[eccr] Merton dies at 92

>Robert K. Merton, Versatile Sociologist and Father of the Focus Group, 
>Dies at 92
>
>New York Times
>February 24, 2003
>By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
>
>
>Robert K. Merton, one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th 
>century, whose coinage of terms like "self-fulfilling prophecy" and "role 
>models" filtered from his academic pursuits into everyday language, died 
>yesterday. He was 92 and lived in Manhattan.
>
>Mr. Merton gained his pioneering reputation as a sociologist of science, 
>exploring how scientists behave and what it is that motivates, rewards, 
>and intimidates them. By laying out his "ethos of science" in 1942, he 
>replaced the entrenched stereotypical views that had long held scientists 
>to be eccentric geniuses largely unbound by rules or norms. It was this 
>body of work that contributed to Mr. Merton's becoming the first 
>sociologist to win a National Medal of Science in 1994.
>
>But his explorations over 70-odd years extended across an extraordinary 
>range of interests that included the workings of the mass media, the 
>anatomy of racism, the social perspectives of "insiders" vs. "outsiders," 
>history, literature and etymology. Though carried out with the detachment 
>he admired in Emile Durkheim, the French architect of modern sociology, 
>Mr. Merton's inquiries often bore important consequences in real life as 
>well as in academics.
>
>His studies on an integrated community helped shape Kenneth Clark's 
>historic brief in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that 
>led to the desegregation of public schools. His adoption of the focused 
>interview to elicit the responses of groups to texts, radio programs and 
>films led to the "focus groups" that politicians, their handlers, 
>marketers and hucksters now find indispensable. Long after he had helped 
>devise the methodology, Mr. Merton deplored its abuse and misuse but 
>added, "I wish I'd get a royalty on it."
>
>He spent much of his professional life at Columbia University, where along 
>with his collaborator of 35 years, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who died in 1976, 
>he developed the Bureau of Applied Social Research, where the early focus 
>groups originated. The course of his career paralleled the growth and 
>acceptance of sociology as a bona fide academic discipline. As late as 
>1939 there were fewer than a 1,000 sociologists in the United States, but 
>soon after Mr. Merton was elected president of the American Sociological 
>Association in 1957, the group had 4,500 members.
>
>Mr. Merton was sometimes called "Mr. Sociology," and Jonathan R. Cole, a 
>former student and the provost at Columbia, once said, "If there were a 
>Nobel Prize in sociology, there would be no question he would have gotten 
>it." (Mr. Merton's son, Robert C. Merton, won a Nobel Prize in economics 
>in 1997.)
>
>Another of Mr. Merton's contributions to sociology was his emphasis on 
>what he termed "theories of the middle range." By these he meant 
>undertakings that steered clear of grand speculative and abstract 
>doctrines while also avoiding pedantic inquiries that were unlikely to 
>yield significant results. What he preferred were initiatives that might 
>yield findings of consequence and that open lines of further inquiry. In 
>his own writings he favored the essay form, "which provides scope for 
>asides and correlatives," he said, over the more common and streamlined 
>scientific paper.
>
>He was often came up with clearly phrased observations that combined 
>originality with seeming simplicity. Eugene Garfield, an information 
>scientist, wrote that much of Mr. Merton's work was "so transparently true 
>that one can't imagine why no one else has bothered to point it out."
>
>One early example of such illuminating insight appeared in a paper called 
>"Social Structure and Anomie" that he wrote as a graduate student at 
>Harvard in 1936 and then kept revising over the next decade.
>
>Mr. Merton had asked himself what it was that brought about anomie, a 
>state in which, according to Mr. Durkheim, the breakdown of social 
>standards threatened social cohesion. In a breakthrough that spawned many 
>lines of inquiry, Mr. Merton suggested that anomie was likely to arise 
>when society's members were denied adequate means of achieving the very 
>cultural goals that their society projected, like wealth, power, fame or 
>enlightenment. Among the spinoffs of this work were Mr. Merton's own 
>writings on the ranges of deviant behavior and crime.
>
>A tall, pipe-smoking scholar, Mr. Merton often used the trajectory of his 
>life story, from slum to academic achievement, as material illustrating 
>the workings of serendipity, chance and coincidence, which so long 
>fascinated him.
>
>Robert King Merton was born Meyer R. Schkolnick on July 4, 1910, in South 
>Philadelphia; he carried that name for the first 14 years of his life. He 
>was the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe and lived in an apartment 
>above his father's milk, butter and egg store until the building burned 
>down. As a teenager performing magic tricks at birthday parties, he 
>adopted Robert Merlin as a stage name, but when a friend convinced him 
>that his choice of the ancient wizard's name was hackneyed, he modified 
>it, adopting Merton with the concurrence of his Americanizing mother after 
>he won a scholarship to Temple University.
>
>In a lecture to the American Council of Learned Societies in 1994, Mr. 
>Merton said that thanks to the libraries, schools, orchestras to which he 
>had access, and even to the youth gang he had joined, his early years had 
>prepared him well for what he called a life of learning. "My fellow 
>sociologists will have noticed," he said, "how that seemingly deprived 
>South Philadelphia slum was providing a youngster with every sort of 
>capital social capital, cultural capital, human capital, and above all, 
>what we may call public capital that is, with every sort of capital except 
>the personally financial." It is not difficult to see connections between 
>such views and Mr. Merton's insights into the causes of anomie.
>
>In a 1961 New Yorker magazine profile by Morton Hunt, Mr. Merton was 
>described as displaying "a surprising catholicity of interests and a 
>talent for good conversation, impaired only slightly by the fact that he 
>is alarmingly well informed about everything from baseball to Kant and is 
>unhesitatingly ready to tell anybody about any or all of it."
>
>Indeed, what is Mr. Merton's most widely known book, "On the Shoulders of 
>Giants," went far beyond the confines of sociology. Referred to by Mr. 
>Merton as his "prodigal brainchild," it reveals the depth of his 
>curiosity, the breadth of his prodigious research and the extraordinary 
>patience that also characterize his academic writing. The effort began in 
>1942, when, in an essay called "A Note on Science and Democracy," Mr. 
>Merton referred to a remark by Isaac Newton: "If I have seen farther, it 
>is by standing on the shoulders of giants." He added a footnote pointing 
>out that "Newton's aphorism is a standardized phrase which has found 
>repeated expression from at least the 12th century."
>
>But Mr. Merton did not stop there. Intermittently during the next 23 years 
>he tracked the aphorism back in time, following blind alleys as well as 
>fruitful avenues and finally finished the book in 1965, writing in a 
>discursive style that the author attributed to his early reading and 
>subsequent rereadings of Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy." Denis 
>Donoghue, the critic and literary scholar, wrote of the book admiringly as 
>"an eccentric and yet concentric work of art, a work sufficiently flexible 
>to allow a digression every 10 pages or so." He admitted, "I wish I had 
>written `On the Shoulders of Giants.' "
>
>More recently, over the last three and a half decades, Mr. Merton had been 
>gathering information about the idea and workings of serendipity, and 
>thinking about it in the same spirit in which he had written the earlier 
>book, which he liked to call by its acronym, OTSOG. As he had done with 
>all his investigations, he collated and pondered data he had entered on 
>index cards. Most days he started work at 4:30 a.m., with some of his 15 
>cats keeping him company. During the last years of his life, as he fought 
>and overcame six different cancers, his Italian publisher, Il Mulino, 
>prevailed on him to allow them to issue his writings on serendipity as a 
>book. And four days before his death, his wife, the sociologist Harriet 
>Zuckerman, received word that Princeton University Press had approved 
>publication of the English version under the title, "The Travels and 
>Adventures of Serendipity."
>
>In addition to Ms. Zuckerman and his son, Mr. Merton is survived by two 
>daughters, Stephanie Tombrello of Pasadena, Calif., and Vanessa Merton of 
>Hastings-on-Hudson; nine grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Carpentier Nico (Phd)
Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University Brussels
Studies on Media, Information & Telecommunication (SMIT)
Centre for Media Sociology (CeMeSO)
Office: C0.05
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.30
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.28.61
E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
W1: http://www.vub.ac.be/SCOM/smit
W2: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
W3: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~jteurlin/Koccc.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------- 


----------------
ECCR-Mailing list
---
To unsubscribe, send an email message to (majordomo /at/ listserv.vub.ac.be)
with in the body of the message (NOT in the subject): unsubscribe eccr
---
ECCR - European Consortium for Communications Research
Secretariat: P.O. Box 106, B-1210 Brussels 21, Belgium
Tel.: +32-2-412 42 78/47
Fax.: +32-2-412 42 00
Email: (freenet002 /at/ pi.be) or (Rico.Lie /at/ pi.be)
URL: http://www.eccr.info
----------------