Abstract
Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) is an enigma. In his generation, he was highly influential across a range of issues in sociology including sociological theory, research strategies, and areas of neglect such as the sociology of science. Merton created more concepts and theories than any other sociologist. These include ambivalence, anomie-and-opportunity structure-theory, manifest and latent functions, Matilda effect, Matthew effect, Principle of Cumulative Advantage, role-set, the self-fulfilling prophecy, serendipity, status-set, and unanticipated consequences of purposive action. He also created new areas of research including the sociology of scientific discovery and the prestige of famous scientists. Merton was also at key institutions that had a major impact on sociology such as Columbia University in New York. Merton (1965), his text-book 1949 Social Theory and Social Structure (Merton, 1949) went into many editions. In 1994, Merton became the first sociologist to e awarded the National Medical of Science. Prior to Crothers’s study of Merton, the only full length evaluation was undertaken by Piotr Sztompka (1986) Robert K. Merton. An Intellectual Portrait on the occasion of Merton’s 75th birthday. The Berliner Journal fuer Soziologie published a special collection to celebrate his work 100 years from his birth in 1900 (Mueller et al., 2010).
Despite his presence in American sociology, Merton may have laid the foundations for his own demise in his famous view of scientific progress or lack of it. Playing with Newton’s aphorism “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” Merton claimed that any science that continues to stand on the shoulders of its founders is destined to fail. The other irony is that Merton made major contributions to the sociology of scientific success and professional prestige in his theories of serendipity, the Matthew effect and the Principle of Cumulative Advantage. Cynically we might simplify his conclusions by noting that people who are famous continue to be famous even when the reasons for their fame have evaporated. Merton also worked with Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (1901–1976) on audience research for radio and television from which Merton went on to perfect the idea of the focused group interview.
Charles Crothers offers insights into the demise of Merton’s influence and provides arguments to restore Merton to modern sociology. Merton became influential to some extent in the shadow of Talcott Parsons and functionalism against which he developed his middle range theory which was grounded in empirical research rather than in Grand Theory. Merton was the right man in the right place but probably at the wrong time. With the demise of Parsonian functionalism, sociology was quickly developed by symbolic interactionism, social constructionism, ethnomethodology, conversational analysis, conflict sociology, and eventually by cultural studies and post-modernism. The prospect of sociology ever becoming a “normal science” in Thomas Kuhn’s conception of a coherent paradigm was long over. Merton’s middle range theories and his lack of attention to gender and race was out of kilter with the emerging student radicalism of the 1960s.
Despite the rapidly changing intellectual and political environment, Merton’s contributions to sociological theory were significant in developing sociological research into crime and science. He also developed sociological research methods. However, Merton has unsurprisingly been subject to criticism especially for his anomie theory of criminal behavior and his sociology of science. Critical criminology rejects Merton’s anomie theory as blaming the victim rather than the system. The sociology of science also took a more critical view of scientific progress through empirical research for example on the behavior of scientists in a laboratory setting (Bloor, 1976). Although Merton made no contribution to the sociology of religion, his model of deviant behavior was adopted by Bryan Wilson (1959) and became the basis of the long-enduring theory of sectarianism. One area of research that remains underdeveloped relates to Merton’s theory of the unanticipated consequences of action. While the idea of social action, to a large extent following Max Weber’s verstehende soziologie, more or less defines sociology, the idea of unanticipated consequences has been strangely neglected in contemporary spciology. In passing we might note that Ulrich Beck’s (1992) highly successful Risk Society contains no reference to the risky character of unanticipated consequences.
While Sztompka presented an “intellectual portrait” of Merton, Crothers presents a more systematic treatment of Merton’s sociology by presenting chronology of Merton’s development and the issues with which he engaged at various stages. These are the Harvard years in the 1930s and the 2-year period at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1939. Merton spent most of his working life at Columbia University. This period can be regarded as the comprehensive development of his commitment to middle-range theory which he described in 1947 as dealing with “delimited aspects of social phenomena, as is indicated by their labels. One speaks of a theory of reference groups, of social mobility, or role-conflict and of the formation of social norms just as one speaks of a theory of prices, a germ theory of disease, or a kinetic theory of gasses” (Merton, 1968:39). Middle range theory was an attempt to provide sociology with a research agenda that deliver valuable results in contrast to Parsons’s grand theory which Merton thought was premature and ultimately a failure. Examples of middle range theory include research on role conflict, reference groups, social mobility, and the formation of social norms. The relationship between Parsons’s general theory and Merton’s development of an alternative in his middle range theory forms the core of chapter 3 (“Early years at Columbia”) is in large measure the core of Crothers’s evaluation of the importance of Merton’s sociology. Crothers’s provides a summary of Merton’s contribution in Chapter 6 (“Reprise”). Merton influenced sociology by developing a methodology as the building-block of a discipline; providing a wide-ranging theoretical apparatus; grounding his work in an understated set of values; contributing to specific areas of study such as science; providing a “theory of society.”
In conclusion, Crothers’s personal connections with Merton and with Merton’s wife Harriet Zuckerman, his comprehensive reading of Merton and detailed understanding of Merton’s location in American sociology have produced a comprehensive study of Merton’s oeuvre. Reintroducing Merton can also be read as an introduction to American sociology from the publication of Parsons’s The Social System in 1951 until Merton’s “retirement” to his Riverside apartment in New York in the 1980s. Crothers’s commitment to Merton’s legacy is also illustrated by his editorship of the forthcoming Anthem Companion to Robert K. Merton.
