Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#501

Beverly J. Silver

#34013

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Beverly J. Silver is an American scholar of labor and development whose work has been translated into over twelve languages. She is a professor of Sociology at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

#502

James Alan Fox

#8170

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

James Alan Fox is the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy and former dean at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. Fox holds a bachelor's degree in sociology , a master's degree in criminology , a master's degree in statistics , and a Ph.D. in sociology , all from the University of Pennsylvania.

#503

Carl L. Bankston

#10134

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Carl L. Bankston III is an American sociologist, author and educator. He is best known for his work on immigration to the United States, particularly on the adaptation of Vietnamese American immigrants, and for his work on ethnicity, social capital, sociology of religion and the sociology of education.

#504

Mervin F. Verbit

#21133

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Mervin Feldman Verbit is an American sociologist whose work focuses on sociology of religion, American Jews and the American Jewish community. He is currently the chair of the Sociology Department at Touro College.

#505

Gresham Sykes

#18530

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Gresham M'Cready Sykes was an American sociologist and criminologist. He earned a Bachelor of Arts at Princeton University and a Ph.D. at Northwestern University. He taught at Princeton, Dartmouth, and Northwestern prior to becoming sociology professor at the University of Virginia. Sykes's study of New Jersey State Prison has been described as a pioneering look at the issues faced by guards, as well as the pains of imprisonment encountered by inmates . His most famous work is The Society of Captives, which is sometimes considered the first work in the genre of prison sociology. He coauthored...

#506

Tricia Rose

#18839

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Tricia Rose is an American sociologist and author who pioneered scholarship on hip hop. Her studies mainly probe the intersectionality of pop music and gender. Now at Brown University, she is a professor of Africana Studies and is the director of the Center for Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. Rose also co-hosts a podcast, The Tight Rope, with Cornel West.

#507

Claude S. Fischer

#21618

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Claude Serge Fischer is an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in urban sociology, research methods, and American society at UC Berkeley. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017.

#508

Hauke Brunkhorst

#28880

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Hauke Brunkhorst is a German political sociologist, Professor of Sociology and Head of the Institute of Sociology at the University of Flensburg, Germany. He specializes in European constitutionalism, political theory and European affairs. He received his doctorate in 1977 from the University of Frankfurt with a thesis "". During the 2009-2010 academic year, he was the Theodor Heuss Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

#509

Nathan Hare

#10424

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Nathan Hare is an American sociologist, activist, academic, and psychologist. In 1968 he was the first person hired to coordinate a Black studies program in the United States. He established the program at San Francisco State. A graduate of Langston University and the University of Chicago, he had become involved in the Black Power movement while teaching at Howard University.

#510

Alvin Toffler

#596

Overall Influence

1928 - 2016 (88 years)

Alvin Eugene Toffler was an American writer, futurist, and businessman known for his works discussing modern technologies, including the digital revolution and the communication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide. He is regarded as one of the world's outstanding futurists.

#511

Russell L. Ackoff

Russell L. Ackoff

#1382

Overall Influence

1919 - 2009 (90 years)

Russell Lincoln Ackoff was an American organizational theorist, consultant, and Anheuser-Busch Professor Emeritus of Management Science at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Ackoff was a pioneer in the field of operations research, systems thinking and management science.

#512

Danny Miller

#28621

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Danny Miller is a Canadian economist and Strategy Professor at HEC Montréal. He also teaches at the Chair in Family Enterprise and Strategy at the University of Alberta. According to a statement by HEC, Miller is the fifth-most cited management researcher in the world.

#513

Peter Worsley

#17047

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Peter Maurice Worsley was a noted British sociologist and social anthropologist. He was a major figure in both anthropology and sociology, and is noted for introducing the term Third World into English. He not only made theoretical and ethnographic contributions, but also was regarded as a key founding member of the New Left.

#514

Raka Ray

#46538

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Raka Ray is an American sociologist and academic. She is a full-time professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the departments of Sociology and Southeast Asian Studies. She became the Dean of Social Sciences at UC-Berkeley in January 2020. Ray's research interests include gender and feminist theory, postcolonial sociology, emerging middle classes, South Asia, inequality, qualitative research methods, and social movements. Her current project explores changes in the meanings and relations of servitude in India. Ray is also an editor of the publication Feminist Studies.

#515

John Lie

#31401

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

John Lie is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His principal academic interests are social theory, political economy, social identity, and East Asia. Early life and education Lie was born in Seoul, South Korea. He grew up in Tokyo, Japan, and Honolulu, Hawaii. After graduating from Punahou School, he attended Harvard University . He has held tenured appointments at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the University of Michigan, as well as holding visiting appointments at Yonsei University, Keio University, Harvard University, and other institutions.

#516

Evelyn Nakano Glenn

#24623

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Evelyn Seiko Nakano Glenn is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, she served as founding director of the university's Center for Race and Gender , a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008, Glenn was elected president of the 15,000-member American Sociological Association. She served as president-elect during the 2008–2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in Augu...

#517

Sammy Smooha

#10016

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Sammy Smooha is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Haifa. Biography He is recipient of the Israel Prize. He specializes in comparative ethnic relations, and has researched the internal divisions in Israeli society, and the society of Israel in comparative perspective.

#518

Stephen K. Sanderson

#21273

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Stephen K. Sanderson is an American sociologist. His area of focus includes comparative sociology, historical sociology, sociological theory and sociocultural evolution. He is a specialist in sociological theory and comparative and historical sociology and is one of the leading sociologists to develop an evolutionist, yet non-Darwinist, understanding of human society. He has written or edited ten books and about sixty peer-reviewed articles, and is the author of numerous articles and many books, including Evolutionism and Its Critics.

#519

Jesse R. Pitts

#24967

Overall Influence

1921 - 2003 (82 years)

Jesse Richard Pitts , was an American sociologist specializing in deviance and social control, family sociology, sociological theory, French society, and criminology. He is considered one of the leading disciples of Talcott Parsons, dean of American sociologists for much of the 20th century. Pitts is perhaps best known for his contributions to a large textbook on sociology, Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory, edited by Parsons and published in 1961. He pioneered sociological work on marginality, deviance and conformity. He was interested particularly in criminology and the institutional treatment of mental illness.

#520

Chi-Tang Ho

#45988

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Chi-Tang Ho is a Chinese-born American food scientist. He received his PhD in organic chemistry in 1974 and started working as a researcher and professor in the food science department at Rutgers University. He is now director of the food science graduate program at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

#521

Mattei Dogan

#10683

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

Mattei Dogan was a Romanian-born French political sociologist and senior research officer emeritus of the French National Center for Scientific Research and professor emeritus of political science of the University of California, Los Angeles. Over a period of 22 years, he also taught at UCLA, Indiana University, Yale University, the Institute of Statistical Mathematics in Tokyo, the University of Florence, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was a foreign honorary member of the Romanian Academy from 1992, and he received the CNRS Silver Medal.

#522

Diego Gambetta

#4539

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Diego Gambetta is an Italian-born social scientist. He is a professor of social theory at the European University Institute in Florence, a Carlo Alberto Chair at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, and an official fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He is well known for his vivid and unconventional applications of economic theory and a rational choice theory approach to understanding a variety of social phenomena. He has made important analytical contributions to the concept of trust by using game theory and signalling theory.

#523

Gary T. Marx

#21716

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Gary T. Marx is Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and retired from the University of Colorado in 1996. He has worked in the areas of race and ethnicity, collective behavior and social movements, law and society and surveillance studies.

#524

William Julius Wilson

#71761

Overall Influence

#525

Thomas Mathiesen

#11108

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Thomas Mathiesen was a Norwegian sociologist. Background Mathiesen grew up in the Norwegian county of Akershus, as the only child of Einar Mathiesen and Birgit Mathiesen . He is the grandson of surgeon Johan Berger Mathiesen .

#526

Richard Rosenfeld

Richard Rosenfeld

#15858

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Richard Rosenfeld is an American criminologist and Founders Professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Education Rosenfeld received his B.A. in 1972 and his Ph.D. in sociology in 1984, both from the University of Oregon.

#527

Kenneth D. Bailey

#9353

Overall Influence

1943 - 2009 (66 years)

Kenneth D. Bailey is an American sociologist, systems scientist and professor of sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles. Biography Bailey studied at the University of Texas at Austin. He got there a B.S. in mathematics in 1963, a M.A. in sociology in 1966 and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1968. The last four years he got an N.D.E.A. Fellowships. Summer 1967 he participated in a workshop in mathematical sociology at the Johns Hopkins University.

#528

Catherine Hakim

#26698

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Catherine Hakim is a British sociologist who specialises in women's employment and women's issues. She is known for developing the preference theory, for her work on erotic capital and more recently for a sex-deficit theory. She is currently a professorial research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Civil Society , and has formerly worked in British central government and been a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics and the Centre for Policy Studies. She has also been a visiting professor at the Social Science Research Center Berlin.

#529

Richard Lachmann

#38274

Overall Influence

1956 - 2021 (65 years)

Richard Lachmann was an American sociologist and specialist in comparative historical sociology who was a professor at University at Albany, SUNY. Lachmann is best known as the author of the book, "Capitalists in Spite of Themselves", which has been awarded several prizes, including the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award. In this work, Lachmann shows that relations among elites rather than class struggle, or any other set of factors proposed by other historians, primarily determined the creation or non-creation of capitalism in early modern Europe. Later, he used his elite conflict theory to analyze the political crisis in the United States.

#530

Mike Featherstone

#46662

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Mike Featherstone is a British sociologist. He is director of the Theory, Culture & Society Centre and the Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, and is visiting professor in Barcelona, Geneva, Kyoto, Recife, São Paulo, Tokyo and Vancouver. He has been influential in generating international funding and organizing conferences such as the Ubiquitous Media Conference in Tokyo. He is a founding editor of the journal Theory, Culture & Society and the Theory, Culture & Society book series . He is also the editor-in-chief of the journal, Body & Society .

#531

Ziauddin Sardar

Ziauddin Sardar

#4643

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Ziauddin Sardar is a British-Pakistani scholar, award-winning writer, cultural critic and public intellectual who specialises in Muslim thought, the future of Islam, futurology and science and cultural relations. The author and editor of more than 50 books, Prospect magazine has named him as one of Britain's top 100 public intellectuals and The Independent newspaper calls him: 'Britain's own Muslim polymath'.

#532

Mahmoud Sadri

#38686

Overall Influence

Mahmoud Sadri is an Iranian-American sociologist. He is the twin brother of Ahmad Sadri. He graduated with his master's degree in Sociology as well as a Baccalauréat qualification from the University of Tehran in 1976 and 1974 respectively. He then earned his Ph.D. from The New School University, New York in 1988.

#533

Christoph Deutschmann

#43817

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Christoph Deutschmann is a German sociologist. He currently holds a professorship at the University of Tübingen. Deutschmann studied sociology as a major, with economics and law as minors, at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, graduating in 1973 and earning his PhD there in 1975. From 1976 to 1984, he worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Social Research, home of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory. In 1987, he habilitated in the Social Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt. Since 1989, he is professor for Social and Behavioural Sciences in Tübingen.

#534

Gérald Bronner

#27639

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Gérald Bronner is a French social scientist and author. Bronner is a professor of sociology at Université Paris-Diderot and is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France . He is one of the main proponents of cognitive sociology in France and is known for his work on collective beliefs as well as for his involvement in jihadist radicalization prevention programs with the French government. More generally, his research has focused on the key success factors of a belief in social contexts.

#535

Robert Wuthnow

#39100

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Robert John Wuthnow is an American sociologist who is widely known for his work in the sociology of religion. He is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Princeton University, where he is also the former chair of the Department of Sociology and director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.

#536

Derek C. Angus

#71920

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Derek Calder Angus is an American-based, British medical scientist, whose work focuses on clinical, epidemiologic and translational studies of sepsis, pneumonia, multisystem organ failure and the organization and delivery of critical care services.

#537

Susan Leigh Star

#20950

Overall Influence

1954 - 2010 (56 years)

Susan Leigh Star was an American sociologist. She specialized in the study of information in modern society; information worlds; information infrastructure; classification and standardization; sociology of science; sociology of work; and the history of science, medicine, technology, and communication/information systems. She commonly used the qualitative methods methodology and feminist theory approach. She was also known for developing the concept of boundary objects and for contributions to computer-supported cooperative work.

#538

David Lyon

#22904

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

David Lyon is a retired Scottish sociologist who directed the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He previously held a Queen’s Research Chair position and appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Faculty of Law at Queen's University.

#539

Pan Suiming

#15335

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Pan Suiming is a Chinese sexologist and professor at the Renmin University of China who has taught sexology for more than 30 years. He is hailed as "the First Person in Sexology in China". Early life Pan was born in 1950 to an official family. At the age of 9, his father was classified as right winger and suffered unfair treatment. In 1966, Mao Zedong launched the ten-year Cultural Revolution, Pan became a sent-down youth at a state farm in Heilongjiang province.

#540

Howard E. Aldrich

#43280

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Howard E. Aldrich is an American sociologist who is Kenan Professor of Sociology and Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a Faculty Research Associate at the Department of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business. He is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge University and Faculty Fellow of the Center for Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University. Aldrich's main research interests are entrepreneurship, team formation, evolutionary theory, economic sociology and inequality, and gender is...

#541

Hildegard Maria Nickel

#67813

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Hildegard Maria Nickel is a German sociologist and feminist who has specialized in the sociology of work and gender studies. From 1977, she was attached to the East-German Academy of Pedagogical Sciences becoming a full professor at the Institute for Social Sciences at Humboldt University, Berlin, from 1992 until her retirement in 2014. In 1994, she received the Helge Pross Prize from the University of Siegen for her contributions to family and gender studies. From 2002 to 2008, Nickel was State Secretary for Economy, Labour and Women at the Senate of Berlin.

#542

Didier Fassin

#5917

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Didier Fassin is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science for the Institute for Advanced Study, the Chair of Public Health at the College de France, and holds Direction of Studies role in Political and Moral Anthropology at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He earned his MD from Pierre and Marie Curie University, an M.A. from the University of Paris, and a Ph.D. from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His career began in the medical field, during which time he served as an infectious disease specialist. He moved on to an anthropological approach, studying health inequities in Africa.

#543

Monique de Saint-Martin

#34688

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Monique de Saint-Martin is a sociologist born in France. Introduction She is the director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales , Monique de Saint-Martinis is known for her work with Pierre Bourdieu. The focus of her research is on the sociology of elites, the sociology of the Grandes écoles and the sociology of employers. Prior to her position at the EHESS, she was involved with the Laboratory Council of the Center for the Study of Social Movements from 2005 to 2008.

#544

Georgiann Davis

#8936

Overall Influence

Georgiann Davis is an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico and author of the book Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis. Davis formerly held similar positions at University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Born with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, she writes widely on intersex issues and the sociology of diagnosis.

#545

Neil Fligstein

#19015

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Neil Fligstein is an American sociologist and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his work in economic sociology, political sociology, and organizational theory. He has produced both empirical and theoretical works.

#546

Hanna Herzog

#48138

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Hanna Herzog is a professor of sociology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University and a senior research fellow and the academic director of the Civil Society forums at Van Leer Jerusalem Institute in Jerusalem.

#547

Ralf Dahrendorf

#21978

Overall Influence

1929 - 2009 (80 years)

Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf, also known as Baron Dahrendorf and Lord Dahrendorf, was a German-British sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and liberal politician. A class conflict theorist, Dahrendorf was a leading expert on explaining and analysing class divisions in modern society. Dahrendorf wrote multiple articles and books, his most notable being Class and Conflict in Industrial Society and Essays in the Theory of Society .

#548

Peter Abell

#25728

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Peter Abell is a British social scientist, currently professor emeritus at the London School of Economics where he has founded and directed the "Interdisciplinary Institute of Management". He has been teaching for many years at LSE's Department of Management, managerial economics and strategy group.

#549

Christopher Jencks

#12804

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Christopher Sandy Jencks is an American social scientist. Career Jencks is Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Emeritus. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1954 and was president of the school's newspaper, the Exonian, as a senior. After Exeter, he received an A.B. in English literature from Harvard in 1958, followed by a M.Ed. in Harvard Graduate School of Education. During the year 1960–1961 he studied sociology at the London School of Economics. He has previously held positions at Northwestern University, the Un...

#550

Patricia Bell-Scott

#31357

Overall Influence

Patricia Bell-Scott is an American scholar of women's studies and black feminism. She is currently a professor emerita of women's studies and human development and family science at the University of Georgia. As an author, she has been widely collected by libraries worldwide.

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