Coleman, James

James S. Coleman (1926–1995) is widely considered to be one of the most outstanding sociologists of the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in 1926, in Bedford, Indiana, graduated as a bachelor of science from Purdue University in 1949, had a brief stint as a chemical engineer, and then studied sociology at Columbia University in New York from 1951 to 1955, mainly with Robert Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Martin Lipset. During his lifetime, he published 28 books and more than 300 articles. The publications that had the highest impact were on the sociology of community and education (schools), on policy research, and on mathematical and rational choice sociology. After getting his PhD in sociology in 1955 (Columbia), he spent three years as assistant professor in Chicago, then stayed as associate professor for 14 years at the Department of Social Relations of Johns Hopkins University, and worked as professor of sociology from 1973 to his death in 1995 at Chicago University.

The basic interest that drove Coleman's studies remained virtually unchanged during his career as a sociologist. He [Page 112]approached social systems as an engineer, trying to understand them by knowing how they can be (re)constructed. He went about this interest in three very different ways, and in each of them, he had considerable influence on other scholars. First, social systems are made up of individuals. Even though individuals are likely to have a common human nature, they differ according to how they are “formed” in society, and for a sociologist, it is crucial to understand the mechanisms that form them. Coleman's answer to this was that in our society, they are mostly formed by the communities and the schools in which they grow up. Thus, community and schools and their interrelation were Coleman's major subject of empirical research from the beginning to the very end of his career. In his later work on these topics, he developed the concept of “social capital” (especially norms carried by social networks in communities and schools) as an important tool for social analysis. The major books by Coleman on the topic of community and schools are the following: The Adolescent Society (1961), Equality of Educational Opportunity (the so-called Coleman Report, 1966), Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities (with Hoffer, 1987).

Second, individual actions and interactions combine to form social systems. How does it work? What mechanisms can we discern? To answer these questions, he developed mathematical models, for example, on diffusion processes, and later worked out rational choice models that allowed him to trace the processes that combine interactions into authority systems, systems of trust, collective behavior, and collective actors (often somewhat misleadingly called “the micro-to-macro link”). The most important book on these topics is his Foundations of Social Theory (1990), for which his Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (1964) and Individual Interests and Collective Action (1986) were important stepping-stones.

Third, if we know how social systems work, can we improve them by institutional design? Here, the questions that concerned him most were what the pressing social problems are, what we can do to mitigate them, and how research on these two questions (what he called “policy research”) can avoid being co-opted by political interests. With regard to the last point, he argued that the more explicit one can make the mechanisms by which social systems function, the less likely powerful political players will be able either to buy the results they want or bend results to legitimize their plans. In this sense, he clearly saw good fundamental research as the most important basis for policy research, a point of view slowly gaining ground in the social sciences generally. The most important books by Coleman on these questions are Power and the Structure of Society (1974), The Asymmetric Society (1982), and again, his Foundations of Social Theory (1990). In the remainder of this discussion, the three major areas of Coleman's work will be discussed in more detail. The most cogent criticism of Coleman's work will be briefly discussed in the last paragraph. For a more complete description of all points, see Lindenberg (2000).

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