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7 FEBRUARY 1918 * 12 MARCH 2002
PETER MICHAEL BLAU died 12 March 2002 of adult respiratory distress syndrome. He was eighty-four. He was professor emeritus at Columbia, a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, Pitt Professor at Cambridge University, senior fellow at King's College, member of the American Philosophical Society, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an honorary professor at the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences.
He completed his doctorate with Robert K. Merton at Columbia in 1952 and went on to develop theories that continue to be influential in the study of modern society. His endeavor was to develop systematic theoretical schemes to explain macrostructures and their impact on daily life. He wrote his dissertation on bureaucracy, which led to a book on exchange theory. For the next fifty years, Peter Blau studied macrostructural characteristics of society. His theories seek to explain how social phenomena such as upward mobility, occupational opportunity, heterogeneity, and population structures influence human behavior. He developed the methods used in sociology to draw out and map the diverse constellations of social forces. Miller McPherson has called this type of constellation-mapping "Blau space." Sociologists today use "Blauspace" to illustrate the effects of aspects of human society - cultural, evolutionary, and institutional - which did not specifically enter Blau's work. It is the unique feature of Blau's scholarship that his theories were flexible enough to extend beyond the parameters of the field of his time.
He was the author of hundreds of articles and eleven books, many of which are still widely read by students of sociology. He is considered one of the founders of contemporary American sociology and one of the most prominent scholars of his time. He taught many of today's prominent sociologists. Tb his students and colleagues, he was known for his fairness, integrity, modesty, and humor. Former graduate students Craig Calhoun, Marshall Meyer, and Richard C. Scott wrote, "Peter Blau is not only one of today's most influential sociologists, he is one of sociology's finest people. . . . We never knew any [teacher] of...