Notes and References Preface 1. First edition, 1949; second edition, 1957; revised and enlarged edition, 1968 (New York; The Free Press). Translated into: French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Hebrew, Portuguese, Polish, Hungarian, Serbo­ Croatian, Chinese and German (in part). 2. Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language (Cleveland, 1959: The World Publishing Company), p. 1678. 3. Dated 15 May 1970 (mimeographed). Chapter 1 1. Merton, STSS, p. 70. 2. Merton, 1975a, p. 335. 3. This strategy is 'unorthodox' only in the social sciences. After all, probably 95 per cent of all the scientific work in the world is published in the form of articles; much less so, of course, in the humanities and with the social sciences somewhere in between the natural sciences and the humanities. 4. Bell, 1980, p. 13. 5. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, a Vicennial Edition (New York, 1985: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). First published in 1965. 6. Merton, Sociology of Science; An Episodic Memoir (Carbondale, 1979: Southern Illinois University Press). 7. First edition: 1938. 8. Bierstedt, 1981, p. 486. 9. Ibid., pp. 495 and 487-8. 10. Loomis and Loomis, 1961, p. 246. 11. The term is introduced by C. W. Mills, 1959. 12. Stinchcombe, 1975, pp. 26-27. See also Boudon, 1977: 'there is more systematic and general theory in Merton's work than he himself has ever confessed' (p. 1356). 13. Bierstedt, 1981, p. 488. 14. Lazarsfeld, 1975, p. 61. 15. Stinchcombe, 1975, p. 30. 16. He certainly shares Toulmin's conviction that 'a scientist who fails to criticize and change his concepts, where the collective goals of his discipline require it, offends against the "duties" of his scientific "station", as much as a somnolent night-watchman or an insubordinate soldier' (as quoted in Merton, 1984b, p. 282). Notes and References 263 17. Reflecting on his friendship with late Louis Schneider, Merton admits: 'We were both addicted to oral publication, continually and sometimes for years revising our thoughts in lectures before putting them into print' (Merton, 1984c, p. xxxv). He calls it a 'pattern of delayed print'. Sometimes even in his own appraisal this strategy of avoiding premature publication appears - post facto- as too rigorous. In a recent conversation he brought to my attention the titles of four books which 'should have been published', even though at the time he did not feel completely satisfied with their content. 18. Merton, STSE, p. xxix. This sentence reads: 'On the basis of the foregoing study, it may not be too much to conclude that the cultural soil of seventeenth-century England was peculiarly fertile for the growth and spread of science'. 19. As Boudon puts it: 'the best way to honor [important] work is to extract the sometimes latent though obsessive main intuitions responsible for the importance of the work' (1977, p. 1356). 20. When substantially significant for the clarity of interpretation, I inform the reader of the original dates of publication of articles or essays, later collected in separate volumes. 21. See: Popper, 1976, pp. 180-93. 22. In fact I shall venture, at times, to take up the challenge of elaboration myself. Attempting to remain faithful to Merton's implicit intentions and the overall spirit of his analysis, I shall suggest some new distinctions, concepts and hypotheses. 23. This term introduced by Merton in a 1963 article (as reprinted in SRPP, ch. 8), will be discussed in more detail in chapter 4 of this book. 24. On those other faces of Merton, see Morton M. Hunt, 'How Does It Come To Be So? Profile of Robert K. Merton', in: New Yorker, 28 January, 1961. Chapter 2 1. See M. W. Miles, 'Bibliography - Robert K. Merton, 1934-1975', in L. A. Coser (ed), The Idea of Social Structure; Papers in Honor of Robert K. Merton (New York, 1975: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), pp. 497-522; and a supplement 'Publications since 1975' compiled by M. W. Miles (mimeographed). 2. Znaniecki, 1940. 3. Znaniecki subdivides the crucial category of 'Scholars' in the following way (as summarised by Merton, SOS, pp. 42-3): (1) Sacred scholar: perpetuates sacred truths through exact and fruitful reproduction of their symbolic expressions. (2) Secular scholar: with the following subtypes: (a) discoverer of truth ... (b) systematizer. (c) contributor ... (d) fighter for truth ... 264 Notes and References (e) disseminator of knowledge ... 1. populariser. 2. educating teacher'. 4. Merton, SOS, p. 43. 5. Merton (with Lazarsfeld), 1954, p. 18. 6. Ibid. pp. 18-19. 7. Zuckerman and Merton, in: Merton, SOS, p. 520. 8. Ibid., p. 520. 9. It is striking how often the terms 'pattern' and 'structure', in their various forms, appear and reappear in Merton's analyses of society. This has been noted by Lazarsfeld, 1975, p. 57, among others. 10. Merton, STSS, pp. vii-viii. 11. Ibid., p. xiv. 12. Merton evidently suffers from perfectionism, coupled with an incessant, not always satisfied drive toward a better and wider understanding of things social. At the age of seventy-four he envisages 'about seventy articles still to be written' and complains that excessive self-criticism has kept him from publishing four books (one of them awaiting already eight years for his decision to print). (In a private communication to me) Quite recently he put forward something he calls a 'self-emancipation proclamation': 'I resolved, quite firmly, not again to commit myself to writing a paper for: a symposium (no matter how meritorious that symposium might be), to delivering a lecture (no matter how enticing an occasion that might be), to preparing a paper to be read at a national or international conference (no matter how significant that occasion might be), write a review (no matter how enticing the book) ... and so on and on through the varieties of ad hoc scholarly commitments one makes as a matter of course ... I have my own program of scholarly work and I do not want to be deflected from it'. (In a letter to Nico Stehr, dated 23 Dec., 1983). A year later comments on the effects of his proclamation: 'I have found this to be a soul-satisfying guideline, one that has led to my doing more writing that I find reasonably satisfying than in any equivalent period before' (Letter to R. Turner dated 17 July, 1984) In a letter to me dated 22 April, 1984, he refers to six extensive projects on his immediate agenda: 'the queue of matters clamoring for publication in print [as distinct from oral publication1 is forbiddingly long'. 13. Quoted in Merton, 1980, p. 31. 14. Merton, STSS, p. 70. 15. Ibid., p. 616. 16. Ibid., p. 68. 17. Merton, 1985, p. 5. 18. In Merton's study there is a sort of symbolic audience of his 'significant others' - the collection of photographs of famous scholars, teachers, intellectuals on a wall in front of his desk: Whitehead, Freud, Thomas, Henderson, Sarton, Sorokin, Stouffer, Kroeber, Polanyi, Parsons, Gini, Szilard, Knopf, Lipchitz and three photographs of Lazarsfeld. Notes and References 265 19. Merton, SA, p. 86. 20. It is characteristic that for many of the multiple foreign translations of STSS, Merton adduces special introductions which relate to the sociological tradition of the given country. For example, in the Polish edition of 1982 carefully traces his relationships with such representatives, old and young, of Polish sociology as Malinowski, Znaniecki, Ossowski, Ossowska, Malewski, Podgorecki, Nowak - and even the present author. 21. Merton, SOS, p. 374. 22. Bierstedt, 1981, pp. 466-7. See also: Manis and Meltzer, 1974, p. 1. 23. Turner, 1978, p. 91. 24. Garfield, 1977, p. 5. 25. Manis and Meltzer, 1974, p. 9. 26. Garfield, 1980, p. 61. 27. Blau, 1975a, p. 136. 28. Lazarsfeld, 1975, p. 60. 29. Bierstedt, 1981, p. 486. 30. Garfield, 1980, p. 71. 31. Manis and Meltzer, 1974, p. 5. 32. Coser, 1975, p. 85. 33. Stinchcombe, 1975, p. 11. 34. Garfield, 1980, p. 64. 35. Ibid., p. 65. 36. Ibid., p. 71. 37. Oromaner, 1970, p. 324. 38. Ibid., p. 329. But note that Merton himself warns: 'citation counts cannot be responsibly taken as the controlling basis for appraisals of individual performance. At best, they are ancillary to detailed judgments by informed peers'. Merton, 1979, p. 10. 39. Translated into: French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Hebrew, Portuguese, Polish, Hungarian, Yugoslavian (Serbo-Croatian), Chinese and German (in part). 40. Manis and Meltzer, 1974, p. 4. 41. Merton, STSS, p. ix. 42. Bierstedt, 1981, p. 461. 43. Hodges Persell, 1984, pp. 362-363. 44. Merton, 1980, p. 3. 45. Manis and Meltzer, 1974, p. 4. 46. Coser, in: Coser and Nisbet, 1975, p. 8. 47. Caplovitz, 1977, pp. 146 and 145. Merton himself says: 'During the past 55 years, the files lead to an estimate of approximately 200 book-manuscripts and about ten times that number of article-length manuscripts' (in a letter to the author, 5 Feb., 1985). 48. Letter to Eugene Garfield, dated 2 Aug., 1983. 49. In a letter to the author dated 22 April, 1984. 50. Cole and Zuckerman, 1975, p. 164. 51. Merton, STSS, p. 446. 52. Donoghue, 1981. See also: Donoghue, 1985. 266 Notes and References 53. Merton, OTSOG, p. 9. 54. Ibid., p. 178. 55. Ibid., p. 43. 56. In a letter to the author dated 5 Feb., 1985. 57. Merton, OTSOG, p. 45. 58. Merton, STSS, p. 35. 59. Taken out of context this aphorism has been sometimes misunderstood as a call to bury intellectual ancestors in perpetual oblivion. Such a striking misconstruction can be found in Levine, 1981, p. 60: 'Sociologists seemed driven to avoid the classics, following with apparently fanatic devotion the injunction suggested by the Whiteheadian epigraph to R.