Robert K. Merton

Works

• 1949Social Theory and Social Structure

  Middle-range theories, manifest and latent functions, anomie and deviance, the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Position

Merton thought grand theories of society, including that of his teacher Parsons, were premature. Sociology should instead build “theories of the middle range” that could be tested against evidence. Social Theory and Social Structure (1949) gave functionalism its most usable form: an institution can have manifest functions, which are intended and recognised, and latent ones, which are neither; it can also be dysfunctional for some groups. In “Social Structure and Anomie” (1938) he explained deviance as a gap between culturally prescribed goals, such as success, and the legitimate means of reaching them; people respond by conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreat or rebellion. Earlier he had written about the unanticipated consequences of purposive action (1936). He coined or popularised terms that have passed into everyday language: the self-fulfilling prophecy (1948), in which a false belief makes itself come true, the role model and the reference group. Merton also founded the sociology of science. In 1942 he described its norms – communism (common ownership of findings), universalism, disinterestedness and organised scepticism – and in 1968 he named the Matthew effect, by which famous scientists receive more credit than unknown ones for comparable work; he later acknowledged that the idea drew on Harriet Zuckerman’s interviews with Nobel laureates. From the 1960s critics charged functionalism with neglecting conflict and power, and later sociology of science treated his norms more as ideals than as descriptions of practice.

Life & context

Robert K. Merton was born Meyer Robert Schkolnick in 1910 in South Philadelphia, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe; he took the name Merton as a teenage amateur magician. He studied at Temple University and from 1931 at Harvard, where Pitirim Sorokin supervised his dissertation and Talcott Parsons became an important teacher. The dissertation, published in 1938 as Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, argued that the Puritan ethos had encouraged experimental science. After a brief period at Tulane he moved in 1941 to Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career. With Paul Lazarsfeld he directed the Bureau of Applied Social Research, and the focused interview they developed later became the model for the focus group. He was president of the American Sociological Association in 1957, and in 1994 he became the first sociologist to receive the National Medal of Science. His son Robert C. Merton received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1997. He died in New York in 2003.

Further main works

• The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action (1936)
• Social Structure and Anomie (1938)
• Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (1938)
• On the Shoulders of Giants (1965)
• The Sociology of Science (1973)