Arthur Stinchcombe

Stinchcombe joined the Northwestern University faculty in 1983 and was named John Evans Professor of Sociology in 1990. He retired in 1995. Stinchcombe died on July 3, 2018.

Over the course of his career, Stinchcombe was granted fellowship by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1977), and National Academy of Sciences (2003). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991.

Stinchcombe began his teaching career at Johns Hopkins University before returning to Berkeley from 1967 to 1975. He then left for the University of Chicago, followed by a stint at the University of Arizona.

Stinchcombe's most cited work, "Social Structure and Organizations" (1965), is a study of the relation of the society outside organizations to the internal life of organizations. The work proposes that “social structure” be understood as "any variables which are stable characteristics of the society outside the organization". It suggests that “organization” be understood as "a set of stable social relations deliberately created, with the explicit intention of continuously accomplishing some specific goals or purposes". This work is seen as an important contribution to organizational theory.

Arthur Leonard Stinchcombe (1933–2018) was an American sociologist. Stinchcombe was born on May 16, 1933, in Clare County, Michigan, and attended Central Michigan University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics. He then pursued graduate study in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, earning a doctorate.