Professor John W. Meyer is Professor of Sociology (and, by courtesy, Education) at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1966. He was born in 1935 and studied at Goshen College, the University of Colorado, and Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in 1965. He has served as visiting professor or lecturer at many universities and institutes around the world, and has received many honors. He is a member of the (US) National Academy of Education, has received the American Sociological Association´s Waller Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Sociology of Education, and has an honorary doctorate from the Stockholm School of Economics.
Professor Meyer is well known as a founder and contributor to institutional theory in modern sociology. This line of work emphasizes the embeddedness of modern social actors, from individuals to organizations to national states, in wider external cultural models. Thus, in a much cited 1977 paper (with Brain Rowan) and in later books, Professor Meyer depicted modern formal organizations as ritualized celebrations of external cultural rules, more than as coherent action and policy systems. Similar lines of argument led to the codification, in many books and articles and in the work of many students, of a "world polity" tradition emphasizing the embeddedness of modern national states in a wider world environment. Throughout his career, Professor Meyer has emphasized empirical research along these lines. He and his students have created a number of new areas of empirical work on national societies in the global system. |