Coleman, James S. (1926–1995)

James Coleman is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest empirical sociologists of the 20th century. His great work was Foundations of Sociological Theory (1990), but his work on education was very influential, if controversial. He pioneered the use of formal theorizing in sociology, publishing An Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (1964) and Mathematics of Collective Action (1973), formed the Rational Actor group within the International Sociological Association, and founded the associated journal Rationality and Society in 1988.

Coleman's work intersects with the concept of power in a number of interrelated ways. As well as a formal approach to power with the index named after him, he recognized that power was a concept of immense social importance. His first book, Community Conflict (1957), is a series of case studies examining conflict at the local level. He saw that crosscutting cleavages within the social structure help ameliorate conflict, a process that is also aided by stable social structures and organizations. In a sense, he was a traditional normative pluralist, believing that multiple centers of power enable efficiency. He also saw structured competition within markets, governments, and the state as promoting efficiency.

He believed competition within education was a good thing, though he strongly believed in equality of opportunity in education. He was commissioned to write a report on educational equality in the United States, which was published in 700 pages in 1966. He argued that educational attainment had more to do with the socioeconomic status of children than with the differences in school funding then existing. This led the statistically incompetent to misunderstand his argument that differences in school do not matter to educational attainment—hence the controversy. He also argued that black students would benefit from racially mixed schooling, which led to bussing, though he later controversially argued that bussing had failed because white parents removed their children from schools where blacks were sent. Coleman's other early work included an important study on medical diffusion. A central plank of his pluralism was that efficiency requires multiple sources of information. He found that doctors who were well connected into local medical networks adopted new drugs more swiftly than did those who were not. The idea of diffusion here has been enormously influential in later network studies, globalization, and organizational analysis.

Coleman was interested in the unintended consequences of social policy, such as the white flight caused by bussing. He used formal mathematics in his social theorizing (he had been trained in chemical engineering). His formal work led him to considering the cooperative game-theoretic ways of measuring power, and he created the Coleman Index for measuring the power of coalitions. His later work was informed by rational choice theory and the methodology of microeconomics. He saw collective action as the key problem for social theory, perceiving that people working together can achieve more than can those working alone. Thus, he had an interest in measuring the power of individuals as collectives or coalitions. In both Introduction to Mathematical Sociology and The Mathematics of Collective Action, he uses mathematical models to theorize about attitude change, diffusion, voting [Page 117]behavior, group contagion, and other social processes. The ways in which social structures affect human behavior led him to use rational choice methods of interpreting human behavior under constraint.

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