Structural Contexts of Opportunities

by Peter M. Blau

The distinguished sociologist Peter Blau has opened up a variety of fields with brilliant contributions, ranging from research on social networks of small groups and quantitative studies of formal organizations to more synoptic investigations of populations and the large scale structures which hold them together. In this capstone to a prolific career, he has brought together these concerns to form a wide ranging theory of population structures and their influence on social life—from opportunities in job choice and social mobility, to organizational participation, and intergroup relations.

Blau begins by outlining the influences of population structures on intergroup relations and then examining the implications these influences have on occupational opportunities. He looks at the many groups within which an individual is likely to socialize—family, ethnic group, socioeconomic class—and the distance away from these groups an individual is likely to move. Blau demonstrates how such factors affect social mobility, which, in turn, influences membership and structures several types of organizations.

Blau then moves on to interpersonal relationships and analyzes the social exchanges in them that reveal the ultimate effects of ethnic, socioeconomic, and other aspects of population structures. He defines two types of influence in direct interpersonal exchange, and large-scale domination (economic or political) of groups without personal contact.

244 pages, Hardcover

First published October 17, 1994

About the author

Peter Michael Blau was an Austrian and American sociologist and theorist. Born in Vienna, Austria, he immigrated to the United States in 1939. He completed his PhD doctoral thesis with Robert K. Merton at Columbia University in 1952, laying an early theory for the dynamics of bureaucracy. The next year, he was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1953 to 1970. He also taught as Pitt Professor at Cambridge University in Great Britain, as a senior fellow at King's College, and as a Distinguished Honorary professor at Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences which he helped to establish. In 1970 he returned to Columbia University, where he was awarded the lifetime position of professor emeritus. From 1988 to 2000 he taught as the Robert Broughton Distinguished Research Professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the same department as his wife, Judith Blau, while continuing to commute to New York to meet with graduate students and colleagues.