[2] Collins's publications include The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), which analyzes the network of philosophers and mathematicians for over two thousand years in both Asian and Western societies.
He is considered to be one of the leading non-Marxist conflict theorists in the United States, and served as the president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 to 2011.
[6] Although he did not agree with Parsons's socially conservative methodology, he respected the prestige of being a theorist and emulated this in his later years.
[8] While at Berkeley, Collins encountered many influential sociologists of his day, including Herbert Blumer, Philip Selznick and Leo Löwenthal.
The monograph analyzed organizational data to show that rising educational requirements for employment were not due to technologically-driven demand for skills, but to changing standards of cultural respectability.
Leading scholars in sociology contributed talks, including Elijah Anderson, Paul DiMaggio, David R. Gibson, Michèle Lamont, Jonathan Turner, and Viviana Zelizer.
[13] As Collins points out, even the existence of a small number of elite jobs acts in ways to shape the entire system of social mobility competition.
As more degrees become available through increased production, they cannot all be absorbed by businesses, but demand for credentials promising access to salaried positions continues.
Additional advanced degrees and professional certifications emerge to accelerate the expansion, undermining the value of American education, i.e., credential inflation.
[17] He has devoted much of his career and research to study society, how is it created and destroyed through emotional behaviors of human beings.
Generalized cultural capital is the individual's stock of symbols that are associated with group specific and can be used with strangers, somewhat the way money can.
Thinking, too, can be explained by the internalization of conversations within the flow of situations; individual selves are thoroughly and continually social, constructed from the outside in.
It has itself inspired various domains across the social sciences, including Management Studies,[19] Creative Tourism,[20] International Relations,[21] and Jeffrey C. Alexander's Cultural Pragmatics.
[22] Numerous empirical studies have likewise employed Interaction Ritual Theory, for instance to explore how specific institutions maintain themselves,[23] how websites use interaction ritual chains to form the identity of its users,[24] or how diplomats establish exchange programmes to invite foreign elites into their countries.
This is in opposition to explanations by social scientists that violence is easy under certain conditions, like poverty, racial or ideological hatreds, or family pathologies.