Neil J. Smelser is Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. From 1958 to 1994 he was
on the faculty of Sociology of the University of California, Berkeley,
serving as University Professor since 1971. Among his publications are
Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1958), Theory
of Collective Behavior (1962), Comparative Methods in the Social
Sciences (1976), Social Paralysis and Social Change (1991),
and The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis (1998). He also edited
the Handbook of Sociology (1988) and, with Richard Swedberg,
the Handbook of Economic Sociology (1994). He is a member of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical
Society, and the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of the founders
of the Research Committee on Economy and Society of the International
Sociological Society, and served as co-chair of that Committee from
1978 to 1986. He served as Vice-President of the International Association
from 1990 to 1994, and as President of the American Sociological Association
from 1996 to 1997.
