Merton's term "role model" first appeared in a study on the socialization of medical students at Columbia University. The term grew from the concept of the reference group, the group to which individuals compare themselves but to which they do not necessarily belong. Social roles were central to the theory of social groups. Merton emphasized that, rather than a person assuming just one role and one status, they have a status set in the social structure that has, attached to it, a whole set of expected behaviors.
Biography
Early life
Robert King Merton was born on July 4, 1910, in Philadelphia as Meyer Robert Schkolnick into a family of Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews who had immigrated to the United States in 1904. His mother was Ida Rasovskaya, an "unsynagogued" socialist who had freethinking radical sympathies. His father was Aaron Schkolnickoff, a tailor who had officially been registered at port of entry to the United States as "Harrie Skolnick". Merton's family lived in strained financial circumstances after his father's uninsured dairy-product shop in South Philadelphia burned down. His father later became a carpenter's assistant to support the family.Even though Merton grew up fairly poor, he believed that he had been afforded many opportunities. As a student at South Philadelphia High School, he was a frequent visitor to nearby cultural and educational venues, including the Andrew Carnegie Library, the Academy of Music, the Central Library, and the Museum of Arts. In 1994, Merton stated that growing up in South Philadelphia provided young people with "every sort of capital—social capital, cultural capital, human capital, and, above all, what we may call public capital—that is, with every sort of capital except the personally financial."
He adopted the name Robert K. Merton initially as a stage name for his magic performances. Young Merton developed a strong interest in magic, heavily influenced by his sister's boyfriend. For his magic acts he initially chose the stage name "Merlin", but eventually settled on the surname "Merton" to further "Americanize" his immigrant-family name. He picked the given name "Robert" in honor of the 19th-century French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, widely considered the father of modern-style conjuring. Thus his stage name became "Robert Merton", and he kept it as his personal name upon receiving a scholarship to Temple University.
Education
Merton began his sociological career under the guidance of George E. Simpson at Philadelphia's Temple University. Merton's work as Simpson's research assistant on a project dealing with race and media introduced Merton to sociology. Under Simpson's leadership, Merton attended an American Sociological Association annual meeting where he met Pitrim A. Sorokin, the founding chair of the Harvard University sociology department. Merton applied to Harvard and worked from 1931 to 1936 as a research assistant to Sorokin.By his second year at Harvard he had begun publishing with Sorokin. In 1934 he began publishing articles of his own, including "Recent French Sociology", "The Course of Arabian Intellectual Development, 700–1300 A.D.", "Fluctuations in the Rate of Industrial Invention", and "Science and Military Technique". In 1936 he graduated from Harvard, having obtained an MA and PhD in sociology.
By the end of his student career in 1938 he embarked on works that brought him renown, publishing his first major study, Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, which helped create the sociology of science. Merton's dissertation committee comprised Sorokin, Talcott Parsons, the historian George Sarton, and the biochemist Lawrence Joseph Henderson. Merton's thesis—similar to Max Weber's famous claim about a link between the Protestant work ethic and the capitalist economy—proposed a positive correlation between the rise of Protestant pietism, Puritanism, and early experimental science.
Personal life
In 1934 Merton married Suzanne Carhart, with whom he had a son, Robert C. Merton, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in economics, and two daughters, Stephanie Merton Tombrello and Vanessa Merton, professor of law at Pace University School of Law. In 1968 Merton and Carhart separated; she died in 1992.In 1993 Merton married his fellow sociologist and collaborator, Harriet Zuckerman. After years of failing health, and battling six forms of cancer, Merton died in Manhattan on 23 February 2003, aged 92. He was survived by his wife, three children, nine grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.
Career
Teaching career
Merton taught at Harvard until 1938, when he became professor and chairman of the Department of Sociology at Tulane University. In 1941, he joined the Columbia University faculty, where he spent the vast majority of his teaching career. Over his five decades at Columbia University he held numerous prestigious titles. He was associate director of the university's Bureau of Applied Social Research from 1942 to 1971, and named Giddings Professor of Sociology in 1963. He was also named to the university's highest academic rank, University Professor, in 1974 and became a Special Service Professor, a title reserved by the trustees for emeritus faculty who "render special services to the University", upon his retirement in 1979. He was an adjunct faculty member at Rockefeller University, and was also the first Foundation Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He withdrew from teaching in 1984. In recognition of his lasting contributions to scholarship and the university, Columbia established the Robert K. Merton Professorship in the Social Sciences in 1990.Theory
Upon moving to Columbia in 1941, Merton joined Paul Lazarsfeld, who was introducing quantitative methods into empirical research in sociology. Lazarsfeld and Merton emphasized the importance of "systematic data", collected in a systematic way through representative sampling. Merton sought to develop a theoretical approach "that would turn the results from this research into sociology."Middle-range theory
Merton's work is often compared to that of Talcott Parsons. Merton enrolled in Parsons' theory course while at Harvard, admiring Parsons' work because it introduced him to European methods of theory, while also broadening his own ideas about sociology. However, unlike Parsons, who emphasized the necessity for social science to establish a general foundation, Merton preferred more limited, middle-range theories. Merton later explained in his writings that "although much impressed by Parsons as a master-builder of sociological theory, I found myself departing from his mode of theorizing." Merton himself fashioned his theory very similarly to that of Emile Durkheim's Suicide or Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber had suggested a strong relationship between Protestant beliefs and the Economic activity that gave rise to capitalism. Merton's extensive research highlighted a complementarity between puritanical Protestant beliefs and science, which developed rapidly in the seventeenth century. Merton believed that middle range theories bypassed the failures of larger theories, which are too distant from observing social behavior in a particular social setting.According to Merton, middle-range theory starts its theorizing with clearly defined aspects of social phenomena, rather than with broad, abstract entities such as society as a whole. Theories of the middle range should be firmly supported by empirical data. These theories must be constructed with observed data to create theoretical problems and to be incorporated in proposals that allow empirical testing. Middle-range theories, applicable to limited ranges of data, transcend sheer description of social phenomena and fill in the blanks between raw empiricism and grand or all-inclusive theory.
The identification of middle-range theories or "intermediate provisions", as defined by Rinzivillo, is typical of the specification that passes through functional analysis, developed by Merton in the course of his research on the relationship between theory and empirical research. Unlike the functionalist theorisation proposed by Parsons, Merton proposes a choice that puts in particular evidence the relationship that the researcher should assume in the direction of a pragmatic choice of the instruments and methodology it uses. In this way, the theory can be addressed for heuristic purposes and the empirical research results in the operative aspect of the analysis, where the sociologist is obliged to choose to represent always, not the universe of the variables in play, but a reduction of the field of scientific interest. A strategy, in short, in favor of the survey.