Randall Collins (born July 29, 1941) is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing. He has taught in many notable universities around the world and his academic works have been translated into various languages. Collins is currently the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology, emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He 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. Collins's publications include The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), which analyzes the network of philosophers and mathematicians for over two thousand years in both Asian and Western societies. His current research involves macro patterns of violence including contemporary war, as well as solutions to police violence. He 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.
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Randall Collins in the context of Sociological theory
A sociological theory is a supposition that intends to consider, analyze, and/or explain objects of social reality from a sociological perspective, drawing connections between individual concepts in order to organize and substantiate sociological knowledge. Hence, such knowledge is composed of complex theoretical frameworks and methodology. These theories range in scope, from concise, yet thorough, descriptions of a single social process to broad, inconclusive paradigms for analysis and interpretation. Some sociological theories are designed to explain specific aspects of the social world and allow for predictions about future events, while others serve as broad theoretical frameworks that guide further sociological analysis. Dynamic social theory is the hypothesis that institutions and patterns of behaviour are the social science equivalent of theories in the natural sciences because they embody a great deal of knowledge of how society works and act as social models that are replicated or adapted to achieve predictable outsomes.
Prominent sociological theorists include Talcott Parsons, Robert K. Merton, Randall Collins, James Samuel Coleman, Peter Blau, Niklas Luhmann, Immanuel Wallerstein, George Homans, Theda Skocpol, Gerhard Lenski, Pierre van den Berghe and Jonathan H. Turner.