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.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

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List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#401

Kenneth A. Bollen

#21803

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Kenneth A. Bollen is the Henry Rudolf Immerwahr Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bollen joined UNC-Chapel Hill in 1985. He is also a member of the faculty in the Quantitative Psychology Program housed in the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory. He is a fellow at the Carolina Population Center, the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also the Director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science from 2000 to 2010. His specialties are population studies and cross-...

#402

Johanna Brenner

#41992

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Johanna Brenner is an American feminist and sociologist whose writing and thought is in the socialist-feminist vein. A graduate of Reed College and the University of California, Los Angeles , she spent four years as a telephone installation technician worker in the 1970s. In 1981 she began teaching in the sociology department at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where she served from 1982 to 2005 as coordinator of its women's studies program. She is now emeritus professor.

#403

John Heritage

#12178

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

John Heritage is Professor of Sociology at University of California at Los Angeles. He is one of the key figures in the approach known as conversation analysis. He came to prominence in 1984 with the publication of his book on Ethnomethodology, the sociological tradition pioneered by Harold Garfinkel. This book overviewed, integrated and introduced the highly technical field of ethnomethodology to a broader audience. It has now received more than 2,000 citations. Soon after the publication of this book he was appointed to the chair in UCLA where Garfinkel had worked before his retirement....

#404

Salvador Giner

#39926

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

Salvador Giner i de San Julián was a Spanish sociologist, who was the president of the Institute of Catalan Studies between 2005 and 2013. Biography Salvador Giner got his PhD in the University of Chicago and has postgraduate courses in the University of Cologne. In 1989, he became professor of sociology in the University of Barcelona .

#405

Scott Boorman

#28853

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Scott Archer Boorman is a mathematical sociologist at Yale University. Life His father, Howard L. Boorman, was a Foreign Service Officer in Beijing, China, and he was born there as Chinese Communists troops entered the city. He received no formal education before enrolling at Harvard College, and had largely completed work on his book, The Protracted Game, which was published in 1971.

#406

Mimi Sheller

#19248

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Mimi Sheller is Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, USA. From 2009–2021 she was professor of sociology in the Department of Culture and Communication, and the founding Director of the New Mobilities Research and Policy Center at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is widely cited and considered a "key theorist in mobilities studies" and specializes in the post-colonial context of the Caribbean.

#407

Stokely Carmichael

Stokely Carmichael

#771

Overall Influence

1941 - 1998 (57 years)

Kwame Ture was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while attending the Bronx High School of Science. He was a key leader in the development of the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee , then as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party , and last as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party .

#408

Ulus Baker

#17825

Overall Influence

1960 - 2007 (47 years)

Ulus Sedat Baker was a Turkish Cypriot sociologist. Biography Baker was born on July 14, 1960, in Ankara, Turkey. He was born to a cosmopolitan family; his mother was the Cypriot poet Pembe Marmara, and his father was the prominent psychiatrist of the island, Sedat Baker. Baker studied in the Soviet Union, Turkey, France, and Cyprus. He completed his studies at the Department of Sociology in METU in Ankara and began his academic life in the same institution shortly thereafter. He was a very productive intellectual and a prolific scholar; he had already become an influential public intellectual in Turkish cultural life beyond the academia by mid-nineties.

#409

Omar Lizardo

#36591

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

#410

Heinz Dieterich

Heinz Dieterich

#13038

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Heinz Dieterich or Heinz Dieterich Steffan is a German sociologist and a political analyst residing in Mexico. He is best known for his leftist ideals. He contributes to several journals and has published more than 30 books about conflict in Latin America, global society and the ideological controversies that characterised the 20th century, among other philosophical and social scientific topics.

#411

Burhan Ghalioun

#11469

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Burhan Ghalioun is a French-Syrian professor of sociology at the Université de Paris III Sorbonne University in Paris, and the first chairman of the Syrian opposition Transitional National Council . He was named chairman on 29 August 2011. His chairmanship was criticized for his perceived closeness to the Muslim Brotherhood, his early reluctance to arm opposition forces, and what opponents called the autocratic nature of his leadership. On 17 May 2012, feeling he had become an increasingly divisive figure for the council, Ghalioun resigned.

#412

Peggy Levitt

#18976

Overall Influence

Peggy Levitt is professor and chair of the sociology department at Wellesley College and an associate at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organization where she co-directs the Transnational Studies Initiative. Peggy writes regularly about globalization, arts and culture, immigration, and religion. Her latest book, Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation on Display, is published by the University of California Press.

#413

Richard Arum

#27999

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Richard Arum is an American sociologist of education and stratification, best known for his research on student learning, school discipline, race, and inequality in K-12 and higher education. Arum has a B.A. in Political Science from Tufts University, an M.Ed. in Teaching and Curriculum from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

#414

Kenan Malik

#4291

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Kenan Malik is an Indian-born British writer, lecturer and broadcaster, trained in neurobiology and the history of science. As an academic author, his focus is on the philosophy of biology, and contemporary theories of multiculturalism, pluralism, and race. These topics are core concerns in The Meaning of Race , Man, Beast and Zombie and Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate .

#415

Diane Vaughan

#23321

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

#416

David Krackhardt

#12790

Overall Influence

David Krackhardt is Professor of Organizations at Heinz College and the Tepper School of Business, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences and the Machine Learning Department , all at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, and he also serves a Fellow of CEDEP, the European Centre for Executive Education, in France. He is notable for being the author of KrackPlot, a network visualization software designed for social network analysis which is widely used in academic research. He is also the founder of the Journal of Social Structure.

#417

Ann Swidler

#27226

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Ann Swidler is an American sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Swidler is most commonly known as a cultural sociologist and authored one of the most-cited articles in sociology, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies".

#418

Roger Establet

#7305

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Roger Establet Polity is a French scholar of the sociology of education. A student of Louis Althusser, Establet is an emeritus professor at University of Provence. A student at the lycée in Nice, and khâgne at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, in 1959 he entered the école normale supérieure, where he earned degrees in philosophy and sociology. He often collaborates with Christian Baudelot, a sociologist at the École normale supérieure. He was involved in Althusser's Reading Capital project.

#419

Hilary Rose

#15743

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Hilary Ann Rose is a British sociologist. Biography During World War II, she was evacuated from London with her mother and brother. In 1940, they were sent to Weymouth, Dorset. The same year, the French army was defeated, and many evacuated troops took shelter in Weymouth. Exhausted soldiers slept on the pavements and the luckier ones on straw in the requisitioned schools. The children, with no school to attend, mostly watched the war, fascinated but sometimes terrified. The authorities soon despatched the evacuees to safer places. Eventually, her mother found a home in Framlingham, her family home.

#420

Heinrich Popitz

#16035

Overall Influence

1925 - 2002 (77 years)

Heinrich Popitz was a German sociologist who worked towards a general sociological theory. Alongside thinkers like Helmut Schelsky, Hans Paul Bahrdt, Dieter Claessens, and others he was one of those sociologists in post-war Germany who founded their sociological reflections on insights from Philosophical Anthropology, thus creating an alternative to the then dominant paradigms of the Frankfurt School and Cologne School . His work revolves around the four central concepts power, normss, technology, and creativity.

#421

William A. Gamson

#22546

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

William Anthony Gamson was a professor of Sociology at Boston College, where he was also the co-director of the Media Research and Action Project . He is the author of numerous books and articles on political discourse, the mass-media and social movements from as early as the 1960s. His influential works include Power and Discontent , The Strategy of Social Protest , Encounters with Unjust Authority and Talking Politics , as well as numerous editions of SIMSOC.

#422

Albert Benschop

#23325

Overall Influence

1949 - 2018 (69 years)

Albert Benschop was a Dutch sociologist with the University of Amsterdam's faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He ran a sociology-focussed website called SocioSite. Biography Benschop received a master's degree in sociology and psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam early 1970s. In 1972 he made name as leader of the SRVU Students' union of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, which occupied the main building of the Vrije Universiteit during the student protests that year.

#423

Henri H. Stahl

#15916

Overall Influence

1901 - 1991 (90 years)

Henri H. Stahl was a Romanian Marxist cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, sociologist, and social historian. Biography Born in Bucharest to a family of Alsatian and French-Swiss ancestry, he was the son of Henri Stahl , as well as the younger brother of the sociologist and Social Democratic Party activist Şerban Voinea, and of the novelist Henriette Yvonne Stahl. He was married to Margareta, a known painter.

#424

Mauro Wolf

#34925

Overall Influence

1947 - 1996 (49 years)

Mauro Wolf was an Italian sociologist, professor and essayist. He has developed important works in the field of sociology of communication and the media. His books are now considered classical texts in theoretical research on mass communication.

#425

Ezra Vogel

#7318

Overall Influence

1930 - 2020 (90 years)

Ezra Feivel Vogel was an American sociologist who wrote prolifically on modern Japan, China, and Korea. He was Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. His 1978 book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America was a best-seller in both English and Japanese, and his 2011 book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China won the Lionel Gelber Prize.

#426

Gerard Delanty

#30225

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Gerard Delanty is a British-based sociologist and Professor of Sociology and Social & Political Thought at the University of Sussex. He is also the editor of European Journal of Social Theory. Bibliography Delanty, Gerard Formations of European modernity: a historical and political sociology of Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. Delanty, Gerard, ed. Handbook of cosmopolitanism studies. Routledge International Handbooks . Routledge. Delanty, Gerard, Giorgi, Liana and Sassatelli, Monica, eds. Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere. Routledge Advances in Sociology . Routledge, Abingdon and New York.

#427

Göran Therborn

#13362

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Göran Therborn FAcSS is a professor of sociology at Cambridge University and is amongst the most highly cited contemporary Marxian-influenced sociologists. He has published widely in journals such as the New Left Review, and is notable for his writing on topics that fall within the general political and sociological framework of post-Marxism. Topics on which he has written extensively include the intersection between the class structure of society and the function of the state apparatus, the formation of ideology within subjects, and the future of the Marxist tradition. Therborn was awarded the 2019 Lenin Award.

#428

Robert Groves

#25369

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Robert Martin Groves is an American sociologist and expert in survey methodology who has served as the Executive Vice President and Provost of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. since August 2012. He also served as the Director of the United States Census Bureau from 2009 to 2012.

#429

John Lofland

#10664

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

John Franklin Lofland is an American sociologist best known for his studies of the peace movement and for his first book, Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith, which was based on field work among a group of Unification Church members in California in the 1960s. It is considered to be one of the most important and widely cited studies of the process of religious conversion, and one of the first modern sociological studies of a new religious movement.

#430

Robert Bierstedt

#26183

Overall Influence

1913 - 1998 (85 years)

Robert Bierstedt was an American sociologist who often wrote about sociological theory, culture, and constitutional law. He was a native of Burlington, Iowa, and graduated in philosophy from the University of Iowa in 1934. He received a master's degree in philosophy in 1935 and a doctorate in sociology in 1946 from Columbia University.

#431

Bruce Link

#25776

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Bruce George Link is an American epidemiologist and sociologist who is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside. He is also a Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology and Sociomedical Sciences in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, a research scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and the current president of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science . Bruce Link is probably best known for developing fundamental cause theory of social inequalities in health together with Jo Phela...

#432

Walter F. Buckley

#14311

Overall Influence

1922 - 2006 (84 years)

Walter Frederick Buckley was an American sociologist, and professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire. Buckley was among the first to apply concepts from general systems theory based on the work of Bertalanffy to sociology

#433

Philip Slater

#18695

Overall Influence

1927 - 2013 (86 years)

Philip Elliot Slater was an American sociologist and writer. He was the author of the bestselling 1970 book on American culture, The Pursuit of Loneliness and of numerous other books and articles. He had an A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard and taught sociology at Harvard, Brandeis, and University of California at Santa Cruz. He was Professor and Chairperson of the Brandeis Sociology Department in 1971 when he resigned to found, with Jacqueline Doyle and Morrie Schwartz, Greenhouse, a non-profit growth center, where he led encounter groups and personal growth workshops.

#434

John David Brewer

#25134

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

John David Brewer HDSSc, MRIA, FRSE, FAcSS, FRSA is an Irish-British sociologist who was the former President of the British Sociological Association , and was Professor of Post Conflict Studies in the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen's University Belfast , and is now Emeritus Professor in the Mitchell Institute. He is also Honorary Professor Extraordinary, Stellenbosch University and Honorary Professor of Sociology, Warwick University . He was formerly Sixth-Century Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen . He is a member of the United Nations Roster of Global Experts for his work on peace processes .

#435

Vandana Shiva

#400

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, ecofeminist and anti-globalization author. Based in Delhi, Shiva has written more than 20 books. She is often referred to as "Gandhi of grain" for her activism associated with the anti-GMO movement.

#436

Margaret Somers

#11078

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Margaret R. Somers is an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Michigan She is the recipient of the inaugural Lewis A. Coser Award for Innovation and Theoretical Agenda-Setting in Sociology, Somers's work specializes in historical, political, economic, and cultural sociology and social theory.

#437

Masachi Osawa

#32090

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Masachi Osawa is a Japanese sociologist and philosopher. Outside Japan, he is best known as a social scientist, often mentioned in reference to sociological and philosophical research on otaku culture and popular Japanese animation series such as Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

#438

Robin DiAngelo

#7113

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Robin Jeanne DiAngelo is an American author working in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies. She formerly served as a tenured professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University and is currently an affiliate associate professor of education at the University of Washington. She is known for her work pertaining to "white fragility", an expression she coined in 2011 and explored further in a 2018 book entitled White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

#439

Jennifer Platt

#22915

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Jennifer Platt FAcSS is a sociologist who is Emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex, where she taught from 1964 to 2002. She has been President of the British Sociological Association in 1987–89, and edited its journal Sociology for 1985–87. She was a member of the International Sociological Association’s executive from 1994–2002. Her research interests in the history of sociology have been reflected in her terms as Secretary and President of the ISA’s Research Committee on the History of Sociology, as Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on the History of Sociology, In 2002 she became an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences.

#440

Glen Elder

#23029

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Glen Holl Elder, Jr. is an American sociologist who is the Howard W. Odum Research Professor of Sociology , a research professor of Psychology and a current professor at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests are in social psychology, sociology, demographics and life course research. Elder's major work was Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience, in 1974. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences admitted Glen H. Elder in 1988. In 1993, he was honored with the Cooley-Mead Award by the Social Psychology Section of the American Sociological Association.

#441

James A. Beckford

#15765

Overall Influence

1942 - 2022 (80 years)

James Arthur Beckford was a British sociologist of religion. He was professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1988/1989, he served as president of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and from 1999 to 2003, as the president of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion.

#442

Philip Hauser

#50809

Overall Influence

1909 - 1994 (85 years)

Philip Morris Hauser was a demographer and pioneer in urban studies who was a president of the American Sociological Association, the American Statistical Association and the Population Association of America. For more than 30 years he was director of the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago where he also served as the Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology.

#443

Frederick H. Buttel

#44950

Overall Influence

1948 - 2005 (57 years)

Frederick Howard Buttel was the William H. Sewell Professor of Rural Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A prominent scholar of the sociology of agriculture, Buttel was well known also for his contributions to environmental sociology.

#444

Bertice Berry

#41010

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Bertice Berry is an American sociologist, author, lecturer, and educator. Early life and education Berry grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, as one of seven children raised by a single mother. The family was poor and her mother struggled with alcoholism. In a 1994 article, Berry reflected on her upbringing and her mother's abusiveness when she was "in one of her frightening stages of drunkenness." Berry ultimately forgave her mother, writing that "her drinking was a way to mask her own pain. I think of the burden she endured as a black woman with few resources for herself or her children."

#445

Dan Dungaciu

#36564

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Dan Gheorghe Dungaciu is a Romanian sociologist. Biography He was born in Târgu Mureș. He graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1995 and received his Ph.D. in 2002. He teaches at the University of Bucharest. He served as Secretary of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania.

#446

Stewart Clegg

#22680

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Stewart Clegg is a British-born Australian sociologist and organizational theorist, and a professor at the School of Project Management, University of Sydney. Prior to joining the University of Sydney he was Distinguished Professor of Management and Organization Studies at the University of Technology Sydney.

#447

David A. Snow

#20736

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

David A. Snow is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Intellectual Contributions Snow's research constitutes one of the most original and groundbreaking bodies of work in the discipline. While it addresses a number of discrete theoretical and empirical problems, it has the common goal of creating general conceptual tools to comprehend the dynamics of everyday social interaction. Snow’s influence is particularly deep in two areas of the discipline: social movements and social inequality.

#448

Jack Goldstone

#10378

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jack A. Goldstone is an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian, specializing in studies of social movements, revolutions, political demography, and the 'Rise of the West' in world history. He is an author or editor of 13 books and over 150 research articles. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities on the study of revolutions and long-term social change. His work has made foundational contributions to the fields of cliodynamics, economic history and political demography. He was the first scholar to describe in detail and document the long-term cyclical relationship between global population cycles and cycles of political rebellion and revolution.

#449

Veronica Beechey

#33213

Overall Influence

1946 - 2021 (75 years)

Veronica Beechey was a British feminist sociologist and patient's rights advocate. Early life and education Beechey was born in Hastings and grew up in Battle, Sussex. She attended Ashford School for Girls and Hastings College. She studied sociology at Essex University, achieving a first in her degree, before going to Oxford to complete a doctorate.

#450

Chela Sandoval

#17416

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Chela Sandoval , associate professor of Chicana Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, is a noted theorist of postcolonial feminism and third world feminism. Beginning with her 1991 pioneering essay 'U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World', Sandoval emerged as a significant voice for women of color and decolonial feminism.

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