Peter Blau Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Peter Blau is one of the most influential figures in post-war American sociology. His long career and range of substantive interests span the range from small-groups and social exchange theory to organizational theory, the analysis of status attainment, and finally general sociological theory. In spite of its apparent ”heterogeneity, it can be argued that a single strand runs through Blau s diverse body of work. For Blau, the study of the structural limits posed by large-scale distributions of actors, positions, and resources on the opportunities and choices of individuals constituted the central subject matter of sociology. Nevertheless Blau made seminal contributions to many sociological fields. His life s work can be divided into four major components: status attainment, his work on organizations, his exchange theory, and his macrostruc-tural theory.

Status Attainment And Mobility

Blau and Duncan s classic monograph The American Occupational Structure (1967) introduced to a sociological audience multiple regression and path analysis, which is today the bread and butter of quantitative sociology.

Organizational Theory

Blau s first major contributions to sociology were in the field of organizations. His first important publication – an elaboration of his dissertation research – was Dynamics ofBureaucracy (1955), which at the time formed part of a rising post-Weberian wave of organizational studies. This research consisted in exploring how far the received image of the Weberian bureaucracy as an efficient, mechanical system of roles, positions, and duties held up under close scrutiny in the empirical study of social interaction within organizations. Blau (1955) contributed to this strand of research by highlighting the ways in which the real life ofthe organization was structured along informal channels of interaction and socio-emotional exchange, and how the incipient status systems formed through these back-channels were as important to the continued functioning of these organizations as the formal status structure. Thus, Blau was primarily concerned with the interplay between formal structure, informal practices, and bureaucratic pressures and how these processes affect organizational change.

Exchange Theory And Small Group Behavior

From his original study of social activity in bureaucracies, Blau developed a ”microstructural theory of exchange and social integration in small groups. His work on this type of non-economic exchange and its interaction with the status and power structure of the group (flows of advice, esteem, and reputation) would later become important in the influential formalization of exchange theory in the hands of Richard Emerson. To this day Blau is seen in social psychology (along with George Homans) as one of the intellectual progenitors of modern exchange theory in structural social psychology.

Macrostructural Theory

For Blau (1977), social structure consisted of the networks of social relations that organize patterns of interaction across different social positions. For Blau, the basic components of social structure were not natural persons, but instead social positions. Thus, the ”parts of social structure are classes of people like men and women, rich and poor, etc. The relations between these components are none other than the actual network connections that may (or may not) obtain between members of different positions.

Bibliography:

Blau, P. (1977) A macrosociological theory of social structure. American Journal of Sociology 83 (1): 26-54.
Blau, P. M. (1970) A formal theory of differentiation in organizations. American Sociological Review 35: 201-18.
Blau, P. M. (1974) Presidential address: parameters of social structure. American Sociological Review 39: 615-35.