Merton, Robert

Robert K. Merton is among the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century. He is the founder of a sophisticated variety of structural functionalism, the originator of modern sociology of science, and a prolific contributor to the conceptual and theoretical resources of several sociological disciplines.

He was born on July 4, 1910, in Philadelphia, and died February 24, 2003 in New York. He graduated from Temple College in 1931 and pursued graduate study at Harvard University, where in 1936 he defended a doctoral dissertation on Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenthcentury England. Merton's thesis about the influence of puritan, pietist religion on the emergence of experimental natural science is still vigorously debated. In 1941 he moved to Columbia University, where he was to remain on the faculty of the Sociology Department for 38 years until his retirement. He has received the highest forms of academic recognition, among them 24 honorary doctoral degrees. In 1994, the president of the United States granted him the top academic honor, the National Medal of Science. His books have gone through multiple foreign editions, with Social Theory and Social Structure ([1949] 1968) appearing in more than 20 languages. In the Books of the Century contest organized in 1998 by the International Sociological Association (ISA), this volume was among the top five, which also included work by Max Weber and Émile Durkheim.

Merton is often referred to as a modern sociological classic for two main reasons: first, he made a lasting substantive contribution to general sociological theory, as well as some more specific theoretical contributions to various sociological subdisciplines (in particular the sociology of science and the sociology of deviance, where strong Mertonian schools are still operating), and, second, he exemplified a unique, classical style of sociological theorizing and concept formation.

Merton has elaborated two theoretical orientations: functional analysis and structural analysis. For him, functionalism meant the practice of interpreting data by establishing their consequences for the larger structures in which they are implicated. In 1949 he published his famous paradigm for functional analysis, where he outlined a flexible, undogmatic, deeply revised version of functionalism that allowed for the conceptualization of social conflict and social change. He put an emphasis not only on functions but also on dysfunctions of various components in the social system, and what he called “the variable balance of functional consequences.” He argued that the components of a social system may appear not only in harmonious but also in conflictual relations. The effect of a specific balance is not necessarily equilibrium, order, and continuity (as in the earlier structural functionalism), but sometimes disequilibrium, disorder, disorganization, and consequently social change. A quarter century later in 1975, he wrote an important paper, “Structural Analysis in Sociology” (in Merton 1986), which presented a correlative sociological orientation, emphasizing the network of relationships within which components of the system are located. Structural analysis is a natural, complementary outgrowth of functional analysis. Whereas functional analysis specifies the [Page 500]consequences of a social phenomenon for its differentiated structural context, structural analysis searches for the determinants of the phenomenon in its structural milieu. The best example of Merton's structural functional analysis is his famous theory of anomie. Understood as a structural condition of dissociation between cultural demands of success and the actual opportunities for success, anomie is shown to generate various forms of deviant conduct—innovation, ritualism, retreatism or rebellion—depending on the wider structural context within which it appears ([1938] 1996:132–52). In turn, these various ways of departing from established normative order have different effects on the functioning of the whole system, sometimes leading to social change. Obviously, both orientations refer to the different sides of the same coin: they scrutinise two vectors of the same relationship, between a social phenomenon and its structural setting.

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