Professor Robert Merton

Sociologist who coined the 'self-fulfilling prophecy' and other 20th-century neologisms

Meyer Robert Schkolnick (Robert King Merton), sociologist: born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 5 July 1910; tutor and instructor, Harvard University 1936-39; Associate Professor, then Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, Tulane University, New Orleans, 1939-41; Assistant Professor, then Professor, Columbia University, New York 1941-63, Giddings Professor of Sociology 1963-74, University Professor 1974-79 (Emeritus), Special Service Professor 1979-85; married 1934 Suzanne Carhart (one son, two daughters; marriage dissolved), 1993 Harriet Zuckerman; died New York 23 February 2003

Robert Merton was one of the most distinguished sociologists of the 20th century. In a long post-war period stretching well into the 1970s his reputation within American sociology was equalled only by Talcott Parsons, and his influence on its institutional development was arguably much greater.

Merton is most readily associated with his "theory of the middle range"; with his pioneering work in the sociology of science; with perhaps the most frequently cited and reprinted paper in the history of sociology, "Social Structure and Anomie", first published in the American Sociological Review in 1938; and with a stream of neologisms that he either coined himself or rescued from the shadows to elaborate and refine. He saw many of the latter become firmly established not only within the lexicon of sociology but also within the vocabularies of everyday life. They include the self-fulfilling prophecy, reference groups, the focused interview (which, in turn, spawned "focus groups"), opportunity structure, manifest and latent functions, unanticipated consequences, role-models, status-sets, social dysfunctions, scientific paradigms, the serendipity pattern in research and obliteration by incorporation.

He was born Meyer Robert Schkolnick in 1910 in Philadelphia, the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father scraped out a living as a carpenter and truck driver and Schkolnick grew up in the city's southern slums. He lived above the family's milk, egg and butter store until the building burned down. He was no stranger to the juvenile gangs and street fights of his neighbourhood but also, very early on, was drawn to the local public library and to the promise of learning that it housed.

Many have hinted at links between these early years and his later insights into the causes of anomie (that is, the lack of the usual social standards in a group or person). At 12 he became an amateur magician and performed at local social functions. He adopted Robert Merlin as a stage name after the mythical wizard but, encouraged by friends, modified it over the years, eventually adopting Robert Merton after winning a scholarship to Temple University in 1931.

After completing his BA at Temple University, Merton won a fellowship for graduate work at Harvard University, where he studied with Parsons, George Sarton, Pitirim Sorokin and L.J. Henderson. Merton's doctoral dissertation was published in 1938 as Science, Technology and Society in 17th-century England, by which time he had become an instructor and tutor at Harvard. This was a seminal book in establishing the sociology of science as a significant field of study in its own right. In the words of his contemporary Robert Bierstedt:

To ask what Merton has contributed to this area of enquiry is almost to ask the wrong question. The sociology of science is a sea over which he exercises an admiral's suzerainty. It was he who explored it, surveyed it, and drew its charts.

In 1990, 52 years after this youthful dissertation saw print, 18 eminent scholars came together in a special volume to debate the continuing significance of its thesis about Puritanism and the ethos that surrounded the rise of modern science.

Leaving Harvard, Merton spent two years at Tulane University, New Orleans, before becoming assistant professor at Columbia University, New York, in 1941. He was to remain here for the rest of his long working life. In 1934 he married Suzanne Carhart and they had a son, Robert C. Merton, who was to become a celebrated economist, winning the Nobel Prize in 1997, and two daughters.

Merton became a full professor in 1947 and succeeded the doyen of social science methodology, Paul Lazarsfeld, as chair of the department in 1961 for several years. From 1942 to 1971 he also served as Lazarsfeld's deputy in Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research. The tall, pipe-smoking, austere-looking Merton was devoted to words and the craft of writing, and he was a committed, formidable and inspiring teacher.

He also lent his prodigious talents in a most unselfish and private way to the support of aspiring colleagues through spending between a third and a half of his professional life reading and commenting on the work of others. He much preferred these activities to those of administration and he consistently refused to take up the position of director of the bureau, even when Lazarsfeld was out of the country for several years. Amongst many other honours Merton was President of the American Sociological Association in 1957, a MacArthur Prize Fellow (1983-88), and the first sociologist to win a National Medal of Science in 1994.

The first edition of Merton's magisterial Social Theory and Social Structure was published in 1949. It has since been translated into a dozen languages and both the impact and continuing status of this collection of Merton's earlier essays can be gauged by the remark of a recent editor of the ASA's theory journal that it is "as close to a bible as one is likely to come when surveying social theories".

The collection included a revised version of "Social Structure and Anomie" which is one of the most widely known of Merton's contributions to his own version of structural-functionalism, a more dynamic, open, liberal and research oriented version than that proposed by Parsons. The paper argued that criminal and other forms of deviance were encouraged by an acute mismatch between the cultural values of American society, in which the goal of material success is paramount, and the restricted "means" available to many citizens within its social structure. Deviance was a dysfunctional consequence of this mismatch between cultural norms and social opportunities.

In other works, including 12 single-authored books and collections of essays, Merton also made path-breaking contributions to the sociology of the professions in general and the medical profession in particular, to the sociology of mass communications (with Lazarsfeld), to the sociology of racism, and to micro-sociology. He believed with a passion, and as the title of one of his books has it, that we should stand "on the shoulders of giants" who have gone before us, if each new generation is not to repeat the mistakes and the false starts of its predecessors.

His own writing reveals a profound debt to the writings of the classical European theorists, particularly Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel, which he approached both sympathetically and critically but without polemic. He combined these orientations with a commitment to theoretically informed empirical research that was reinforced by his association with the Columbia Bureau. He placed the emphasis on "disciplined inquiry" on the basis of theories of the middle range that were explicitly opposed to the excesses of both empirically empty grand theory and theoretically empty data gathering.

The theoretical clarity, rigour and explicit empirical orientation of Merton's approach, first formulated at a time when there were fewer than 1,000 sociologists in the United States, gave it powerful advantages at the institutional level. It played a large role in the more formal couching of theoretical models within American sociology that accompanied a growing methodological sophistication, a combination whose influence was to spread around the globe in the post-war era.

Rob Stones