Robert K. Merton
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"In Émile Durkheim's view, traditional religions often provided the basis for the shared values which the anomic individual lacks. Furthermore, he argued that the division of labor that had been prevalent in economic life since the Industrial Revolution led individuals to pursue egoistic ends rather than seeking the good of a larger community. Robert King Merton also adopted the idea of anomie to develop strain theory, defining it as the discrepancy between common social goals and the legitimate means to attain those goals. In other words, an individual suffering from anomie would strive to attain the common goals of a specific society yet would not be able to reach these goals legitimately because of the structural limitations in society. As a result, the individual would exhibit deviant behavior. Friedrich Hayek notably uses the word anomie with this meaning." --Sholem Stein |
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Robert King Merton (July 4, 1910 – February 23, 2003, born Meyer R. Schkolnick to immigrant parents) was a distinguished American sociologist perhaps best known for having coined the phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy." He also coined many other phrases that have gone into everyday use, such as "role model" and "unintended consequences". He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor.
Publications
- 1938. "Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England." Osiris 4(2):360–632.
- This publication made Merton well known among historians of science. It was strongly influenced by Boris Hessen's famous 1931 Marxist account, The Socio-economic Roots of Newton's Principia, which he defended in a paper "Science and the Economy of Seventeenth Century England". However, Merton also supplemented Hessen's analysis of the technological determinants of the fields of inquiry of seventeenth-century science with a study of the influence of religion (especially Protestantism) on the social legitimacy of science as a profession: the so-called "Merton Thesis". He also supported Hessen's arguments by revealing how military problems influenced the research agendas of the Royal Society.
- 1938. "Social Structure and Anomie." American Sociological Review 3:672–82.
- 1942. "The Normative Structure of Science"
- 1949. Social Theory and Social Structure (revised and expanded in 1957 and 1968)
- 1965. On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript
- 1973. The Sociology of Science
- 1976. Sociological Ambivalence
- 1979. The Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir
- 1985. "George Sarton: Episodic Recollections by an Unruly Apprentice." Isis 76(4):470–86.
- 1996. On Social Structure and Science, edited by Piotr Sztompka
- 2004. The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science
See also
- Harriet Zuckerman
- Historic recurrence
- List of multiple discoveries
- Merton thesis
- Middle range theory (sociology)
- Multiple discovery
- Narcotizing dysfunction
- Role set
- Strain theory (sociology)
