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List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#2851

E. Franklin Frazier

E. Franklin Frazier

1894 - 1962 (68 years)

Edward Franklin Frazier , was an American sociologist and author, publishing as E. Franklin Frazier. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled The Negro Family in the United States ; it analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African-American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s. The book was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the most significant work in the field of race relations. It was among the first sociological works on blacks researched and written by a black person.

#2852

Thorsten Sellin

1896 - 1994 (98 years)

Johan Thorsten Sellin was a Swedish American sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, a penologist and one of the pioneers of scientific criminology. Biography Sellin was born in Örnsköldsvik in Västernorrland County, Sweden and came to Canada with his parents when he was 17 years old. He received his bachelor's degree from Augustana College in Illinois when he was 19. He went on to receive a master's degree and doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1922 until becoming Professor Emeritus in 1967.

#2853

Max Horkheimer

1895 - 1973 (78 years)

Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research. Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, and the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework. This became the foundation of critical theory. His most important works include Eclipse of Reason , Between Philosophy and Social Science and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment . Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, suppo...

#2854

Theodore Fred Abel

1896 - 1988 (92 years)

Theodore Fred Abel was an American sociology professor who collected the largest single archive of first person accounts from people who joined Hitler's National Socialist movement. The collection of men's accounts was published in 1938 in a book titled Why Hitler Came to Power. The women's accounts were set aside to publish at a later date. Those accounts were lost and then rediscovered in the archives of the Hoover Institute in Palo Alto, after which three Florida State University professors arranged to have them transcribed, translated and digitized. This collection of first person account...

#2855

Norman E. Himes

1899 - 1949 (50 years)

Norman Edwin Himes was an American sociologist and economist and Professor at Colgate University, known for his work on the medical history of contraception. Himes obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1932. After graduation, he started his academic career at Colgate University in 1932. In World War II he served at the Surgeon General of the United States. His research interests were in the field of "population problems, history of contraception and the birth control movement, and marriage and family relations."

#2856

Bernard Berelson

1912 - 1979 (67 years)

Bernard Reuben Berelson was an American behavioral scientist, known for his work on communication and mass media. He was a leading proponent of the broad idea of the "behavioral sciences", a field he saw as including areas such as public opinion. In Chapter 14 of Voting , he enunciated what has become known as Berelson's paradox on democracy: while classical theories of its success assume voters committed to interest in public life, this fails to correspond with practical politics, while the system itself functions.

#2857

Everett Hughes

1897 - 1983 (86 years)

Everett Cherrington Hughes was an American sociologist best known for his work on ethnic relations, work and occupations and the methodology of fieldwork. His take on sociology was, however, very broad. In recent scholarship, his theoretical contribution to sociology has been discussed as interpretive institutional ecology, forming a theoretical frame of reference that combines elements of the classical ecological theory of class , and elements of a proto-dependency analysis of Quebec's industrialization in the 1930s .

#2858

Robert E. Park

1864 - 1944 (80 years)

Robert Ezra Park was an American urban sociologist who is considered to be one of the most influential figures in early U.S. sociology. Park was a pioneer in the field of sociology, changing it from a passive philosophical discipline to an active discipline rooted in the study of human behavior. He made significant contributions to the study of urban communities, race relations and the development of empirically grounded research methods, most notably participant observation in the field of criminology. From 1905 to 1914, Park worked with Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute. After...

#2859

Rose Marie Pangborn

1932 - 1990 (58 years)

Rose Marie Valdes Pangborn was a Mexican-American food scientist, food technologist, professor, and a pioneer in the field of sensory analysis of food attributes. She worked as a sensory scientist in the Experiment Station, Step VIII, served for 35 years at the University of California, Davis. She co-founded the Association for Chemoreception Sciences , and the Sensory Reception Scholarship Fund .

#2860

Paul Lazarsfeld

Paul Lazarsfeld

1901 - 1976 (75 years)

Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was an Austrian-American sociologist. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, he exerted influence over the techniques and the organization of social research. "It is not so much that he was an American sociologist," one colleague said of him after his death, "as it was that he determined what American sociology would be." Lazarsfeld said that his goal was "to produce Paul Lazarsfelds". He was a founding figure in 20th-century empirical sociology.

#2861

Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno

1903 - 1969 (66 years)

Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment , Minima Moralia , and Negative Dialectics —strongly influenced the European New Le...

#2862

Richard Thacker Morris

Richard Thacker Morris

1917 - 1981 (64 years)

Richard Thacker Morris was a professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was the author of The Two-Way Mirror: National Status in Foreign Students' Adjustment , as well as The White Reaction Study , an important work on urban race relations.

#2863

Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons

1902 - 1979 (77 years)

Talcott Parsons was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best known for his social action theory and structural functionalism. Parsons is considered one of the most influential figures in sociology in the 20th century. After earning a PhD in economics, he served on the faculty at Harvard University from 1927 to 1973. In 1930, he was among the first professors in its new sociology department. Later, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard.

#2864

Emory S. Bogardus

1882 - 1973 (91 years)

Emory Stephen Bogardus was a prominent figure in the history of American sociology. Bogardus founded one of the first sociology departments at an American university, at the University of Southern California in 1915.

#2865

Frank H. Hankins

1877 - 1970 (93 years)

Frank Hamilton Hankins was an American sociologist and anthropologist who was the president of the American Sociological Society in 1938. He wrote the book The Racial Basis of Civilization which was critical of racial theories such as Aryanism, Gobinism, Celticism, Anglo-Saxonism and Nordicism.

#2866

Fred W. Tanner

1888 - 1957 (69 years)

Fred Wilbur Tanner was an American food scientist and microbiologist who involved in the founding of the Institute of Food Technologists and the creation of the scientific journal Food Research . Academic career Tanner joined at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1923, where he was chair of the Bacteriology Department until 1948. His work focused on food safety issues, specifically pasteurization and meat curing. Tanner remained as professor until his retirement in 1956. Tanner's research in food science and technology would also lead to the establishment of the food technolo...

#2867

Robert Staughton Lynd

1892 - 1970 (78 years)

Robert Staughton Lynd was an American sociologist and professor at Columbia University, New York City. He is best known for conducting the first Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana, with his wife, Helen Lynd; as the coauthor of Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts ; and a pioneer in the use of social surveys. He was also the author of Knowledge for What? The Place of the Social Sciences in American Culture . In addition to writing and research, Lynd taught at Columbia from 1931 to 1960. He also served on U.S. gover...

#2868

Oliver Cox

1901 - 1974 (73 years)

Oliver Cromwell Cox was a Trinidadian-Americann sociologist. Cox was often misconceived as a Marxist due to his focus on class conflict and capitalism, however, Cox fundamentally disagreed with Marx's analysis of Capitalism. While Marx and other classical economists viewed foreign trade as trade in surpluses, Cox felt that foreign trade was the primary driving force in capitalist development. For Cox, capitalist systems were not isolated, but rather there was an interconnected network of global capitalist systems.

#2869

Ruth Shonle Cavan

1896 - 1993 (97 years)

Ruth Shonle Cavan was an American sociologist based at the University of Chicago. She specialized in deviance and criminology and was a leader of the Chicago school of sociology. According to Moyer :Ruth Shonle Cavan is recognized by most current criminologists as an extraordinary writer with analytical skills and the ability to synthesize the research in the field. One of the major strengths of her writings is her ability to build on the theoretical perspectives and methodologies of the Chicago School and to use other perspectives and methodologies when appropriate....[M]ost current crimino...

#2870

Howard W. Odum

1884 - 1954 (70 years)

Howard Washington Odum was an American sociologist and author who researched African-American life and folklore. Beginning in 1920, he served as a faculty member at the University of North Carolina, founding the university press, the journal Social Forces, and what is now the Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, all in the 1920s. He also founded the university's School of Public Welfare, one of the first in the Southeast. With doctorates in psychology and sociology, he wrote extensively across academic disciplines, influencing several fields and publishing three novels in addition to 20 scholarly texts.

#2871

Robert Cooley Angell

1899 - 1984 (85 years)

Robert Cooley Angell was an American sociologist and educator. Committed to the advancement of rigorous social scientific research, Angell's work focussed on social integration and the pursuit of a more peaceful world order. Professor Angell enjoyed the highest honors which his discipline bestowed, presiding over both the American Sociological Society and the International Sociological Association . As a devoted educator, Angell was instrumental in developing the Honors Program at the University of Michigan, becoming its first director from 1957–1960.

#2872

Walter Reckless

1898 - 1988 (90 years)

Walter Reckless was an American criminologist known for his containment theory . Biography Reckless earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago. While at the Chicago school, he joined with sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess in conducting observation studies of crime in Chicago, Illinois. This research led to his dissertation, The Natural History of Vice Areas in Chicago , which was published as "Vice in Chicago" - a landmark sociological study of fraud, prostitution, and organized crime in the city's "vice" districts.

#2873

Frederic Thrasher

1892 - 1970 (78 years)

Frederic Milton Thrasher was a sociologist at the University of Chicago. He was a colleague of Robert E. Park and was one of the most prominent members of the Chicago School of Sociology in the 1920s.

#2874

Charles S. Johnson

Charles S. Johnson

1893 - 1956 (63 years)

Charles Spurgeon Johnson was an American sociologist and college administrator, the first black president of historically black Fisk University, and a lifelong advocate for racial equality and the advancement of civil rights for African Americans and all ethnic minorities. He preferred to work collaboratively with liberal white groups in the South, quietly as a "sideline activist," to get practical results.

#2875

Mildred Parten Newhall

1902 - 1970 (68 years)

Mildred Bernice Parten Newhall was an American sociologist, a researcher at University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development. She completed her doctoral dissertation in 1929. In it she developed the theory of six stages of child's play, which led to a series of influential publications.

#2876

Alfred Kinsey

1894 - 1956 (62 years)

Alfred Charles Kinsey was an American sexologist, biologist, and professor of entomology and zoology who, in 1947, founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as for the Kinsey scale. Kinsey's research on human sexuality, foundational to the field of sexology, provoked controversy in the 1940s and 1950s, and has continued to provoke controversy decades after his death.

#2877

Irene Barnes Taeuber

1906 - 1974 (68 years)

Irene Barnes Taeuber was an American demographer who worked for the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, where she edited the journal Population Index from 1936 to 1954. Her scholarly work is credited with helping to establish the science of demography.

#2878

Hornell Hart

1888 - 1967 (79 years)

Hornell Norris Hart was an American professor of sociology and parapsychologist. He was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota and raised as a Quaker. In 1921, he obtained a Ph.D. from the Iowa State University.

#2879

Stuart C. Dodd

1900 - 1975 (75 years)

Stuart Carter Dodd was an American sociologist and an educator, who published research on the Middle East and on mathematical sociology, and was a pioneer in scientific polling. Biography Stuart C. Dodd was born in 1900 in Talas, Ottoman Empire. His father was a medical missionary there. He graduated from Princeton University in 1926 with a degree in psychology. He began his career as professor of Sociology and Director of the Social Science Research Section of the American University of Beirut. During World War II, Dodd directed opinion survey work for the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Sici...

#2880

Hans Speier

1905 - 1990 (85 years)

Hans Speier was a German-American sociologist who worked with the United States Government as a Germany expert both during and after World War II. He also published several books on German politics and culture throughout the middle half of the 20th century.

#2881

Peter Heintz

1920 - 1983 (63 years)

Peter René Heintz was a Swiss professor of sociology and doctor of political science that notably impacted on the extensive academic development within Latin America and greater Europe. Life Heintz was born on November 6, 1920, as the son of a merchant in Davos, Switzerland. After many years of adolescence in Spain and scientific studies in Paris, Cologne and Zurich, Heintz obtained his doctorate of Political Science in 1943 from the University of Zurich. While on campus, a chance encounter with German-born sociologist René König was particularly important for his interest in sociology, leadi...

#2882

Carey D. Miller

1895 - 1965 (70 years)

Carey Dunlap Miller was an American food scientist and a University of Hawaii at Manoa food and nutrition professor and department chair from 1922-1958. Early life and education Miller was born to immigrant parents that owned a ranch in Idaho. She graduated from Boise High School in 1912. She received her bachelor's degree with honors from the University of California, Berkeley and later her master's degree at Columbia University.

#2883

M. S. A. Rao

1926 - 1985 (59 years)

Madhugiri Shamarao Anathapadmanabha Rao was a professor of sociology who had been a founder-member in 1959 of the Department of Sociology at the University of Delhi, India. He wrote and edited extensively on subjects such as the social aspects of nutrition, both urban and rural sociology, the sociology of migration, and social dominance. He conducted much fieldwork as a part of his researches.

#2884

George Edmund Haynes

1881 - 1960 (79 years)

George Edmund Haynes was an American sociology scholar and federal civil servant, a co-founder and first executive director of the National Urban League, serving 1911 to 1918. A graduate of Fisk University, he earned a master's degree at Yale University, and was the first African American to earn a doctorate degree from Columbia University, where he completed one in sociology.

#2885

Carl F. Kraenzel

1906 - 1980 (74 years)

Carl Frederick Kraenzel was an American sociologist. Most of Kraenzel's work focuses on the people of the Great Plains, covering a range of topics including quality of life, power relations, resource use, and mental health. Kraenzel has been widely published in a variety of professional journals, monographs, research bulletins, special reports, and books in the fields of rural sociology, Great Plains sociology, and natural resource sociology. His best known work, The Great Plains in Transition, describes the challenges of social life and connections to the natural environments in the North American semiarid region located between the 98th meridian and the Rocky Mountains.

#2886

Ruth Glass

1912 - 1990 (78 years)

Ruth Glass was a German-born British sociologist, urban planner and founder of the Centre for Urban Studies at University College London . Life She was born in Berlin on 30 June 1912, the daughter of Eli Lazarus, who was Jewish, and Lilly Leszczynska. She left Germany in 1932, studying at the London School of Economics. After spending two years from 1941 at the Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia University, she returned to the United Kingdom in 1943. She concentrated on town planning and social planning.

#2887

Albert Salomon

1891 - 1966 (75 years)

Albert Salomon was a German-Jewish sociologist. He was the nephew of Alice Salomon, a pioneer of the academic discipline of social work. Studies He first studied history of art, history of religions and philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin from 1910. He later studied philosophy in Freiburg and Heidelberg, where he came into contact with Max Weber and Georg Lukács, among others. During World War I, he served as a nurse, and in 1921 he took his doctorate in the culture of friendship in Germany in the 19th Century.

#2888

Marcel Granet

1884 - 1940 (56 years)

Marcel Granet was a French sociologist, ethnologist and sinologist. As a follower of Émile Durkheim and Édouard Chavannes, Granet was one of the first to bring sociological methods to the study of China. Granet was revered in his own time as a sociological sinologist, or sinological sociologist, and member of the Durkheimian school of sociology.

#2889

John Porter

1921 - 1979 (58 years)

John Arthur Porter was a Canadian sociologist from 1950 to the late 1970s. His work in the field of social stratification opened up new areas of inquiry for many sociologists in Canada. Porter was born in Vancouver and completed his education at the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom. There, he became interested in studies of social class. On returning to Canada he joined the faculty of Carleton University. He remained at Carleton as a professor, and later, as department chairman, dean and academic vice-president. He was also visiting professor at Harvard and the University of ...

#2890

Paul Massing

1902 - 1979 (77 years)

Paul Wilhelm Massing was a German sociologist. Life and career Born in Grumbach in the Rhine Province, he attended school in Cologne, and later studied economics and social sciences at Frankfurt University, when Franz Neumann was there and at Cologne Handelshochschule . He graduated in 1926 as a Diplom-Kaufmann . A year later, he studied for one term at the Sorbonne in Paris and prepared his dissertation on agrarian conditions of France in 19th century and the agrarian program of the French socialist parties. In 1928, he returned to Frankfurt University to study with Wilhelm Gerloff and at...

#2891

Delores P. Aldridge

1900 - Present (125 years)

Delores P. Aldridge is an American sociologist. Aldridge was the first African-American faculty member at Emory University, and the founder of the first African American and African studies program in the American south.

#2892

Charles Josiah Galpin

1864 - 1947 (83 years)

Charles Josiah Galpin was an American academic. Galpin was a trailblazer of rural sociology, known for advancing research in analysis of rural populations, rural standards of living, rural social organization, and social structures. Galpin was a rural sociologist, professor, author, pastor, and advocate for rural populations. He published 112 works in 245 publications in one language and 2,667 library holdings including The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community ; Rural Life ; My Drift into Rural Sociology ; and Rural Social Problems . His early career set the stage for his influential c...

#2893

Paul Fauconnet

1874 - 1938 (64 years)

Paul Fauconnet was a French sociologist who is best known as a contributor to the L'Année Sociologique. Fauconnet aggregated in philosophy in 1892 and earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1895. He also earned a further doctorate in law in 1920, although his interest in the law was purely scholarly and he never practiced as a lawyer. He became a professor at the faculty of letters in 1907 at the University of Toulouse and later chargé de cours at the faculty of letters in 1921 in Paris, obtaining a chair in 1932. His dissertation was entitled La responsabilité: Etude de sociologie . It adopt...

#2894

Eddie Roux

1903 - 1966 (63 years)

Eddie Roux was a Transvaal Colony-born botanist, academic, writer, member of the South African Communist Party and anti-apartheid activist. Early life He was born Edward Roux to Afrikaner father Phillip R. Roux, a pharmacist and botanist, who was involved in the Labour Party and English mother, Edith May Wilson. He grew up in Bezuidenhout Valley, Johannesburg. Roux's political view were further inspired by the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution. After matriculating at Jeppe High School, he enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand and studied botany and zoology. At university, he joined ...

#2895

Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar

1884 - 1937 (53 years)

Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar was a Marathi sociologist, historian and novelist from Maharashtra, India. He is principally known as the chief editor of Maharashtriya Jnanakosha, the first-ever encyclopedia in the Marathi language.

#2896

Hilda Weiss

1900 - 1981 (81 years)

Hilda Weiss was a sociologist, trade unionist, and socialist. She lived in Germany until 1933 when Hitler came to power, then escaped to France. In 1939 she emigrated to the United States and lived there until her death in 1981.

#2897

Vera Mae Green

1928 - 1982 (54 years)

Vera Mae Green was an American anthropologist, educator, and scholar, who made major contributions in the fields of Caribbean studies, interethnic studies, black family studies and the study of poverty and the poor. She was one of the first African-American Caribbeanists and the first to focus on Dutch Caribbean culture. She developed a "methodology for the study of African American Anthropology" that acknowledged the diversity among and within black families, communities and cultures. Her other areas of research included mestizos in Mexico and communities in India and Israel. "[C]ommitted to...

#2898

Arthur Salz

1881 - 1963 (82 years)

Arthur Salz was a German professor of sociology and economics who wrote on mercantilism, imperialism, and power. He taught at the University of Heidelberg before being forced to flee Germany because of his Jewish faith. He was familiar with the Stefan George circle and married Sophie Kantorowiz, the sister of historian Ernst Kantorowicz.

#2899

Patrick Murphy Malin

1903 - 1964 (61 years)

Patrick Murphy Malin was an American activist and administrator who followed Roger Nash Baldwin as the second Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Early life Malin was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1903, the son of a banker. He entered the family business at age ten, and was expected to eventually become president of the bank. However, Woodrow Wilson's World War I speeches gave him a desire to travel and get a government job. He attended the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, graduating as valedictorian in 1924.

#2900

William Lyman Underwood

1864 - 1929 (65 years)

William Lyman Underwood was an American photographer who was also involved in the research of time-temperature canning research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1895 to 1896. Biography A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Underwood was the second son of William James Underwood, one of the nine children of William Underwood, the founder of the William Underwood Company.

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