Merton as Harvard sociologist: Engagement, thematic continuities, and institutional linkages

Abstract

In this paper I explore the significance of the initial decade of Robert K. Merton's graduate and professional career, from 1931, when he entered the new doctoral program in sociology at Harvard, until 1939, when he joined the Department of Sociology at Tulane University as an associate professor and acting chairperson. Drawing on archival sources, as well as the professional literature, I examine how Merton engaged the exceptionally rich, interdisciplinary context of Harvard in the 1930s, including both interpersonal networks and diverse intellectual perspectives. In particular, I identify connections between Merton's early writing, "oral publications" and teaching, and three locally developed and dominant paradigms of sociology. Following an assessment of the influence of Merton's works published from 1934 to 1939, I trace continuities between Merton's achievements at Harvard and his subsequent teaching and research at Tulane and Columbia. I conclude that a fuller appreciation of Merton's "less noticed" decade in Cambridge is indispensable for understanding his overall career, and that it clarifies linkages across sociological work at three universities in the mid-twentieth century.

The great escape: World War II, neo‐Freudianism, and the origins of U.S. psychocultural analysis

“…Though not often recognized as such, Robert Merton's work on anomie is a perfect example of this. Among America's top midcentury sociologists, Merton put anomie on the social sciences' conceptual radar in a pacesetting article, “Social Structure and Anomie.” Cited more than 530 times between its publication in 1938 and 2004 (Nichols, 2010, p. 85), this watershed piece was, according to Piotr Sztompka, “the most‐quoted paper in the literature on deviance” for a decade and a half, utterly dominating the field (Merton & Sztompka, 1996, p. 3; cf. Passas and Agnew, 1997).…”

“…Passas and Agnew, 1997). For all the attention the article has received, however, what is customarily (if not entirely) neglected by historians and interpreters is the degree to which Merton was immersed in the individuation–sociocentric Freudian debate (Haney, 2008; Nichols, 2010). The goal in writing “Social Structure and Anomie,” Merton wrote, was to establish a “coherent, systematic approach to the study of socio‐cultural sources of deviate behavior,” and that entailed discovering why “some social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in the society to engage in nonconformist rather than conformist conduct”—what he called maladjustment, or anomie (Merton, 1938, p. 672).…”

Introduction: The Social Sciences in a Cross‐Disciplinary Age

“…Having one foot in the social sciences and another in the natural sciences, psychology was especially permeable to the latter's influences, but other disciplines, including sociology, political science, and economics, were similarly affected. Clearly, the emulation of natural‐science methods played a dominant role in the construction of postwar social scientific knowledge as illustrated by a number of articles recently published in JHBS (Selcer, ; Nichols, ; Owens, ; Martin‐Nielsen, ; Gunnel, ).…”

“…Economics and Neighboring Disciplines since 1945, and A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences (2014), all coedited with Roger Backhouse. Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Philippe Fontaine, Département d'économie et de gestion,École normale supérieure de Cachan,61,avenue du Président Wilson,94235 Cachan Cedex,France; natural-science methods played a dominant role in the construction of postwar social scientific knowledge as illustrated by a number of articles recently published in JHBS (Selcer, 2009;Nichols, 2010;Owens, 2010;Martin-Nielsen, 2011;Gunnel, 2013).…”

“…If some essays published in this journal point to the necessity of writing the history of the social sciences with paying heed to the natural sciences, an even more significant number of them have emphasized the cross-disciplinary nature of social scientific knowledge in the postwar era. Whether authors consider leading social scientists, such as Robert K. Merton (Nichols, 2010), Talcott Parsons (Owens, 2010), and David Easton (Gunnel, 2013); influential works, such as William F. Whyte's sociological classic Street Corner Society (Andersson, 2014); committees, such as the University of Chicago's Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations (Gordon, 2010); think tanks, such as the RAND Corporation and the Cowles Commission (Van Horn & Klaes, 2011) and the Simulmatics Corporation (Rohde, 2011); international organizations, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO; Selcer, 2009); educational models, such as the researchbased model of business education (Bottom, 2009); research movements, such as measurement of decision making (Heukelom, 2010), the projective test movement (Lemov, 2011), the peace research movement (Tomás Rangil, 2012), and behavioralism in political science (Hauptmann, 2012); or disciplines and fields, such as psychoanalysis (Gitre, 2010), linguistics (Martin-Nielsen, 2011, International Relations (Guilhot, 2011), and British sociology (Steinmetz, 2014), their narratives point invariably to the historical significance of cross-disciplinary engagements. 1 Here, too, natural scientists occasionally played a role.…”