Melvin L. Kohn
Melvin L. Kohn served as the 77th President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, entitled “Cross-National Research As An Analytic Strategy,” was delivered at the Association’s 1987 Annual Meeting in Chicago,and was later published in the American Sociological Review (ASR December 1987, Vol 52 No 6, pp 713-731). A Presidential Profile of Kohn was published in the October 1986 issue of Footnotes.
Obituary
Written by Ho-fung Hung, Johns Hopkins University. Originally appearing in Footnotes, Summer, 2021.
Melvin L. Kohn, emeritus professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and academy professor at the Academy at Johns Hopkins, died in his home on March 19, 2021.
Kohn joined JHU sociology in 1985, and in 1987 was elected American Sociological Association president. He joined Hopkins after almost 35 years of distinguished service at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), during the last 25 of which he led the Laboratory of Socio-Environmental Studies. At NIMH, Kohn’s path-breaking research on the relationship between social class and schizophrenia garnered many awards, including elected memberships or fellowships in the American Psychopathological Association, the Sociological Research Association, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Kohn was a pioneer in establishing the field of study of social structure and personality that combined class analysis and social psychology, with a particular focus on job conditions and their implications for personality development. In his classic text, Class and Conformity: A Study of Values (University of Chicago Press, 1969), Kohn marshaled survey data from Italy and the U.S. to show how job conditions affect not only parental values and personality but also parents’ socialization practices vis-à-vis their children. In 1985, the book was designated a “citation classic” by the editors of the Social Sciences Citation Index. Today, it remains a standard reference in the literature on social structure and personality.
JHU was Kohn’s first academic appointment, and it remained his only such appointment. At JHU, he became a true comparativist and expanded his research framework to explore the relationship between class and personality in Poland, Japan, and Ukraine. After the collapse of Soviet communism, Kohn seized the opportunity to study how the class-personality relation changed in the context of radical social transformation from state socialism to market capitalism in 1990s Poland and Ukraine. In the 2000s, he launched a five-city study in China to study social psychological change amidst rapid urban transformation.
Kohn’s comparative works earned him some of the highest academic recognition in several countries where he conducted his research. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Polish Sociological Association and a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, as well as being granted an honorary doctorate in Ukraine’s National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In 2008, the Polish Academy of Sciences hosted a symposium on his work entitled “Social Structure and Personality under Conditions of Stability and Change: Research of Melvin L. Kohn and his Collaborators,” with participants from around the world. In 2012, ASA organized a special session, “Class, Stratification, and Personality Under Conditions of Apparent Social Stability and of Radical Social Change (1956–2006),” at its Annual Conference to honor Kohn’s lifetime achievements.
From his PhD in sociology at Cornell University in 1952 to his retirement at JHU in 2012, Kohn was a never-tiring social scientist full of novel ideas to break new grounds. After his retirement, he continued to write and published his last book, The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality (Anthem Press, 2019). The book is a theoretical reflection and intellectual memoir of his lifetime of research. Looking back at his corpus of works is humbling. Kohn sets an example and a high standard of what social scientific investigation, theory building, and global comparison should be like. We will all miss his passion for research, his teaching and mentorship, his companionship, and his laughter.
