He completed his PhD doctoral thesis with Robert K. Merton at Columbia University in 1952, laying an early theory for the dynamics of bureaucracy.

From 1988 to 2000 he taught as the Robert Broughton Distinguished Research Professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the same department as his wife, Judith Blau, while continuing to commute to New York to meet with graduate students and colleagues.

He formulated theories relating to many aspects of social phenomena, including upward mobility, occupational opportunity, and heterogeneity.

He was raised in a Jewish family as fascist power within Europe grew and Hitler's influence within Austria became increasingly evident.

At the age of seventeen, Blau was convicted of high treason for speaking out against government repression in articles he wrote for an underground newspaper of the Social Democratic Worker's Party and was subsequently incarcerated.

[3] He was then released shortly after his imprisonment when the ban on political activity was lifted due to the National Socialists' rise to power.

Blau's original attempt to flee proved unsuccessful as he was captured by Nazi border patrol and was imprisoned for two months.

When the policy about Jews was reversed, he was able to continue his journey to Le Havre, France where he received a refugee scholarship to Elmhurst College in Illinois through a group of missionaries studying at the theological seminary.

Blau returned to Europe 1942 as a member of the United States Army, acting as an interrogator given his skills in the German language and was awarded the bronze star for his duties.

Blau began theoretical studies by making a broad statement or basic assumption regarding the social world, which was then proven by the logical predictions it produced.

[8] Blau's trust in logic and his deductive approach to social theory aligns him closely with the philosophy of positivism and traditional French sociologists, Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim.

[10] Blau created a number of theories explaining aspects of population structure that increased chances of intergroup relations.

Blau determined that prevention of conflict within a population structure can be achieved through "multi-group affiliations and intersection in complex societies".

Peter started from the premise that social interaction has value to people, and he explored the forms and sources of this value in order to understand collective outcomes, such as the distribution of power in a society.

That then leads to an increase in social exchange in which people attempt to stay out of debt because it gives them an advantage, as well as potential power.

He believed that most thriving friendships occur when both participants are the same status level, allowing for an equal potential for exchange and benefit throughout the relationship.

Organizational research consisted in exploring to what extent the received image of the Weberian bureaucracy—an efficient, mechanical system of roles—held up under close scrutiny in the empirical study of social interaction within organizations.

Blau, in his research and study, highlighted the ways in which the real life of the organization was structured along informal channels of interaction and socio-emotional exchange.

Hence, much of Blau's work involving organizations centered on the interplay between formal structure, informal practices, and bureaucratic pressures and how these processes affect organizational change.

Blau's second major contribution to organizational analysis revolved around the study of determinants of the "bureaucratic components" of organizations.

[17] This specific work, however, had a brief influence as organization sociology moved away from monothetic generalizations about determinants of intra-organizational structure and to the study of organizational environments.

Peter Blau played an important role in shaping the field of modern sociology and is one of the most influential post-war American sociologists.

Blau eventually paved the way for many young sociologists that then used similar styles of research and deductive theory.

In addition to that, he, along with the help of Otis Dudley Duncan, introduced multiple regression and path analysis to the sociological audience.