Frank Parkin

Frank Parkin was a British sociologist, born in Aberdare, Wales, in 1931, who earned his doctorate from the London School of Economics in 1966 and taught at the University of Kent from 1965, later becoming professor emeritus there. He developed the theory of social closure, describing the process by which social groups maximize their own rewards by restricting access to resources and opportunities to a limited circle of insiders, distinguishing between exclusionary closure, used by dominant groups to keep others out, and usurpationary closure, used by excluded groups to claim resources for themselves; he set the theory out most fully in Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (1979), alongside his earlier Class Inequality and Political Order (1971). He also wrote short introductions to Max Weber (1982) and Emile Durkheim (1992), and later turned to writing fiction. He died in 2011.