Merton, Robert K.

Merton, Robert K. (King)

(1910– ) sociologist; born in Philadelphia. Educated at Temple and Harvard Universities, he was long on the faculty of Columbia University (1941–79), where he was associate director of the Bureau of Applied Social Research (1942–71). He helped to establish the sociology of science as a discipline and wrote on a variety of topics including social deviance, mass persuasion, bureaucracy, and social theory.