Laumann earned his Ph.D. in the Harvard Department of Social Relations in 1964, where he worked with George Homans, Talcott Parsons, and Harrison White.

While at Harvard, he was a research assistant for Talcott Parsons,[4] who was on his dissertation committee along with George Homans and Harrison White.

Laumann was hired as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan in 1964, where he was the principal investigator of the Detroit Area Study.

His Ph.D. students have included, among others, Ronald Burt, Paula England, Joseph Galaskiewicz, Robert M. Hauser, and Kazuo Yamaguchi.

They demonstrate that major public policy in important domains such as health and energy are shaped by latent social connections that exist among the leaders of numerous networked organizations (e.g., lay voluntary associations, federal agencies, and professional societies).

Policy decisions are disproportionately shaped by organizations that have vested interests in the outcomes of domain-specific issues and those that have greater capacity to monitor events and to obtain information/resources by virtue of their positions within the interorganizational network.

[9] In the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s, Laumann began to study the role of sexual behavior and social networks in the spread of the disease.

Laumann and several colleagues - including Robert T. Michael, John Gagnon, Stuart Michaels, and Martina Morris - won a competition, first conceived by the NICHD in July 1987, to undertake a national survey of individuals' sexual practices and the social and sexual networks in which they occur.

[22][23] Laumann is also a critic of the two Kinsey Reports and has noted that they both focused on the biology of sex and lacked psychological and clinical information and analysis.