William Fielding Ogburn

William Fielding Ogburn (1886 to 1959) was an American sociologist, statistician and educator, born in Butler, Georgia, who died in Tallahassee, Florida. He took his first degree at Mercer University and his master's and doctoral degrees at Columbia University, taught sociology at Columbia from 1919 to 1927, and then chaired the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago. He is best remembered for the idea of cultural lag, a delay in society's adjustment to technological and other change. His 1922 theory of social change treats technology as the primary engine of progress, tempered by social responses to it, and names four stages of technical development: invention, accumulation, diffusion and adjustment. He directed research for President Hoover's Committee on Social Trends, which produced Recent Social Trends, served as president of the American Sociological Society in 1929 and of the American Statistical Association in 1931, and published about 175 articles.