24 Facts About Randall Collins

Randall Collins was born on July 29,1941 and is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing.

Randall Collins has taught in many notable universities around the world and his academic works have been translated into various languages.

Randall Collins is a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise include the macro-historical sociology of political and economic change; micro-sociology, including face-to-face interaction; and the sociology of intellectuals and social conflict.

Randall Collins's publications include The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, which analyzes the network of philosophers and mathematicians for over two thousand years in both Asian and Western societies.

Randall Collins is considered to be one of the leading non-Marxist conflict theorists in the United States, and served as the president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 to 2011.

Randall Collins grew up in various cities and spent a good deal of his early years in Europe, where his father was part of military intelligence during World War II and served in the United States Department of State.

Randall Collins wanted to study personality and human cognition but was assigned to work in a rat lab as a research assistant; this made him realize he would rather study sociology.

On December 3,1964, Randall Collins was arrested during a stand-in for the Free Speech Movement along with over 600 of his peers.

Randall Collins worked with Joseph Ben-David, an Israeli sociologist visiting from Hebrew University, on the sociology of science, which ultimately led to Collins' publication The Sociology of Philosophies decades later.

Randall Collins was introduced to Weberian conflict theory through Reinhard Bendix, a leading Max Weber scholar.

Randall Collins first taught as an acting instructor at Berkeley.

Randall Collins subsequently served on the faculties of University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of California, San Diego, the University of Virginia and the University of California, Riverside before taking his current position at the University of Pennsylvania.

Randall Collins took intermittent breaks from academia as an independent scholar and novelist.

Randall Collins has held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, as well as various schools in Europe, Japan and China.

Randall Collins has published almost one hundred articles since finishing his undergraduate education.

Randall Collins has written and contributed to several books with a range of topics such as the discovery of society to the sociology of marriage and family life.

Randall Collins has written extensively about credential inflation, proposing a set of mechanisms through which it operates.

Randall Collins is a social scientist who views theory as essential to understanding the world.

Randall Collins has devoted much of his career and research to study society, how is it created and destroyed through emotional behaviors of human beings.

Randall Collins believes that the simplest explanation for radical behavior and actions is emotion.

Emotional energy, Randall Collins says, is the "amount of emotional power that flows through one's actions" and does not refer to one specific emotion.

Randall Collins emphasizes the significance of people coming together and the influence this has on behavior.

Randall Collins has argued that violent confrontation goes against human physiological hardwiring.

Early in his career, Randall Collins left academia on several occasions to write fiction.