Our history

The first president of Stanford, David Starr Jordan, recruited E.A. Ross from Cornell University for the Department of Economics and Sociology. In a letter to Jane Stanford (co-founder of Stanford University), Jordan dubbed Ross the “most promising” young sociologist in the country.

Although Ross was quite prolific, his most famous work was his “race suicide” analyses examining whether the birth rate of a racial group was sufficient to maintain its numeric share in the larger population. As E.A. Ross famously put it, “the high standard of living that restrains multiplication in America will be imperiled if [Chinese and Indians] are allowed to pour into this country in great numbers before they have raised their standards of living and lowered their birth rate.” This eugenicist line of analysis traces through to present-day “replacement theory.”

Shortly after E.A. Ross was appointed, Mary Roberts Coolidge earned her Ph.D at Stanford in 1896, after which she was named assistant professor of sociology. This made her the first woman in the U.S. appointed as a full-time professor of sociology.

In her prominent (and controversial) book Chinese Immigration, Coolidge attributed the anti-Chinese sentiment of the time to the prejudices of early settlers. In a later book, Why Women Are So, she examined the effects of societal attitudes on middle-class women.

Because of a “mental breakdown,” Coolidge left Stanford in 1905, going on to found the Department of Sociology at Mills College and to work for the Carnegie Institution and the San Francisco Settlement Association (a prominent social welfare organization).

Because E.A. Ross objected to Chinese and Japanese immigration, he incurred the ire of Jane Stanford (as the Stanfords had made their railway fortune via Chinese laborers). This conflict culminated in Jane Stanford’s insistence that E.A. Ross be fired.

The president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, sought to defend Ross’s academic freedom, but Jane Stanford persisted and E.A. Ross ultimately resigned in 1900.

In the aftermath of this controversy, many other Stanford professors also resigned in support of academic freedom, leading to a “national debate … concerning the freedom of expression and control of universities by private interests.”

This episode led to the creation of a new organization – the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) – that to this day is dedicated to protecting the academic freedom of faculty members.

Soon after Ross’s dismissal, the Department of Economics and Sociology was renamed the Department of Economics and Social Science, a renaming that symbolized the cost – to Stanford sociology – of this dispute.

Although the name “sociology” was vanquished from the Department’s title, Stanford continued to attract some of the most prominent sociologists in the world.

The discipline’s first economic sociologist – Thorstein Veblen – was appointed at Stanford University in 1906. Although Veblen was part economist, he was more fundamentally a sociologist who emphasized that modern economies are embedded in social institutions and can’t be successfully analyzed, as they commonly were, as if they are governed by wholly internal laws (e.g., the laws of supply and demand). This theory of embeddedness was later developed more fully by Mark Granovetter.

In related lines of work, Veblen also introduced the concepts of pecuniary emulation (i.e., “keeping up with the Joneses” by displaying status symbols) and conspicuous consumption (i.e., the dominance of consumption – as against earnings – in determining the status of individuals). In 1911, Veblen was forced to resign from his position, amidst charges of womanizing.

The loss of Veblen was crushing, and Stanford sociology but limped along as the world struggled through two world wars and their aftermath. The leading figures in Stanford sociology within this period were Margaret Mulford Lothrop, Walter Greenwood Beach, Richard T. LaPiere, and Charles N. Reynolds.

Most notably, LaPiere attracted attention for his work establishing that attitudes and behaviors were not always in alignment, a shot across the bow for those who had thought that surveys of attitudes could alone suffice. To expose the attitudes-behavior disjuncture, LaPiere showed that business establishments almost always claimed that they’d never welcome people of Chinese ethnicity into their establishments, but in truth they actually did allow them when LaPiere toured the country and visited the establishments (in effect carrying out one of sociology’s first “audit studies”).

The resulting study was one of the relatively few prominent works within this otherwise disappointing “middle period” of Stanford sociology. At the same time, other sociology departments in the U.S. were thriving, with the University of Chicago forming the “Chicago schools” of urban sociology (led by Robert Park, George Mead, W.I. Thomas, Louis Wirth, Everett Hughes, and Jane Addams), Harvard becoming the hub of grand theory (led by Pitirim A. Sorokin and Talcott Parsons), and Michigan becoming a powerhouse of empirical and survey research (led by Rensis Likert and Amos Hawley).

During this “missing middle” period, the Department of Anthropology and Sociology was formed (in 1948), but the more prominent members of this hybrid department were for the most part anthropologists. The breakthrough was the decision – in 1957 – to at long last establish an independent department of sociology (a far later development than at other top universities in the U.S).

In 1950, Sanford M. Dornbusch was invited to chair this new department, with a clear mandate to strengthen the program by hiring top sociologists from around the country. This led to the appointment of Joseph Berger, Santo F. Camilleri, Bernard P. Cohen, W. Richard Scott, Morris Zelditch, Jr., and John W. Meyer. Because the department  lacked the resources to become a full-service department covering all of sociology’s major fields, a strategic decision was made to focus on two very central fields, social psychology and organizations. Within these two fields, Stanford instantly became a world-leading institution.

The social psychology “wing” built out a new theory of status expectations that showed how inequality emerges because (a) it’s believed that members of privileged groups (e.g., men) are more competent, and (b) these beliefs lead others to defer to privileged group members in ways that then render their beliefs self-fulfilling.

The institutionalist wing, especially John Meyer (in collaboration with Woody Powell and others), built a research program showing that organizational practices are not optimizing in a narrow sense but instead are myths, ceremonies, or scripts that are seen as modern, have the veneer of rational practice, and thus legitimate the organization as a member of a modern community.

These two lines of research were immensely influential and succeeded in establishing Stanford sociology as a leading voice in the discipline.

This commitment to concentrating on two key fields – social psychology and organizations – served Stanford well in its “reentry period” by establishing a strong foothold in the discipline.

But inevitably the ambitions of the department grew as Stanford University itself transformed into a world-leading institution. The new ambition – to become the “best department” – was widely shared among the faculty, but how it might be realized was quite contested. The resulting “great broadening” of the department brought about, then, extraordinary growth as well as red-hot conflict, as different sectors of the department offered up different models for growth.

Although it was rough-and-tumble times, the job got done and, when the dust settled, the department had indeed successfully stole top faculty from leading departments across an expansive range of new fields, including gender (Cecilia Ridgeway), collective action (Doug McAdam), political sociology (Seymour Martin Lipset), demography and the family (William J. Goode, Nancy B. Tuma, Michael Rosenfeld), inequality (David B. Grusky), networks and economic sociology (Mark Granovetter), social theory (Alex Inkeles), race and ethnicity (Susan Olzak, C. Matthew Snipp), and comparative and international sociology (Xueguang Zhou, Gi-Wook Shin). The department also shored up its existing strength in the fields of organizations (Michael T. Hannan, James G. March) and social psychology (Karen Cook, Elizabeth Cohen). It would be hard to imagine a more impressive hoovering-up of talent.

During this period, the department’s faculty put out field-leading research on collective action, the sources of gender inequality, the dynamics of social mobility and the life course, the structure of networks, the embeddedness of the economy, the population ecology of organizations, trust in organizations, the future of social classes, political institutions in America, nationalism and state-building in Asia, and so much more.

The transition to a full-service department was nearly complete.

The key development of our time is that the stock problems of sociology (e.g., authoritarianism, inequality, rent-seeking and corruption, externalities and capture, racism and ethnocentrism) have become the fundamental problems of our time. In recent decades, the Stanford sociology department has leaned into this problem-solving sensibility, indeed we’ve quietly built what we immodestly call a new school of “open and engaged sociology.”

At various points in sociology’s history, the discipline’s leading departments have put forth very distinctive approaches to the practice of sociology (e.g. the first “Chicago School of sociology” flourished in the early 20th century), approaches that then profoundly influenced the course of disciplinary history. In the last 5 years, Stanford’s sociology department has been quietly building out just such a new approach, a build-out that was so stealthy that none of our faculty appreciated until recently that something distinctive was afoot.

The main development of note is that, via a spate of junior and young-senior hires (who mesh exceedingly well with our preexisting faculty), we now have a department that’s resolutely committed to taking on fundamental societal problems (i.e., we’re “engaged”), that seeks to do so by identifying and targeting the social mechanisms that give rise to these problems (i.e., we’re model-based), and that’s not squeamish in the least about prosecuting this work via a full-throated commitment to the best open science principles (i.e., we’re “open scientists”).

We’ve recently invested in faculty who are focused on solving key problems of our time, including rising surveillance (Sarah Brayne), increasing political polarization (Robb Willer), persisting neighborhood segregation and housing inequality (Jackelyn Hwang), new types of urban inequality (Forrest Stuart), new types of discrimination by gender and sexuality (Shelley Correll, Aliya Saperstein), criminal justice inequities (Matthew Clair), immigration and deportation (Tomás Jiménez, Asad Asad), health inequalities (Jeremy Freese), the rise of a dysfunctional division of labor (Michelle Jackson), and human rights abuses (Kiyoteru Tsutsui).

This new school of “open and engaged” sociology shouldn’t be treated as some marketing ploy. It’s not entirely free, of course, of marketing benefits. But it’s also a meaningful supplement to sociology’s current emphasis on “public sociology” (i.e., publishing mass-market trade books) or simple advocacy on behalf of normative positions. Although trade books and advocacy are of course useful and important, our faculty focus on the unheralded scientific work of figuring out how to build an inclusive and sustainable society. This work relies on basic science to establish the social facts and mechanisms in play, on policy research to establish how those facts and mechanisms operate in concrete institutional conditions, and on fresh conceptual work to imagine how existing societies might be refashioned in productive ways.