William Julius Wilson

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William Julius Wilson bigraphy, stories - American sociologist

William Julius Wilson : biography

December 20, 1935 –

William Julius Wilson (born December 20, 1935) is an American sociologist. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1972 to 1996 before moving to Harvard University.

William Julius Wilson is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. He is one of only 22 University Professors, the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member. After receiving a Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1966, Wilson taught sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1972. In 1990 he was appointed the Lucy Flower University Professor and director of the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Urban Inequality. He joined the faculty at Harvard in July 1996. He is affiliated with the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Wilson was an original board member of the progressive Century Institute, and a current board member at Philadelphia-based Public/Private Ventures.

Influence

Wilson’s book When Work Disappears has been cited as an inspiration for the second season of the HBO show The Wire., Slate.com

Notes

Criticism of his work

Beginning with The Declining Significance of Race, Wilson’s work has attracted a great deal of controversy and criticism. (See, e.g., Willie’s The Inclining Significance of RaceWillie, C: The Inclining Significance of Race, Society, 15(5), 1978.)

In his book Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York, Roger Waldinger, a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, provides a critique of arguments advanced by Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged. In particular, Waldinger challenges Wilson’s argument that the labor market problems African Americans face today are largely due to deindustrialization and consequent skills mismatches.Waldinger, R: Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Waldinger argues that, on one hand, African Americans never were especially dependent on jobs in the manufacturing sector, so deindustrialization in itself has not had a major impact on African Americans, and that, on the other hand, the relative labor market success of poorly-educated immigrants suggests that in the postindustrial era shows that there is no absence of jobs for those with few skills. (See Anthony Orum’s review of the bookOrum, A: Hard Times in the City Published on H-Urban, November, 1997. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=19602881261265. for an assessment of how thoroughly Waldinger rebuts Wilson.) One crucial limitation to the full credibility of Waldinger’s study, however, is that it is based entirely on research in New York City and, therefore, its findings are difficult to generalize to cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and others where blacks were indeed concentrated in the manufacturing sector.

Honors

Past President of the American Sociological Association, Wilson has received 41 honorary degrees, including honorary doctorates from Princeton University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Bard College, Dartmouth College, and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. A MacArthur Prize Fellow from 1987 to 1992, Wilson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the American Philosophical Society, the Institute of Medicine, and the British Academy. In June 1996 he was selected by Time magazine as one of America’s 25 Most Influential People. He is a recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States, and was awarded the Talcott Parsons Prize in the Social Sciences by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.