Merton, Robert King

▪ 2004

Meyer R. Schkolnick 

      American sociologist (b. July 4, 1910, Philadelphia, Pa.—d. Feb. 23, 2003, New York, N.Y.), made wide-ranging contributions to the field, especially the sociology of science; he coined such expressions as “self-fulfilling prophecy,” “role model,” “unanticipated consequences,” “theories of the middle range,” “opportunity structure,” and “focused interview” (from whence “focus group”). Merton earned a B.A. (1931) from Temple University, Philadelphia, and a Ph.D. (1936) from Harvard University. He stayed on as an instructor at Harvard until 1939, when he moved to Tulane University, New Orleans, and then in 1941 to Columbia University, New York City, where he remained until 1985. At Columbia he collaborated with Paul F. Lazarsfeld at the university's Bureau of Applied Social Research until Lazarsfeld's death in 1976. Among Merton's publications were Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth Century England (1938), a seminal work in the sociology of science that explored the relationship between Puritanism and the rise of modern science; “Social Structure and Anomie” (1938), a widely reprinted paper that argued that some nonconformist behaviour is a result of the social structure; Social Theory and Social Structure (1949; rev. ed., 1968), a collection of papers that advanced a structural-functional approach to sociology; and On the Shoulders of Giants (1965), which traced the use of Sir Isaac Newton's statement “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Merton's work assisted Kenneth Brown in the preparation of the report on segregation that figured in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case. Merton served as president of the American Sociological Association in 1957 and was the first sociologist to receive a National Medal of Science (1994). His son, Robert C. Merton, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1997.

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