William A. Gamson
William A. Gamson served as the 85th President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, entitled “Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the Politics of Exclusion,” was delivered at the Association’s 1994 Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, and was later published in the February 1995 issue of the American Sociological Review (ASR Vol 60 No 1, pp 1-20).
Obituary
Written by David S. Meyer, University of California, Irvine. Originally appearing in Footnotes, Summer 2021.
William (Bill) Gamson had a knack for opening sentences. A favorite, “Beware of economists bearing gifts,” was emblematic, grabbing attention and setting up the paper—a critical examination of the growing influence of utilitarian perspectives in assessing the politics of social protest. Pithy and provocative, the line opened an argument against the so-called “free rider problem,” buttressed by historical accounts and contemporary examples, and ending with a formal mathematical proof. It was characteristically free of jargon and gratuitous citation, and clearly aimed at making sense of a theoretical problem in order to engage in more effective action.
Of course, there’s considerable variation in Gamson’s styles and subjects—math, for example, appears episodically—but a concern with clarity and practical consequences stretches across a massive volume of writing, which includes eight books and well over 100 articles published between 1961 and 2014. Gamson could write.
Gamson engaged critical topics in the study of collective action, always concerned about the influence and outcomes of social movements that opposed war and promoted progressive policies. He started with coalitions, considered how individuals and groups made judgments about justice and choose to get involved in politics, the political and policy outcomes of social movements, how activists worked in and with mass media, and how media framed both activists and their causes. An astonishing share of his work animates that of other scholars decades later. Along the way, he wrote about whatever else engaged him, writing about his identity as a Jewish professor teaching at a Catholic school late in his career.
Gamson’s teaching, like his politics, was fundamentally democratic. In the classroom, he committed to learning groups and games (SimSoc!), where small learning groups worked through problems to engage difficult and interesting material. He even brought the learning groups to the presidential address of the American Sociological Association in 1994, where 1,500 sociologists spread out across scores of tables to talk about genocide and nuclear war. Outside the classroom, he was one of the architects of the first “teach-in” about the Vietnam War at the University of Michigan in 1965. Over decades, he met weekly with the members of the Media Research and Action Project (MRAP), which he co-founded with Charlotte Ryan. With good humor, coffee, and baked goods, MRAP was a home for an admixture of activists and academics and launched a thousand dissertations.
Gamson was an innovator, prospecting methods and creating games. As an assistant professor, he created fantasy baseball, allowing academics to imagine alternative careers in sports, and created classroom games that similarly stoked students’ imagination. A creative and eclectic scholar, he deployed formal modeling, simulations, historical analysis, frame analysis, focus groups, and interviews—depending upon the question of the moment.
Gamson won many awards and honors. A partial list includes: AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research (1962); the ASA Sorokin Award, for a distinguished scholarly publication (1969) for the book Power and Discontent (Richard D. Irwin, 1968); Guggenheim Fellowship (1978); Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (1978); ASA Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award (1987); ASA President (1994); Distinguished Career Award, ASA Section on Peace and War (1997); Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002); the ASA Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements’ Distinguished Book Award (2004, with Myra Marx Ferree, Jürgen Gerhards, and Dieter Rucht) for Shaping Abortion Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2002); John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Behavior (2011); and W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (2012).
Gamson was born in Philadelphia on January 27, 1934. He earned a BA from Antioch College (political science) and a PhD from the University of Michigan (social psychology), where he taught from 1962 until 1982. In 1982, he moved to Boston College, teaching there until 2010 and remaining engaged after his retirement until his death on March 23, 2021. He is survived by his wife, sociologist Zelda Gamson; a son, sociologist Joshua Gamson; a daughter, Jenny Gamson; and five grandchildren. His half-century of work continues to animate scholarship, and if you throw a rock at ASA’s annual meeting, you will hit someone who remembers Gamson’s extraordinary kindness.
