biography
pronunciation:
[tawlcot]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1902–79)
|
| biography:
| Sociologist and educator, born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA. Educated at Amherst College, the London School of Economics, and the University of Heidelberg, he spent his long academic career at Harvard (1927–73), where he founded the department of social relations (1946) and trained three generations of students. His first book, The Structure of Social Action (1937), launched a lifelong effort to supplant traditional empirical sociology with a theoretical approach that synthesized existing theories from all the social sciences. Further developed in such works as The Social System (1951) and Toward a General Theory of Action (1951, with E A Shils), this general theory of human action and social systems was abstract, complex, and controversial. Few claimed to understand it fully, but his interdisciplinary theoretical approach exerted a strong influence on academic sociology. |
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