Randall Collins
| Randall Collins | |
|---|---|
| Born |
July 29, 1941 Knoxville, Tennessee |
| Fields | Sociology |
| Institutions | University of Pennsylvania |
| Alma mater |
University of California, Berkeley Stanford University Harvard University |
| Influences | Max Weber · Émile Durkheim · Erving Goffman · Marcel Mauss · W. Lloyd Warner · Mary Douglas |
Randall Collins (born 1941) is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing. He has taught in many notable universities around the world and his academic works have been translated into various languages. Collins is currently Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise include the macro-historical sociology of political and economic change; micro-sociology, including face-to-face interaction; and the sociology of intellectuals and social conflict. He is considered to be one of the leading non-Marxist conflict theorists in the United States, and served as the president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 to 2011.
Collins spent a good deal of his early years in Europe where his father was part of the military intelligence during WWII and also a member of the state department. Collins attended a New England prep school. Afterward, he completed a Bachelor of Arts at Harvard University where he was taught by notable sociologist Talcott Parsons. He later went on to gain a Masters in psychology from Standford (1964) and a PhD in sociology at University of California, Berkeley (1969). Although he did not agree with Parsons' theorizing that was often thought to be socially conservative, he respected the prestige of being a theorist and emulated this in his later years. Collins wanted to study personality and human cognition but, was assigned to work in a rat lab, which made him realize he'd rather study sociology.
He continued his graduate education at the University of California Berkeley, completing a master's degree in sociology in 1965 and a PhD in 1969. During his time at Berkeley, Collins was involved with campus protests, the Free Speech Movement, and the anti-war movement. On December 3, 1964, Collins was arrested during a stand in for the Free Speech Movement along with over 600 of his peers.
While at Berkeley, Collins encountered many influential sociologists of his day. He worked with Joseph Ben-David, an Israeli sociologist visiting from Hebrew University, on the sociology of science, which ultimately lead to Collins' publication The Sociology of Philosophies decades later. Collins was introduced to Weberian conflict theory through Reinhard Bendix, a leading Max Weber scholar. Of his early career, Collins would later say "I was part of the generation of young sociologists who broke with functionalist theory and moved toward conflict theory." He later wrote a chapter for Bendix's work State and Society. This work enabled Collins to later combine this theory with Erving Goffman's microsociology, which resulted in Collins' publication Conflict Sociology in 1975 and later, Interaction Ritual Chains in 2004. Goffman was also one of Collins' professors during his time at Berkely. Collins' dissertation advisor was organizational and industrial sociologist Harold Wilensky. It was titled Education and Employment: Some Determinants of Requirements for Hiring in Various Types of Organizations, and it was later published in 1979 as The Credential society: a historical sociology of education and stratification. While at Berkeley Collins also worked with Herbert Blumer, Philip Selznick, and Leo Lowenthal.
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