Bio: (1930-2017) American sociologist. Neil Smelser completed his undergraduate and doctoral studies at Harvard and spent his entire teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley. During his undergraduate studies at Harvard, he began working closely with Talcott Parsons, who was his mentor. Smelser underwent complete clinical training in psychoanalysis, while working as an assistant to Parsons, to help Parsons write the book Family, Socialization, and the Interaction Process (1955), which contained many psychoanalytic elements.

Their collaboration continued after that and together they published the book Economy and Society (1956). In this book, they theoretically develop Parsons's functionalism. The authors divide the social system into four functional sub-systems: economic system (A), political system (G), societal community (I), and fiduciary system (L). In addition to the social system, there are behavioral systems, personality systems, and cultural systems. They applied the AGIL scheme to the economic system itself because it contains four functional parts: adaptation (A), goal attainment (G), integration (I), and latency (L). They sought to integrate sociological and economic theory through the incorporation of economic concepts and mechanisms into their broader theoretical paradigm because they believed that the economy was connected and, in a way, part of society as a whole and that all individuals and collectives participated in a way, in the economy.

In his book Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959), Smelser expands the functionalist model by introducing, to this predominantly static paradigm, an analysis of social change that he studied in the context of industrialization and modernization. He sees the industrial revolution as a multidimensional social process involving political, economic, family, cultural, and scientific change. Smelser shows how the modernization of production technology was related to changes in all other areas. He pays special attention to the question of how the factory system in Britain has influenced the change in the family structure and studies the gender division of labor as an independent variable that has affected both the economy and the family.

In the book Theory of Collective Behavior (1962), Smelser emphasizes the key importance of mobilization for collective action. He introduces the concept of "structural strain" to develop a multi-level model that explains many forms of collective behavior. He takes the concept of "added value" from economics, to explain the successive stages that occur in collective behavior. Smelser applies this approach to study the case of the emergence of new social movements. Each new stage in the development of social movements adds some new added value to the whole movement and thus increases the chance that collective behavior or social movements will be successful.

Studying social movements, he concluded that there is no specific mover, but they are always the result of several factors. In this context, six elements add new value to social movements. 1) structural conduciveness – opportunities and resources available to movements; 2) structural strains - the emergence of “ambiguities, deprivations, conflicts, and discrepancies” (1962); the discrepancy between people's expectations and social reality, meaning, when the situation in society does not meet people's expectations; 3) generalized beliefs - beliefs and attitudes that are spread among the population and support the movement; 4) precipitating factors - events that serve as a spark for the sudden spread of dissatisfaction and mobilization; 5) mobilization for action - formation of a functional social network of activists, in order to carry out the necessary activities; 6) failure of social control - the authorities are not able to stop the formation and spread of the social movement.

In the early 1970s, the popularity of the functionalist paradigm declined rapidly. Smelser himself becomes self-critical and accuses functionalism of being too involved in the development of theory, while, at the same time, it was empirically unsuccessful. His partially altered theoretical framework is evident in the book Social Paralysis and Social Change: British Working Class Education in the Nineteenth Century (1991). In it, Smelser studies different approaches to the history of working-class education in Britain (functionalist, Marxist, status approach) and concludes that all these approaches are insufficient and unable to answer all the questions.

He advocates building a synthetic approach that incorporates the best elements of different paradigms. In Problematics of Sociology (1997), Smelser further develops a synthetic approach, emphasizing that each level of sociological study - global, macro, meso, and micro - has its significance and that none can be more important for sociological analysis than others. In the book Social Edges of Psychoanalysis (1998), he states that many elements of Freud's psychoanalysis have been discredited: Eros and Thanatos, the universal language of dreams, psychosocial levels of development, the myth of primitive horde, and others. Smelser believes that the application of psychoanalysis in sociology was an obstacle to building a serious interdisciplinary approach.

The fruits of Smelser's intellectual work have greatly contributed to the development of several sociological fields: the shaping of the classical functionalist approach and the development of its concepts and constructs; the return of economic sociology to the center of sociological focus; improvement of the sociological understanding of social change; and bringing a better understanding of collective behavior and social movements.

Main works

Economy and Society (1956);

Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry (1959);

Theory of Collective Behavior (1962);

The Sociology of Economic Life (1963);

Essays in Sociological Explanation (1968);

Public Higher Education in California (1974);

Behavioral and Social Science: Fifty Years of Discovery (1986);

Social Paralysis and Social Change: British Working Class Education in the Nineteenth Century (1991);

The Handbook of Economic Sociology (1994);

Problematics of Sociology: The Georg Simmel Lectures (1997);

The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis (1998);

Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004);

Dynamics of the Contemporary University: Growth, Accretion, and Conflict (2013).