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Gary T. Marx

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For the British musician, see Gary Marx.

Gary T. Marx (born 1938) is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and retired from the University of Colorado in 1996. He has worked in the areas of race and ethnicity, collective behavior and social movements, law and society and surveillance studies.

Background

Marx was born on a farm in central California, raised in Los Angeles from the age of two, and attended John Marshall High School.[1] He has degrees from UCLA (1960) and University of California at Berkeley (PhD in sociology, 1966: Protest and Prejudice: The Climate of Opinion in the Negro American Community).[2] He taught at Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations, moving to MIT in Urban Studies and Planning (1973-1994). From 1992, he spent four years as head of the Sociology Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[3][4]

Marx was married with children, to Phyllis Anne Rakita Marx for over 50 years, until her death in 2013. They moved to a farm on Bainbridge Island near Seattle in 1996.[5]

Contributions

Marx's early work was on race relations in the United States, during the Civil Rights Movement. He has also contributed to studies of collective behavior and social movements, and studies of policing and policing methods. In 1967, he was a consultant sociologist for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) and participated in the writing of the controversial internal staff paper, "The Harvest of American Racism," which concluded that some of 1967's rioting was political in nature and inferred that it was justified. Although this paper was largely rejected by senior staff, its major theme--that the rioting was caused by racism--was consistent with that of the Commission's final report, and Marx, while recognizing some of the final report's weaknesses, has generally been a strong and consistent supporter of the report.[6] [7] [8]

He worked extensively on surveillance issues, illustrating how and why surveillance is neither good nor bad, but context and comportment make it so. He has sought to create a conceptual map of new ways of collecting, analyzing, communicating and using personal information. Explanation and evaluation require a common language for the identification and measurement of surveillance's fundamental properties and contexts (e.g., the new surveillance, surveillance society, maximum security society, surveillance creep; surveillance slack, the softening of surveillance, the myth of surveillance, neutralization and counter-neutralization, and four basic surveillance contexts: coercion, contracts, care, and cross cutting, unprotected "publicly" available data).[9]

His work has appeared or been reprinted in over 300 books, monographs and periodicals and has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Czech, French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Dutch, German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Portuguese, Persian, Macedonian, Slovak, Swedish, Belarusian; and other languages.[citation needed]

Marx has been a consultant to, or served on panels, for the House Committee on the Judiciary, the House Science Committee, the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, the Government Accountability Office, the Office of Technology Assessment, the Justice Department, and other federal agencies; various state and local governments; the European Community and European Parliament, the House of Commons of Canada, The National Academy of Sciences, the Social Science Research Council, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the U.K. Association of Chief Police Officers, public interest groups, foundations and think tanks.[citation needed]

Awards

Major works

  • Protest and Prejudice: a Study of Belief in the Black Community (Harper & Row, 1967)
  • Racial Conflict, Tension and Change in American Society (Little, Brown & Co., 1971)
  • Muckracking Sociology: Research as Social Criticism. (Ed. Transaction Publishers, 1972)
  • Society Today.(with Norman Goodman, Random House, 1978)
  • Sociology: Classic and popular approaches (with Norman Goodman, Random House, 1980)
  • Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (University of California Press, 1989)
  • Collective Behavior and Social Movements (with Doug McAdam, Pearson, 1993)
  • Undercover Police Surveillance in Comparative Perspective (ed. with Cyrille Fijnaut, Brill, 1995)
  • Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology (University of Chicago Press, 2016) (CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award 2017)

Selected newspaper articles, letters, and op-eds

References

  1. ^ "What's it all about? Reflections on Meaning in a Career".
  2. ^ "Gary Marx (1960) | UC Berkeley Sociology Department".
  3. ^ "What's it all about? Reflections on Meaning in a Career".
  4. ^ "Looking for Meaning in All the Right Places: The Search for Academic Satisfaction".
  5. ^ "What's it all about? Reflections on Meaning in a Career".
  6. ^ Steven M. Gillon (2018). Separate and Unequal. New York: Basic Books. pp. 151-175 and 274-275.
  7. ^ Rick Loessberg and John Koskinen. "Measuring the Distance: The Legacy of the Kerner Report". Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. 4 (6): 105-106 and 116.
  8. ^ Gary T. Marx (1970). J.F. Szwed (ed.). Two Cheers for the National Riot (Kerner) Commission Report. In Black Americans: A Second Look. New York: Basic Books.
  9. ^ "Entry on Gary T. Marx in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Surveillance, Security, and Privacy; Bruce A. Arrigo (ed.) SAGE Publications Inc., 2018". Gary T. Marx. Retrieved June 6, 2020.

Profiles and reviews of Gary T. Marx and his work:

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