James Samuel Coleman
May 12, 1926 – March 25, 1995
James S. Coleman served as the 83rd President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, “The Rational Reconstruction of Society”, was delivered at the Association’s Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh in 1992, and was later published in ASR (ASR, Vol 58 No 1, pages 1-15). A profile of James Coleman was published in the September 1991 issue of Footnotes.
Obituary
Originally published in the May/June, 1995 edition of Footnotes.
James S. Coleman, a world renowned professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, died March 25, 1995, at the age of 68. James Coleman received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1949 from Purdue University and his PhD in sociology in 1955 from Columbia University where he studied with Paul S. Lazarsfeld and Robert K Merton. He founded the Department of Social Relations at Johns Hopkins University in 1959, where he served as professor and department chair until 1973, when he returned to the University of Chicago as University Professor. He served as ASA President in 1992.
Coleman’s scholarly career was devoted to the creation and utilization of social science method ology and theory to study social phenomena and to illuminate major issues in public policy. His main contributions lay in sociological theory–including the analysis of social change, collective action, and rational choice–mathematical sociology, the sociology of education, and public policy. Exceptional ability, fertile imagination, and the courage to go against received opinion and to bear sometimes vicious attacks marked his distinguished career, and explained his enormous contributions to the social sciences.
Coleman first attained fame in the discipline as a mathematical sociologist with his book Introduction to Mathematical Sociology, where he introduced mathematical models for study of com plex social processes. Coleman insisted on relating his theories to real world situations and problems. In Medical Innovations, he showed how information about new drugs diffused among physicians linked in social networks. His doctoral dissertation (later published as the classic Union Democracy with S. M. Lipset and M. Trow) explained how trade unions would maintain democracy in the face of strong countervailing forces. The Adolescent Society put the American high school under a similarly fine-grained scrutiny. His early research on schools and schooling helped shape government policy on racial integration and school busing. The best-known product of the research is ”Equality of Educational Opportunity” known as the Coleman report (1966). The study made pioneering use of large data sets. One of his most prominent conclusions was that lower-class black children benefit ted academically from being in integrated schools. His later studies compared the relative efficacy of public and private schools. In this way, Coleman’s research probably touched the lives of more Americans than that of any other sociologist.
Subsequent to the Coleman Report, he analyzed data from cities that had begun busing programs in order to integrate black and white students into the same schools. In 1975 Coleman concluded that whites moved out of public schools (in ”white flight”) in massive numbers from communities with these programs. Outraged civil-rights leaders, social scientists, and educational leaders responded by sharply criticizing Coleman’s methodology and motives. Coleman did not back away from his conclusions, despite pressure to do so.
In 1981, he triggered another uproar by releasing a report that compared public schools with private and Catholic schools and concluded that Catholic schools provided a better education than public schools.
Coleman spent much of the last two decades of his life working on sociological theory. These efforts culminated in his 1990 Foundations of Social Theory, which he considered his most important work in sociology. The book, which is already a classic, uses a rational choice approach to social behavior. Rational choice theory has been the basis of eco nomics for the past two centuries, but Coleman used his sociological mind to adapt the theory to social situations by viewing individual behavior as fundamentally embedded in society’s institutions and structure. The book shows how individual choices are affected by social norms, peer pressure, a desire to emulate leaders, and other group influences. Foundations contains a rich mixture of creative theorizing and common examples of social behavior. Theory is used to explain, among other things, bank runs, fads and fashions, acquisitive crazes, behavior in communes, trust in business and social relations, and peer and other influence on voting choices.
Together with economist Gary Becker, Coleman founded in the early 1980s an interdisciplinary seminar at the University of Chicago on rational choice in the social sciences. The seminar acquired a broad reputation in academia as a center for rigorous discussions of both the strengths and weaknesses of rational choice theory in interpreting social, political, and eco nomic behavior. In 1989 Coleman founded the interdisciplinary journal Rationality and Society to serve as a forum for interdisciplinary discussion and debate of these issues.
Coleman’s scholarship and active engagement with social issues exemplified his view of the role of social scientists in contemporary democratic societies. Like most of the great sociologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Coleman’s commitment to his field was moral. For him, social science could not be justified merely as an intellectual exercise. Rather, it had to prove its worth by showing policy-makers how to design legislation and institutions that would be beneficial to society.
Coleman was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and an honorary member of the Polish Sociological Association. In 1970-1971 he was a fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge University, England. He was a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee from 1970 to 1973. In 1991 he served as the president of the American Sociological Association. Coleman was the author of nearly 30 books and over 300 articles and book chapters, many of them oriented towards both an academic and a public policy audience. He received honorary degrees from universities in the United States and through out the world. Among his numerous awards were the Paul Lazarsfeld Award for Research in 1983, the Educational Freedom Award in 1989, and the Ameri can Sociological Association Distinguished Publication Award in 1992 (for his Foundations of Social Theory). He had wide international influence and had particularly strong ties to the scholarly communities in Poland, Germany, Israel, and the Scandinavian countries.
