Robert K. Merton

Robert K. Merton (born July 4, 1910, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died February 23, 2003, New York, New York) was an American sociologist whose diverse interests included the sociology of science and the professions, sociological theory, and mass communication. After receiving a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1936, Merton joined the school’s faculty. In his first work in the sociology of science, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (1938), he studied the relationship between Puritan...