Neil Smelser

Neil Smelser was an American sociologist, born in Kahoka, Missouri, in 1930, who spent most of his career as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1958 to 1994. He developed value-added theory, also called strain theory, to explain the sequence of conditions that produce episodes of collective behavior, set out in his Theory of Collective Behavior (1962), and helped establish economic sociology as an interdisciplinary field linking sociology and economics, notably in Economy and Society (1956), co-written with Talcott Parsons, and the Handbook of Economic Sociology (1994), co-edited with Richard Swedberg. He served as president of the American Sociological Association in 1997 and later directed Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He died in Berkeley in 2017.