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.
Video Randall Collins
Early life and education
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 Stanford (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.
Maps Randall Collins
Career
Collins' first position in academia was at his alma mater, University of California Berkeley followed by many other universities including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by the University of California - San Diego, the University of Virginia, and then University of California-Riverside, finally arriving at his current position at the University of Pennsylvania. He took intermittent breaks from academia, as a novelist, and as a freelance scholar. He has also been a visiting professor at Chicago, Harvard, and Cambridge, as well as various schools in Europe, Japan, and China. Collins has published almost one hundred articles since finishing his undergraduate education. He has also written and contributed to several books with a range of topics such as the discovery of society to the sociology of marriage and family life.
In honor of Collins' retirement from the field, the University of Pennsylvania hosted "Social Interaction and Theory: A Conference in Honor of Professor Randall Collins." Leading scholars in sociology contributed talks, including Elijah Anderson, Paul DiMaggio, David R. Gibson, Michèle Lamont, Jonathan Turner, and Viviana Zelizer.
Research
Collins is an social scientist who views theory as essential to understanding the world. He says "The essence of science is precisely theory...a generalized and coherent body of ideas, which explain the range of variations in the empirical world in terms of general principles". This is Collins' way of examining the social world, emphasizing the role and interaction of larger social structures. He has devoted much of his career and research to study society, how is it created and destroyed through emotional behaviors of human beings. Collins believes that the simplest explanation for radical behavior and actions is emotion. Emotional energy, Collins says, is the "amount of emotional power that flows through one's actions" and does not refer to one specific emotion. Collins also emphasizes the significance of people coming together and the influence this has on behavior.
Collins argues sex, smoking, and social stratification and much else in our social lives are driven by a common force: interaction rituals. Interaction Ritual Chains is a major work of sociological theory that attempts to develop a "radical microsociology." It proposes that successful rituals create symbols of group membership and pump up individuals with emotional energy, while failed rituals drain emotional energy. Each person flows from situation to situation, drawn to those interactions where their cultural capital gives them the best emotional energy payoff. Thinking, too, can be explained by the internalization of conversations within the flow of situations; individual selves are thoroughly and continually social, constructed from the outside in. The theory of interaction ritual chains is inspired by Emile Durkheim's theory of ritual, laid forward in his book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, by the conflict theory of Max Weber, and by the microsociology of Erving Goffman.
Collins has also argued that violent confrontation goes against human physiological hardwiring. It is the exception, not the rule--regardless of the underlying conditions or motivations. This is in opposition to explanations by social scientists that violence is easy under certain conditions, like poverty, racial or ideological hatreds, or family pathologies.
Selected bibliography
Journal articles
- Collins, Randall (March 2013). "Entering and leaving the tunnel of violence: Micro-sociological dynamics of emotional entrainment in violent interactions". Current Sociology, special issue: Violence and Society. Sage. 61 (2): 132-151. doi:10.1177/0011392112456500.
Books
- 1975 - Conflict Sociology: Toward an Explanatory Science
- 1979 - The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification
- 1986 - Weberian Sociological Theory
- 1988 - Theoretical Sociology
- 1992 - Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology 2nd ed.
- 1994 - Four Sociological Traditions
- 1998 - The Sociology of Philosophies
- 1999 - Macro-History
- 2004 - Interaction Ritual Chains
- 2008 - Violence: A Microsociological Theory
- 2015 - Napoleon Never Slept (with Maren McConnell)
Fiction writing
Early in his academic career, Collins left academia on several occasions to write fiction. One of his novels is The Case of the Philosopher's Ring, featuring Sherlock Holmes.
References
External links
- Randall Collins' blog The Sociological Eye
- http://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/r_collins
- http://sociology.ucr.edu/people/faculty/collins/index.html
- http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/theoryatmadison/papers/rcollins.pdf
Other Resources
Contemporary Social and Sociological Theory, Visualizing Social Works by Kenneth Allan
Source of article : Wikipedia
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