ABSTRACT
In January 1961 the journalist Morton M. Hunt published a "New Yorker" profile on Robert Merton that is still a very well documented source of information about his biography and his work up to the age of fifty. At the age of twenty-six, Merton published his paper on the unanticipated consequences of purposive "social action." Several of Merton's subsequent Bureau studies can be used to trace this hypothetical ambivalence and the way it was finally resolved. One is Merton's well-known distinction between cosmopolitan and local influentials. While the subsequent expansion of the Bureau would have been impossible without Merton's administrative and "political" contribution, he was never an "organization man." Merton wrote a paper on "Bureaucratic Structure and Personality." His main idea was that a bureaucratic organization requires careful attention to rules; this leads to a "trained incapacity" of its members to handle situations requiring unusual solutions.
