Alvin Ward Gouldner | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 29, 1920 New York City, US |
| Died | December 15, 1980 (aged 60)[2] |
| Academic background | |
| Education | PhD |
| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Thesis | Industry and Bureaucracy (1954) |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert K. Merton[1] |
Alvin Ward Gouldner (July 29, 1920 – December 15, 1980) was an American sociologist, lecturer and radical activist.[2]
Goulder was born in New York City. He earned a B.B.A. degree from the Baruch College of the City University of New York and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University.
Goulder taught sociology at the University at Buffalo, Antioch College, and the University of Illinois at Urbana in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1957, he joined the joint Anthropology and Sociology department of Washington University in St. Louis. In 1968, he became the Max Weber Research Professor of Social Theory there and chair of the department.[2] He was the president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1962) and professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam (1972–1976).[citation needed]
His early works such as Patterns in Industrial Bureaucracy can be seen as important[promotion?] as they worked within the existing fields of sociology but adopted the principles of a critical intellectual. This can be seen more clearly in his 1964 work Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of Value Free Sociology,[3] where he claimed that sociology could not be objective and that Max Weber had never intended to make such a claim.
He is probably most remembered in the academy for his 1970 work The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. This work argued that sociology must turn away from producing objective truths and understand the subjective nature of sociology and knowledge in general and how it is bound up with the context of the times. This book was used by many schools of sociology as analysis of their own theory and methods. However, Gouldner was not the first sociologist to be critical of objective knowledge of society, see for example Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialectics.
Subsequently, much of Gouldner's work was concerned with critiquing modern sociology and the nature of the intellectual. He argued that ideology often produced false premises and was used as a tool by a ruling elite and that therefore critical subjective thought is much more important than objective thought.
Gouldner achieved public prominence when he was accused of beating and kicking Laud Humphreys, then a graduate student at Washington University, who Gouldner suspected of hanging a satirical cartoon poster criticizing Gouldner on the sociology department bulletin board.[4] He died of a heart attack at age 60 in 1981.[2]
Gouldner led an ethnographic study in a mine and identified there various patterns of bureaucracy and bureaucratization. He analyzed how after the appointment of a new manager the bureaucratization process emerged.[5] Gouldner identified three types of bureaucracy in his studies with very specific patterns:
