Robert K. Merton - Biography

Biography

Robert K. Merton was born on July 4, 1910, in Philadelphia as Meyer Robert Schkolnick in a family of Yiddish speaking Russian Jews that 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, officially identified at his port of entry into the United States as Harrie Skolnick, a tailor from Russia and a Hebrew. Many of Merton's childhood experiences formed a basis for his theory of social structure, particularly the reference group. He attended South Philadelphia High School. As a high school student, he became a frequent visitor of nearby cultural and educational venues including Andrew Carnegie Library, The Academy of Music, Central Library, and Museum of Arts. He adopted the name Robert K. Merton initially as a stage name for his magician performances. 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".

He started his sociological career under the guidance of George E. Simpson at Temple University in Philadelphia (1927–1931). He worked as a research assistant to Simpson on a project having to do with race and media, introducing him to sociology. Under the leadership of Simpson, Merton attended the ASA annual meeting, where he met Pitrim A. Sorokin, the founding chair of the Harvard University Sociology Department. Merton then applied to Harvard and went to work as a research assistant to Sorokin (1931–1936).

He 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, becoming Giddings Professor of Sociology in 1963. He was 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 associate director of the University's Bureau of Applied Social Research from 1942 to 1971. 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 received many national and international honors for his research. He was one of the first sociologists elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the first American sociologist to be elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He was also a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which awarded him its Parsons Prize, the National Academy of Education and Academica Europaea. Merton is also credited as the creator of the focus group research method.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 and was the first sociologist to be named a MacArthur Fellow (1983–88). More than 20 universities awarded him honorary degrees, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Chicago, and, abroad, the Universities of Leyden, Wales, Oslo and Kraków, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Oxford.

In 1994, Merton was 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 was the first sociologist to receive the prize.

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 Suzanne died in 1992. Merton married his fellow sociologist Harriet Zuckerman in 1993.

Merton was one of Talcott Parsons' most devoted students; he participated not only in Parsons' seminars but was also for years an active participant in Parsons' informal sociology group, which met in Adams House. Merton has publicly stated that he came to Harvard in order to study with Sorokin but that the thinker who intrigued and inspired him the most was Parsons. Parsons was a junior member of his dissertation committee, the other members being Pitirim Sorokin, Carle C. Zimmermann and the historian of science George Sarton. The dissertation, a quantitative social history of the development of science in seventeenth-century England, reflected the interdisciplinary nature of this committee (Merton, 1985).