ARTHUR L. STINCHCOMBE

O F all contemporary theorists of social structure, Merton has had the
greatest impact on empirical research. Investigators find it easy to under-
stand how Merton's general ideas about social structure imply hypotheses
about the pattern of behavior and the pattern of associations between vari-
ables in the setting in which their research is conducted. The argument of
this essay is that this is due to the common logical and substantive character
of all of Merton's theories of social structure. I would further argue, though
I will not defend it in detail here, that this logical and substantive character
of Merton's theories distinguishes him from almost all the other contemporary
currents of social theory: Parsonian, symbolic interactionist, the Linton-
Nadel kind of role theory, functionalism of the non-Mertonian kind. The
main exceptions seem to me to be Homans and the exchange theory tradition,
and to some degree the balance theory tradition, which have a similar logical
structure and similar empirical fruitfulness.

What I will be trying to do, then, is to codify Merton's codifications, to
outline the principles behind the choice of those elements in a theoretical
tradition that he chose as central and worth codifying and those he ignored.
The test case for the success of my effort is his approach to the social struc-
ture of science, where he was choosing freely what to pay attention to because
there was not much to codify.

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