Henderson received support for his Fatigue Laboratory, and foundation money also enabled the Western Electric research headed by Elton Mayo and the “Yankee City” social anthropology directed by W. Meanwhile, a great deal of social scientific work was done through the Graduate School of Business Administration, much of it with Rockefeller Foundation money. Both Lowell and Conant dined weekly with the Society of Fellows. Conant was Henderson’s nephew by marriage. Lowell appointed Henderson the first director of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, whose graduate student members included B. Conant had great confidence in Henderson and often consulted him on matters of policy. Many have found Henderson a rather fascinating figure who occupied a unique place at Harvard with strong connections to the undergraduate college, the medical school and the business school. Meanwhile, his work has remained influential elsewhere, especially in the former Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia. Reactions to Parsons since that time have been mixed but more moderate, and efforts have been made to restore him to a place of honor in U.S. The lowest point occurred after Parsons’s 1979 death, during the early 1990s, when Parsons was accused of attempting to bring former Nazis to Harvard shortly after World War II. At that point, however, with the resurgence of the conflict perspective, especially in Marxist and feminist forms, Parsons came under attack and much of his work was repudiated, especially by younger generations. Parsons was honored by a number of academic associations, and he remained a very prestigious figure until the late 1960s. In 1951 he published two highly influential works that largely defined the functionalist approach of that era. In 1949 he was president of the American Sociological Society. Parsons eventually superseded Sorokin at Harvard, becoming the chair of Sociology in 1944, and then chairing the new Department of Social Relations for a full decade (1946–1956). Examining Merton’s social psychology will contribute both to a fuller appreciation of his career and also to a more complete history of social science in the United States. Merton’s formulations have impacted numerous subfields of sociology, and some (e.g., “self-fulfilling prophecies,” “the Matthew Effect”) remain influential even today. I shall characterize his earlier analyses as “Harvard style,” and his later social psychological works as “Chicago style,” as a heuristic means of calling attention to interesting variations in framing. I argue that, throughout his long career, Merton consistently pursued social psychological issues, including how non-logical action, appeals to shared sentiments and collective definitions of situations affect life in organized groups. Merton (1910–2003) gained renown as a distinguished sociologist, especially in connection with the paradigm of “structural-functionalism” and he publicly self-identified as a “structuralist.” This paper calls attention to an emphasis in Merton’s work that sociologists have often overlooked, namely, his social psychology.
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