![]() ![]() Simpson, a sociologist of race on whose book, The Negro in the Philadelphia Press (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), Merton worked as a research assistant, which can retroactively be viewed as his first experience with media studies. He studied sociology under the tutelage of George E. As a boy he was an avid reader who frequented the public library and came to love Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy, a book that later inspired Merton’s stem-winding tale, On the Shoulders of Giants (1964). Part of an assimilating generation, he adopted the name Robert King Merton, initially as a stage name (he was a talented amateur magician) and then legally when he was an undergraduate at Temple College (later Temple University). Merton was born Meyer Schkolnick, the Philadelphia-born son of Jewish Russian immigrants. This entry focuses on his intellectual biography, his writings on communication, select interpretations of his work, and current uses to which his ideas are put. Though primarily committed to an objectivist paradigm of social scientific knowledge, Merton’s early work on communication had critical elements as well, making it an interesting and nuanced hybrid that continues to reward readings today, evidenced in wide though often ritualistic citations by contemporary scholars. His role in developing the focused interview would lead him to be called “the father of the focus group” when he died. He founded the sociology of science, which both fed and paralleled the sociology of mass communication. Some of his writings from the 1940s on propaganda, mass communication, and flows of social influence became classics in the field and birthed what he called “middle-range” concepts that continue to animate thinking and research today. A major architect of functional and structural analysis, Merton published theoretical writings that shaped understandings of media and communication from the end of the Second World War to the present. Together, they helped train scores of graduate students, including a few-most notably Elihu Katz-who would become central figures in media studies. Lazarsfeld he laid some of the foundations for communication research as a theoretically guided, methodologically rigorous, and empirically grounded social science. He spent most of his career at Columbia University, where in intellectual partnership with Paul F. Merton (1910–2003) was a versatile and highly influential American sociologist whose writings have had a lasting impact on the study of media and communication worldwide. ![]() Citation and Obliteration by Incorporation.Locals and Cosmopolitans in a Globalized World.Merton in Contemporary Communication Studies.Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Rhetoric.Commentaries and Historical Considerations.Sociological Semantics and the Diffusion of Concepts.The Rhetoric and Communication of Science.Public Opinion and Public Image Research.Mass Communication Theory and Communications Research.Propaganda, Mass Persuasion, and Social Influence.Writings on Communication and its Methods of Study.Major Interpretations and Collected Volumes.Intellectual Biographies and Remembrances.Autobiographical Writings and Merton’s Reflections on his Work. ![]()
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