Robert King Merton (born Meyer Robert Schkolnick; July 4, 1910 – February 23, 2003) 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: (1) sociology of science; (2) sociology of crime and deviance; (3) 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". 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.

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.

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".

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 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.

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. 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.

The identification of middle-range theories or "intermediate provisions", as defined by Rinzivillo (2019), 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.

Anomie and Strain

Merton argued that deviance may result as a consequence of a blockage in an individual's life which does not allow them to achieve their goal, essentially leading to deviant behavior. According to Merton's strain theory, criminality is determined by acceptance or rejection of cultural ideals and/or institutionalized mechanisms of accomplishing those goals. The term "strain" refers to the gap between culturally determined goals and the institutionalized tools available to fulfill these goals. Merton uses the progress of achieving the 'American Dream' as an example. If an individual can not achieve the culturally dominant goal (of success), it can prove frustrating for the individual and may lead to breaking free into illegal escape routes or delinquency. The theory has been criticized for not or insufficiently factoring in an individual's aspirations and expectations of achieving those goals. For this reason and others, adherents of strain theory have developed revisions, such as Edwin Sutherland who defined white-collar crime as "a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation".

Clarifying functional analysis

Merton argues that the central orientation of functionalism is in interpreting data by their consequences for larger structures in which they are implicated. Like Durkheim and Parsons, he analyzes society with reference to whether cultural and social structures are well or badly integrated. Merton is also interested in the persistence of societies and defines functions that make for the adaptation of a given social system. He believed that the way these early functionalists put emphasis on functions of one social structure or institution for another, created bias when focusing only on adaptation or adjustment because they would always have a positive consequence.

His belief in empirical testing led to the development of his "paradigm" of functional analysis. Manifest functions are the consequences that people observe or expect, or what is intended; latent functions are those that are neither recognized nor intended. In distinguishing between manifest and latent functions, Merton argued that one must dig to discover latent functions. His example from his 1949 piece, "Manifest and Latent Functions", was an analysis of political machines. Manifest and latent functions were devised to prelude the inadvertent confusion between conscious motivations for social behavior and its objective consequences.  Merton began by describing the negative consequences of political machines, and then changed the angle and demonstrated how the people in charge of the machines, acting in their own interest, were meeting the social needs not met by government institutions.

|-

! Attitude to Goals !! Attitude to Means !! Modes of Adaptation

|-

| accept || accept || Conformity

|-

| accept || reject || Innovation

|-

| reject || accept || Ritualism

|-

| reject || reject || Retreatism

|-

| reject/accept || reject/accept || Rebellion

|}

In this rubric, conformity refers to the attaining of societal goals by socially accepted means, while innovation refers to the attaining of those goals in unaccepted ways (such as crime and deviance). Innovators find and create their own ways to obtain what they want, and a majority of the time, these new means are considered to be socially unaccepted and deviant. Merton considers ritualism the acceptance of the means but the forfeit of the goals. Ritualists continue to subscribe to the means, but they have rejected the overall goal; they are not viewed as deviant. Retreatism is the rejection of both the means and the goals. Retreaters want to find a way to escape from everything and therefore reject both the goals and the means and are seen as deviant. Rebellion differs from the other four approaches in a number of ways. Temporally, rebellion is a short-term response (unlike the other four). Like retreaters, rebels reject both existing societal goals and means, but unlike retreaters, rebels work at the macro level to replace those existing societal goals and means with new goals and means embodying other values. Innovation and ritualism are the pure cases of anomie as Merton defined it because in both cases there is a contradiction or discontinuity between goals and means.

Sociology of science and CUDOS

The sociology of science was a field that Merton was very interested in and remained very passionate about throughout his career. Merton was interested in the interactions and importance between social and cultural structures and science. For example, he did pioneering historical research in his PhD dissertation on the role of military institutions in stimulating scientific research during the era of the Scientific Revolution.

Merton carried out extensive research into the sociology of science, developing the Merton Thesis explaining some of the religious causes of the Scientific Revolution, and the Mertonian norms of science, often referred to by the acronym "CUDOS". This is a set of ideals that are dictated by what Merton takes to be the goals and methods of science and to be binding on scientists. They include:

  • Communism: the common ownership of scientific discoveries, according to which scientists give up intellectual property in exchange for recognition and esteem.
  • Universalism: according to which claims to truth are evaluated in terms of universal or impersonal criteria, and not on the basis of race, class, gender, religion, or nationality;
  • Disinterestedness: according to which scientists are rewarded for acting in ways that outwardly appear to be selfless; and
  • Organized skepticism: all ideas must be tested and are subject to rigorous, structured community scrutiny.

The "OS" in "CUDOS" is sometimes identified as "Originality" (i.e. novelty in research contributions) and "Skepticism". This is a subsequent modification of Merton's norm set, as he did not refer to Originality in the 1942 essay that introduced the norms, "The Normative Structure of Science".

Merton introduced many concepts to the sociology of science, including: "obliteration by incorporation", referring to when a concept becomes so popularized that its inventor is forgotten; and "multiples", referring to independent similar discoveries.

Merton and his colleagues spent much time studying "how the social system of science works in accordance with, and often also in contradiction to, the ethos of science."

With his study of the Matthew effect, Merton showed how the social system of science sometimes deviated structurally from the ethos of science, in this case by violating the norm of universalism:

On the Shoulders of Giants

Merton referred to his book On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript as "OTSOG"—"part parody and part history of ideas", according to the publisher. In OTSOG, he traces the history of Newton's famous comment "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" back to centuries earlier, in the rambling style of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

Influences

Merton was heavily influenced by Talcott Parsons and to a much lesser degree by Pitirim Sorokin. Indeed, Merton's choice of dissertation topic reflect profoundly the interest from Parsons and was not of Sorokin's liking. Hence, Sorokin was strongly opposed to the emphasis of the creativity of Puritanism, which was a central element in Merton's discussion. Merton, however, managed to have both men on his dissertation committee. Merton worked with Sorokin as a graduate student at Harvard University.

Accolades

Over his career, Merton published some 50 papers in the sociology of science. Among many other fields and topics to which he contributed his ideas and theories were deviance theory, Organization theory, and middle-range theory.

The Robert K. Merton Award for the best paper in analytical sociology, has been awarded annually by the International Network of Analytical Sociology since 2013.

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

  • Historic recurrence
  • Narcotizing dysfunction
  • Role set
  • Sociology of scientific knowledge

Notes

References

Further reading

  • Deflem, Mathieu. 2018. "Anomie, Strain, and Opportunity Structure: Robert K. Merton's Paradigm of Deviant Behavior." Pp. 140–55 in The Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Criminology, edited by R. A. Triplett. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • — 2018. "Merton, Robert K." The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory, edited by B. S. Turner. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Poros, Maritsa V., and Elizabeth Needham. 2004. "Writings of Robert K. Merton." Social Studies of Science 34(6):863–78.
  • Sztompka, P. (1998). Robert K. Merton: Recipient of the 1997 Cooley-Mead Award. Social Psychology Quarterly, 61(2), 97–100.
  • Hymes, D., & Merton, R. K. (1980). The Award of the Talcott Parsons Prize. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 33(6), 5–8
  • .
  • Robert K. Merton Selected Publications — posted by E. Garfield, University of Pennsylvania.
  • Robert K. Merton papers, 1928–2003, bulk 1943–2001 — Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Columbia University Archival Collections.
  • Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) — by F. W. Elwell, Rogers State University.