By Steve Matthewman
On 29 June 2023 Professor Charles Crothers was bestowed with The Robert K. Merton Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Sociology of Science and Technology. The award was made by RC 23, the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on the Sociology of Science and Technology, at the 20th World Congress of Sociology, held in Narrm, Melbourne.
SAANZ congratulates Charles on this wonderful achievement, which recognises both a lifetime of contributions to sociology generally and to Mertonian sociology more specifically.
Nadia Asheulova, President of RC 23, made the award. The citation read in part: ‘With a considerable reputation as a Merton scholar, Professor Crothers’s contribution to Mertonian scholarship traverses a diverse range of theoretical, methodological, and substantive topics and across several closely related areas such as sociology of social science, sociology of knowledge and social epistemology’.
Dr. Harriet Zuckerman, Professor Emerita of Columbia University, the wife of Robert Merton, former board member of RC23, and a noted sociologist of science in her own right, was quick to congratulate Charles, writing: ‘Dear Charles, Now it’s my chance to congratulate you and heap praise on you for the hard work you’ve done – and for keeping at it over all these years… I confess, I knew about the award and was sworn to secrecy until you got the news. But of course I told the chair of the RC, Nadia Ashuleva, how happy I was about the choice her committee had made.’
Lorenzo Sabetta’s 2023 interview with Charles (‘Sociology of Structures, Structures of Sociology’) is published in the Italian journal Quaderni di Teoria Sociale. Fortunately, it is in English. It can be accessed here.
