Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 3

Ask a number of influential social scientists who in turn influenced them, and you’d likely get a blue-ribbon primer on the classics in social science.

Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination. Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Irving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Emile Durkheim’s Suicide. Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge.

During the recording of every Social Science Bites podcast, the guest has been asked the following: Which piece of social science research has most inspired or most influenced you? And now, in honor of the 50th Bites podcast to air, journalist and interviewer David Edmonds has compiled those responses into three collections. This last of the three appears here, with answers presented alphabetically from Toby Miller to Linda Woodhead.

“I remember as a graduate student reading classics in epidemiology and sociology and feeling like a kid in the candy store,” recalls David Stuckler, now a University of Oxford sociologist, before namedropping? Durkheim.

Several of the guests gently railed at the request to name just one influence. “There isn’t one,” starts Mirca Madianou, a communications expert at Goldsmiths, University of London. “There may have been different books at different times of my formation.”

Social psychologist Steve Reicher said he instead liked the idea of desert Island books, which give multiple bites of this particular apple, and then named several influences, including E.P. Thompson’s The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century and Natalie Davis’s The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France, which he describes as “beautiful and rich depictions of patterns of social behavior.”

“I’m unprepared to answer this!” exclaims behavioral economist and Nobel laureate Robert Shiller before he cites Hersh Shefrin and Richard Thaler’s work that pioneered the connection between neuroscience and eEconomics.

Sometimes, though, the answer comes instantly. “Not a day that I don’t think about him or talk about him to somebody,” said Lawrence Sherman of Austin Bradford Hill, an economist whose work evaluating the use of streptomycin in treating tuberculosis created the template for randomized controlled trials.