Robert K. Merton

He adopted the name Robert K. Merton initially as a stage name for his magic performances. Young Merton developed a strong interest in magic, heavily influenced by his sister's boyfriend. For his magic acts he initially chose the stage name "Merlin", but eventually settled on the surname "Merton" to further "Americanize" his immigrant-family name. He picked the given name "Robert" in honor of the 19th-century French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, widely considered the father of modern-style conjuring. Thus his stage name became "Robert Merton", and he kept it as his personal name upon receiving a scholarship to Temple University.

The identification of middle-range theories or "intermediate provisions", as defined by Rinzivillo (2019), is typical of the specification that passes through functional analysis, developed by Merton in the course of his research on the relationship between theory and empirical research. Unlike the functionalist theorisation proposed by Parsons, Merton proposes a choice that puts in particular evidence the relationship that the researcher should assume in the direction of a pragmatic choice of the instruments and methodology it uses. In this way, the theory can be addressed for heuristic purposes and the empirical research results in the operative aspect of the analysis, where the sociologist is obliged to choose to represent always, not the universe of the variables in play, but a reduction of the field of scientific interest. A strategy, in short, in favor of the survey.

The Robert K. Merton Award for the best paper in analytical sociology, has been awarded annually by the International Network of Analytical Sociology since 2013.

In 1993 Merton married his fellow sociologist and collaborator, Harriet Zuckerman. On February 23, 2003, aged 92, Merton died in Manhattan, survived by his wife, three children, nine grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.

Even though Merton grew up fairly poor, he believed that he had been afforded many opportunities. As a student at South Philadelphia High School, he was a frequent visitor to nearby cultural and educational venues, including the Andrew Carnegie Library, the Academy of Music, the Central Library, and the Museum of Arts. In 1994, Merton stated that growing up in South Philadelphia provided young people with "every sort of capital—social capital, cultural capital, human capital, and, above all, what we may call public capital—that is, with every sort of capital except the personally financial."

In 1994 Merton became the first sociologist to be awarded the US National Medal of Science, for "founding the sociology of science and for his pioneering contributions to the study of social life, especially the self-fulfilling prophecy and the unintended consequences of social action."

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 and was the first sociologist to be named a MacArthur Fellow (1983–1988). More than twenty universities awarded him honorary degrees, including: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Chicago University in the US; and, abroad, the Universities of Leiden, Wales, Oslo, Kraków, Oxford, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The postulate of the functional unity of society refers to the misunderstanding that societies are functional and harmonious unions. According to Merton's perception of functionalism, all standardized social and cultural beliefs and practices are functional for both society as a whole as well as individuals in society. This outlook maintains that various parts of social systems must show a high level of integration, but Merton argues that a generalization like this cannot be extended to larger, more complex societies. Merton points out that not all societies are happy and well-integrated, where the people function well together and all involved prosper. Merton cites examples, such as civil wars, African-Americans in the 1950s, and South African blacks during the apartheid regime as instances where societies were not necessarily functional for all people.

The distinction implied between manifest and latent functions was devised to preclude the unintentional confusion between conscious motivations for our social behavior and its objective consequences. Manifest functions are the consequences that people observe or expect, or what is intended; latent functions are those that are neither recognized nor intended. In distinguishing between manifest and latent functions, Merton argued that one must dig to discover latent functions. His example from his 1949 piece, "Manifest and Latent Functions", was an analysis of political machines. Manifest and latent functions were devised to prelude the inadvertent confusion between conscious motivations for social behavior and its objective consequences.  Merton began by describing the negative consequences of political machines, and then changed the angle and demonstrated how the people in charge of the machines, acting in their own interest, were meeting the social needs not met by government institutions. Merton made it very clear however, that unanticipated consequences and latent functions are not the same. Latent functions are one type of unanticipated consequences; functional for the designated system.

The "OS" in "CUDOS" is sometimes identified as "Originality" (i.e. novelty in research contributions) and "Skepticism". This is a subsequent modification of Merton's norm set, as he did not refer to Originality in the 1942 essay that introduced the norms, "The Normative Structure of Science".

By the end of his student career in 1938, he had already begun to embark on works that made him renowned in the sociological field, publishing his first major study, Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, which helped create the sociology of science. Merton's dissertation committee was composed of Sorokin, but also Talcott Parsons, the historian George Sarton, and the biochemist Lawrence Joseph Henderson. The Merton thesis—similar to Max Weber's famous claim on the link between Protestant ethic and the capitalist economy—proposes a positive correlation between the rise of Protestant Pietism, Puritanism and early experimental science.

Merton taught at Harvard until 1938, when he became professor and chairman of the Department of Sociology at Tulane University. In 1941, he joined the Columbia University faculty, where he spent the vast majority of his teaching career. Over his five decades at Columbia University he held numerous prestigious titles. He was associate director of the university's Bureau of Applied Social Research from 1942 to 1971, and named Giddings Professor of Sociology in 1963. He was also named to the university's highest academic rank, University Professor, in 1974 and became a Special Service Professor, a title reserved by the trustees for emeritus faculty who "render special services to the University", upon his retirement in 1979. He was an adjunct faculty member at Rockefeller University, and was also the first Foundation Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He withdrew from teaching in 1984. In recognition of his lasting contributions to scholarship and the university, Columbia established the Robert K. Merton Professorship in the Social Sciences in 1990.

Merton's theory on deviance stems from his 1938 analysis of the relationship between culture, structure and anomie. Merton argued that deviance is most likely to occur when there is a discrepancy between culturally prescribed goals and the legitimate means of obtaining them. Merton defines culture as an "organized set of normative values governing behavior which is common to members of a designated society or group". Social structures are the "organized set of social relationships in which members of the society or group are variously implicated." Anomie, the state of normlessness, arises when there is "an acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the socially structured capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them." In his theory, Merton links anomie with deviance and argues that the discontinuity between culture and structure have the dysfunctional consequence of leading to deviance within society. The goal of material success was accepted, but the legitimate means were abandoned in preference for illegitimate ones. So, theft might replace hard work as the means for achieving goals. Merton argued deviance results not from pathological personalities but from the culture and structure of society itself. Value consensus is when all members of society share the same values; however, since members of society are placed in different positions in the social structure, they do not have the same opportunity of realizing the shared values. This can create deviance.

In 1938, Merton’s “Social Structure and Anomie,” one of the most important works of structural theory in American sociology, Merton’s basic assumption was that the individual is not just in a structured system of action but that his or her actions may be forced by the demands of the system. Merton argued that when the economic system fails to provide legitimate means to earn an income, and status, the cultural logic of the social system may force the individual to act in ways that are culturally logical, even if illegal.

According to Merton, unanticipated consequences are actions that have both intended and unintended consequences. Everyone is aware of the intended consequences, but the unintended are more difficult to recognize, and therefore, sociological analysis is required to uncover what they may be. In his 1936 essay, "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action", Merton uncovered the wide field of human activity where things do not go as planned, and paradoxes and strange outcomes are seen. One of these outcomes is the "self-defeating prophecy", which through the very fact of its being publicized, is actually wrong. Merton was able to illustrate this by referencing Karl Marx's prediction that as societies become more modern, the wealth will be concentrated amongst fewer people, and the majority of society would suffer from poverty and misery. This prediction helped to stimulate the socialist movement, which in some countries slowed the development that Marx had predicted. Struggles for economic equality tend to spread economic benefit rather than concentrating it. The opposite of the "self-defeating prophecy" then, is the "self-fulfilling prophecy", when an originally unfounded prophecy turns out to be correct because it is believed and acted upon.

Many had doubted that Merton would be accepted into Harvard after graduating from Temple, but he quickly defied the odds and by his second year he had begun publishing with Sorokin. By 1934, he had even begun publishing articles of his own, including: "Recent French Sociology", "The Course of Arabian Intellectual Development, 700–1300 A.D.", "Fluctuations in the Rate of Industrial Invention", and "Science and Military Technique". After completing these, Merton went on to graduate from Harvard with an MA and PhD in sociology.

In 1934 Merton married Suzanne Carhart, with whom he had one son, Robert C. Merton, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in economics, and two daughters, Stephanie Merton Tombrello and Vanessa Merton, a professor of law at Pace University School of Law. Merton and Carhart separated in 1968, and she died in 1992.

Merton began his sociological career under the guidance of George E. Simpson at Philadelphia's Temple University (1927–1931). Merton's work as Simpson's research assistant on a project dealing with race and media introduced Merton to sociology. Under Simpson's leadership, Merton attended an American Sociological Association annual meeting where he met Pitrim A. Sorokin, the founding chair of the sociology department at Harvard University. Merton applied to Harvard and went to work as a research assistant to Sorokin from 1931 to 1936.

Robert King Merton (born Meyer Robert Schkolnick; July 4, 1910 – February 23, 2003) was an American sociologist who is considered a founding father of modern sociology, and a major contributor to the subfield of criminology. He served as the 47th President of the American Sociological Association. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor. In 1994 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science.

Robert King Merton was born on July 4, 1910, in Philadelphia as Meyer Robert Schkolnick into a family of Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews who had immigrated to the United States in 1904. His mother was Ida Rasovskaya, an "unsynagogued" socialist who had freethinking radical sympathies. His father was Aaron Schkolnickoff, a tailor who had officially been registered at port of entry to the United States as "Harrie Skolnick". Merton's family lived in strained financial circumstances after his father's uninsured dairy-product shop in South Philadelphia burned down. His father later became a carpenter's assistant to support the family.

Merton's work is often compared to that of Talcott Parsons. Merton enrolled in Parsons' theory course while at Harvard, admiring Parsons' work because it introduced him to European methods of theory, while also broadening his own ideas about sociology. However, unlike Parsons, who emphasized the necessity for social science to establish a general foundation, Merton preferred more limited, middle-range theories. Merton later explained in his writings that "although much impressed by Parsons as a master-builder of sociological theory, I found myself departing from his mode of theorizing (as well as his mode of exposition)." Merton himself fashioned his theory very similarly to that of Emile Durkheim's Suicide (1897) or Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Weber had suggested a strong relationship between Protestant beliefs and the Economic activity that gave rise to capitalism. Merton’s extensive research highlighted a complementarity between puritanical Protestant beliefs and science, which developed rapidly in the seventeenth century. Merton believed that middle range theories bypassed the failures of larger theories, which are too distant from observing social behavior in a particular social setting.