Gouldner, Alvin

Alvin Ward Gouldner (1920–1980) was an American sociologist who made his early and lasting mark in the field of industrial sociology. A few years after graduating from City College of New York, where he received a bachelor of business administration degree in 1941, Gouldner began work on a master's degree in sociology at Columbia University. By this time, industrial sociology had become an established subfield within sociology, growing in large part out of the earlier Hawthorne experiments conducted between 1927 and 1932 and Elton Mayo's program of human relations management that developed shortly thereafter. With his business background and interest in applying theory to this newly burgeoning area of concern, Gouldner found a supportive and sympathetic mentor in Robert K. Merton, who had joined the Columbia faculty in 1941. Merton (1982) was impressed by the seriousness and scholarly acumen of the young Gouldner, and under his guidance, Gouldner completed his MA thesis in 1945.

Over the next few years, Gouldner took a number of positions while working on his Columbia dissertation under Merton. From 1945 to 1947, he served as resident sociologist on the American Jewish Committee, then as an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo from 1947 to 1951. In 1951 and 1952, he worked as a consulting sociologist at Standard Oil Company in New Jersey, then as an associate professor at Antioch College from 1952 to 1954. During these years, some [Page 341]of Gouldner's first scholarly articles were published in such journals as Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (in 1946), American Journal of Sociology (in 1947), and American Sociological Review (in 1948) (see Chriss 1999 for a thorough bibliography of Gouldner's work).

In 1953, Gouldner completed and successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, which he titled “Industry and Bureaucracy.” Robert Merton, serving as committee chair, was impressed with the dissertation and informed Gouldner that with only minor revisions, he should have not one, but two books ready for press. And indeed, a year later both Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy and Wildcat Strike were published from the dissertation. In Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, the more famous of the two books, Gouldner conducted a case study of a gypsum plant undergoing changes in management and plant operation. His main finding was that management succession tends to lead to higher levels of bureaucratization within organizations.

Through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, Gouldner continued to cement his position among the intellectual leadership of the field of industrial sociology while also contributing important insights to another field, sociological theory. These accomplishments led to his becoming professor and chairman of sociology and anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis beginning in 1959. A year later, he published “The Norm of Reciprocity,” which still stands today as one of the most frequently cited articles in sociology. In this paper, Gouldner focuses on the ways in which functionalist theorists tacitly invoke the concept of reciprocity but formally neglect to define and elaborate upon it. Saying that A is functional for B assumes that B reciprocates A's services, but also that B's service to A is contingent upon A's performance of positive functions for B. Gouldner, however, echoing a Marxist strand of critique of functionalism's assumptions about functional reciprocity, points out that if B is significantly more powerful than A, B can force A to benefit it with little or no reciprocity. This illustrates how social order is possible not only through consensual reciprocity—the explanation functionalists tend to favor—but also through outright force or coercion where reciprocity may hardly be present at all.

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