Joseph Berger

Joseph Berger, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Stanford University and Senior Fellow (Emeritus) at the Hoover Institution, died in his sleep December 24, 2023, about three months short of his 100th birthday. His theoretical and experimental work on status and interaction influences generations of scholars. 

Berger received the Cooley-Mead Award of the Social Psychology Section (1991) and the W. E. B. Dubois Award of the ASA (2007). His alma mater, Brooklyn College, awarded him their Lifetime Achievement Award (2009).

Joe was a staunch friend, an exacting mentor, a careful and prolific scholar, and a devoted family man. In 1949, Joe married Shirley Fuchs, a fellow student at Brooklyn. They had two children, Adam and Rachel. That marriage ended in 1965. The following year he married Margaret Alice Smith (“Theory”), forming an intimate union that lasted until her death on Christmas Day, 2022. Their son Gideon cared for Joe in his final months. In addition to his love for his children, Joe delighted in Rachel’s sons Isiah and Jonah, and Gideon’s son Paul.  

Following commencement at Brooklyn (1949), Joe entered the doctoral program in Social Relations at Harvard. He studied with sociologists and psychologists of his home department, and often, with philosophers, logicians, and mathematicians. Gordon Allport, the Graduate Director, once asked him “What department are you in, Mr. Berger?” Joe was research assistant to Talcott Parsons and his doctoral supervisor was Robert Freed Bales. 

Joe’s first faculty position (1954-1959) was at Dartmouth College, where he became close with young mathematicians John G. Kemeny and J. Laurie Snell. Berger and Snell published a Markov model of mobility. Patrick Suppes, a dean at Stanford, mentioned to Snell that he hoped to enlarge the sociology department. Snell recommended Joe, the department looked him over and offered a position that Joe accepted in 1959. Stanford also hired Sanford M. Dornbusch as chair, and he soon added Bo Anderson, Santo F. Camilleri, Bernard P. Cohen, W. Richard Scott, and Morris Zelditch, Jr. Elizabeth G. Cohen, a sociologist, joined the Graduate School of Education because Stanford at that time did not allow spouses in the same department. 

At Stanford Joe introduced a graduate seminar in theory construction (Dartmouth had declined him permission for “such a radical new course”). Cohen and Zelditch later taught versions of the course, so all graduate students in the department for several decades encountered the ideas. 

The best-known works from the research program are theories of status and expectation state processes. Berger, Cohen, and Zelditch authored the majority of early papers. A former student, Hamit Fisek, worked closely with Joe until his death in 2020. Elizabeth G. Cohen and Rachel Lotan developed techniques used in more than a dozen countries to reduce harmful status inequalities in classrooms. Others develop and apply proliferant theories in business, medicine, race and ethnic inequality, gender, model building, and other venues. The work reflects Joe’s views on the place of abstract theory and relations of theory and evidence, ideas that engaged him throughout his life. 

Joe served as Department Chair for a total of twelve years, from 1976-83 and 1985-89.  Becoming a Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution put him in contact with many social scientists, several of whom he attracted to join the department. He retired from those positions in 1994 at the age of 70, and he worked until the end of his life. His final publications, in 2022, are two chapters on status and research programs. 

  Joseph Berger’s dedication to explicit theory and cumulative knowledge inspires scholars studying social structures and interaction. In his high school yearbook, Joe said he hoped to become “Instructor in the science of sociology.” He did; and accomplished more than he could have foreseen in 1942.