Ron Westrum (born November 23, 1945) is an American sociologist.
Born in Chicago in 1945, Westrum earned a B.A. (cum laude) in Social Relations in 1966 from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1972 from the University of Chicago.
He is the author of Complex Organizations: Growth, Struggle, and Change, (with Kamil Samaha), Prentice-Hall, 1984; Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1999. 33l pp.; and of Technologies: The Shaping of People and Things & Society.Belmont, Ca.: Wadsworth Publishing,1991. 394 pp.
As of 1987, [1] he was professor of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Technology at Eastern Michigan University.
His recent papers include: “The Three Cultures Model,” presentation at Symposium on Patient Safety for Improving Florida’s Medical Education, January 2004. “Increasing the Number of Guards at Nuclear Power Plants,” Risk Analysis, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2004, pp. 959–961. “Models of Bureaucratic Failure,” in Innovation and Consolidation in Aviation, (Eds., Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004)
Interested in unidentified flying object reports, [2] Westrum was a MUFON consultant.
Westrum is said to be a frequent critic of CSICOP and other skeptical organizations. [3]
He was the Scientist Guest of Honor at ConFusion XXX (January 23–25, 2004).
Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. Sagan argued the hypothesis, accepted since, that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to, and calculated using, the greenhouse effect. He testified to the US Congress in 1985 that the greenhouse effect will change the earth's climate system.
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Robert King Merton was an American sociologist who is considered a founding father of modern sociology, and a major contributor to the subfield of criminology. He served as the 47th President of the American Sociological Association. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor. In 1994 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science.
Ufology is the investigation of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) by people who believe that they may be of extraordinary origins. While there are instances of government, private, and fringe science investigations of UFOs, ufology is generally regarded by skeptics and science educators as a canonical example of pseudoscience.
Anselm Leonard Strauss was an American sociologist professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) internationally known as a medical sociologist and as the developer of grounded theory, an innovative method of qualitative analysis widely used in sociology, nursing, education, social work, and organizational studies. He also wrote extensively on Chicago sociology/symbolic interactionism, sociology of work, social worlds/arenas theory, social psychology and urban imagery. He published over 30 books, chapters in over 30 other books, and over 70 journal articles.
James Gardner March was an American political scientist, sociologist, and economist. A professor at Stanford University in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford Graduate School of Education, he is best known for his research on organizations, his seminal work on A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, and the organizational decision making model known as the Garbage Can Model.
The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing with "the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity." The sociology of scientific ignorance (SSI) is complementary to the sociology of scientific knowledge. For comparison, the sociology of knowledge studies the impact of human knowledge and the prevailing ideas on societies and relations between knowledge and the social context within which it arises.
Barry Wellman is a Canadian-American sociologist and is the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network. His areas of research are community sociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest is in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to networked individualism. He has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Wellman was a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year stint as S.D. Clark Professor.
Jacques Fabrice Vallée is an Internet pioneer, computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist and astronomer currently residing in San Francisco, California and Paris, France.
Donald Thomas Campbell was an American social scientist. He is noted for his work in methodology. He coined the term evolutionary epistemology and developed a selectionist theory of human creativity. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Campbell as the 33rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Trevor J. Pinch was a British sociologist, part-time musician and chair of the Science and Technology Studies department at Cornell University. In 2018, he won the J.D. Bernal Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science for "distinguished contributions to Science and Technology Studies over the course of [a] career".
Harrison Colyar White is the emeritus Giddings Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. White played an influential role in the “Harvard Revolution” in social networks and the New York School of relational sociology. He is credited with the development of a number of mathematical models of social structure including vacancy chains and blockmodels. He has been a leader of a revolution in sociology that is still in process, using models of social structure that are based on patterns of relations instead of the attributes and attitudes of individuals.
Charles B. Perrow was an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and visiting professor at Stanford University. He authored several books and many articles on organizations, and was primarily concerned with the impact of large organizations on society.
In ufology, conspiracy theory, science fiction, and comic book stories, claims or stories have circulated linking UFOs to Nazi Germany. The German UFO theories describe supposedly successful attempts to develop advanced aircraft or spacecraft prior to and during World War II, further asserting the post-war survival of these craft in secret underground bases in Antarctica, South America, or the United States, along with their creators. According to these theories and fictional stories, various potential code-names or sub-classifications of Nazi UFO craft such as Rundflugzeug, Feuerball, Diskus, Haunebu, Hauneburg-Gerät, Glocke, V7, Vril, Kugelblitz, Andromeda-Gerät, Flugkreisel, Kugelwaffe, Jenseitsflugmaschine, and Reichsflugscheibe have all been referenced.
The Swiss cheese model of accident causation is a model used in risk analysis and risk management, including aviation safety, engineering, healthcare, emergency service organizations, and as the principle behind layered security, as used in computer security and defense in depth. It likens human systems to multiple slices of Swiss cheese, stacked side by side, in which the risk of a threat becoming a reality is mitigated by the differing layers and types of defenses which are "layered" behind each other. Therefore, in theory, lapses and weaknesses in one defense do not allow a risk to materialize, since other defenses also exist, to prevent a single point of failure. The model was originally formally propounded by James T. Reason of the University of Manchester, and has since gained widespread acceptance. It is sometimes called the "cumulative act effect".
D. Lawrence Kincaid is a senior advisor for the Research and Evaluation Division of the Center for Communication Programs and an associate scientist in the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Louis André (Loet) Leydesdorff (born 21 August 1948 in Djakarta is a Dutch sociologist, cyberneticist and Professor in the Dynamics of Scientific Communication and Technological Innovation at the University of Amsterdam. He is known for his work in the sociology of communication and innovation, especially for his Triple helix model of innovation developed with Henry Etzkowitz in the 1990s.
James Macdonald Jasper is a writer and sociologist who has taught Ph.D. students at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York since 2007. He is best known for his research and theories about culture and politics, especially the cultural and emotional dimensions of protest movements.
Kathleen M. Carley is an American social scientist specializing in dynamic network analysis. She is a professor in the School of Computer Science in the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University and also holds appointments in the Tepper School of Business, the Heinz College, the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and the Department of Social and Decision Sciences.
Joseph Ben-David was a Hungarian-born Israeli sociologist who was a pioneer in the sociology of science.