Notes on the Life of a Tortured Optimist

Abstract

This article is an autobiographical account of the author's background, educational experiences, and academic life and work as a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Particular attention is given to the author's scholarly and research interests, and to how crises involving the organizational setting in which he worked are related to the sociological problems he has addressed since the early 1960s, especially those concerning bureaucracy and human rights.