Person
Robert K. Merton
American sociologist (1910–2003); the name behind “middle-range theory”, established terms such as the self-fulfilling prophecy and the focus group, and the Columbia research tradition.
Biography
Robert K. Merton was born in Philadelphia in 1910 and died in February 2003. He studied at Temple University and, at Harvard, under Talcott Parsons and George Sarton. In 1941 he joined the faculty of Columbia University; he is remembered as a co-founder, with Paul Lazarsfeld, of the Bureau of Applied Social Research.
He worked on bureaucracy, deviant behaviour, mass communication, social stratification and the sociology of science. He coined many terms that entered everyday language, such as the self-fulfilling prophecy and the focus group. In Cole’s tribute, the “theories of the middle range” approach, which ties theory closely to empirical testing, is the style of sociology he left to American social science.
The first edition of Social Theory and Social Structure appeared in 1949. There, theory is defined as a set of logically connected propositions from which observed regularities can be derived, and “middle-range theory” sits between small working hypotheses and large unifying efforts at theory. In 1994 he became the first sociologist to receive the National Medal of Science.
In this course
This lesson (What Is a Theory? Paradigms and Classifications) takes the concept of middle-range theory from him; the theories in the course’s “Mid-Range Effects” unit can be read as close to that description (our interpretation).
Key works
- Merton, Robert K. (1949). Social theory and social structure (1st ed.). Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. — The source of the idea of middle-range theory and of his definition of theory.