Wuthnow, Robert

Robert Wuthnow (b. 1946), an American sociologist, is best known as a highly prolific, empirically oriented cultural sociologist and a sociologist of religion who has, along the way, created a novel theory of cultural change to use in his empirical investigations. Wuthnow received his BA from the University of Kansas and his PhD in sociology from University of California, Berkeley, in 1975 with a dissertation supervised by Charles Glock and Robert Bellah. He joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1976 and has been there ever since.

Like Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Merton, Wuthnow is a social theorist whose theories arise from and serve his empirical research into social life. For example, of Wuthnow's 22 published books, 9 edited volumes, and over 160 articles, few are ...