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1 See also Epstein, 1970a, 1970b, 1985, 1991, 2004. I also include references to Merton’s concepts from my own class notes from his course “Social Theory and Social Structure” given during the years 1961–6 at Columbia University . His concepts are specified with the use of italics throughout this paper. The Contribution of Robert K. Merton’s Key Concepts to the Analysis of Gender Differentiation in Society Cynthia Fuchs Epstein Sex and gender are among the subjects and fields of study most resistant to impartial inquiry in the social and physical sciences. Because no individual is free from impressions or perceptions based on personal experience or philosophy, applying the rules and standards of science to these subjects is not only difficult but is often resisted by those who come to scientific study carrying paradigmatic, social and personal biases. Further, regarded as less important than other domains of analysis , the work done on these subjects is often glossed over or not subjected to the kind of rigorous analysis applied to other subjects. The concepts and methodology advanced by Robert Merton have been of great utility to my work and that of others in analyzing and contesting some of the accepted and privileged work in these fields. Actually, only a few sociologists (with the exception of some of his former students and academic colleagues) who have explored sex and gender issues have specified the use of Merton’s ideas in their analysis . They include, of course, Harriet Zuckerman, Mirra Komarovsky, Alice Rossi, Rose Laub Coser, and Lewis Coser. Many others have quietly benefitted from Merton’s ideas that have been absorbed into popular thought—a process labeled by Merton as obliteration by incorporation. Merton’s influence has been incorporated though certainly not obliterated in my own work over the past 40 years. His ideas have been a keystone to my own throughout my career, most recently in the analysis prepared for my presidential address to the American Sociological Association (Epstein 2007) identifying “Great Divides: The Cultural, Cognitive and Social Basis of the Global Subordination of Women.”1 This paper will address some of the ways in which this has occurred, how valuable his work has been to my own analysis, and how it might further inform scholars in the future. First and foremost I want to note that Merton’s basic contributions were simple, fundamental, yet revolutionary. His injunction: “Ask the question: Is it really so?” poked holes in some very commonly held assumptions about the workings of society and the assumed functions of various institutions. Merton (1984b) warned that “What everyone knows to be true often turns out to be not true at all,” noting the perils of popular acceptance of the “latest word”—often only a new version of an old idea. Merton encouraged a critical and self-critical outlook in everyone who attended his extraordinary classes on “Social Theory and Social Structure” at Columbia University over the years and instilled in his students the taste for “organized skepticism.” Unlike many grand theorists who predicted specific changes in society or who advanced predictive models such as Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto or his own teacher, Pitirim Sorokin, Merton’s directive was to discover and understand possibilities rather than to make predictions. He urged sociologists to analyze why institutions and groups, and therefore the individuals who are members of them, tend to behave in patterned ways. And further, how people may perceive the behavior of members of groups according to their stereotypes of them, and turn a blind eye to their actual behavior. Merton brought the concept of “selective perception” from the individual psychological level to the collective social one. His call to establish the phenomenon was a reminder to sociologists not to accept common assumptions. Nowhere are these questions more pertinent than in the analysis of the ubiquitous social divisions based on sex—a phenomenon occurring in every society across the world and across all eras of history. The dichotomous division of male and female2 has led many social analysts to insist that the cause for the division must be grounded in evolutionary, biological, or basic psychological universals. To this day, even tiny statistical differences found between populations of girls and boys on such measures as mathematical or verbal ability (a difference that has virtually disappeared, according to a recent report by the 62 Concepts and the Social Order 2 I first described this process in detail in my Presidential address to the Eastern Sociological Society in 1982 (Epstein 1984...

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