May 1, 1930 - March 14, 2018
Professor David Matza, longtime Institute faculty affiliate and renowned sociologist, died in 2018 at the age of 87. He was an active member of the Institute community from the founding of the Institute in 1976 into the 1990s.
A child of the Great Depression, he was deeply affected by the difficulties that his father had in getting regular employment and the strains that this placed on his mother and family life. He also enjoyed his childhood, especially playing stickball on the streets of New York City and going to see the Dodgers play. Like many of his generation, he began college at City College of New York, which he attended in between working at a variety of jobs and attending a lot of movies. Though his parents had very limited income and no formal higher education, David was a natural intellect and his gifts led to his discovery by Gresham Sykes, Professor of Sociology at Princeton, who recruited David to become a graduate student at Princeton in Sociology.
In 1957, while he was a still a graduate student having recently completed his Masters Degree, he co-authored an article with Professor Gresham Sykes. The highly influential piece, “Techniques of Neutralization,” was published in the American Sociological Review. This was the beginning of a collaboration over multiple years with Sykes. The article provided an innovative framework anchored around five neutralization techniques; Matza sought to explain how youth could both be part of the conventional values and beliefs of the society and engage in occasional or more frequent forms of “deviant” behaviors. It was the first published expression of Matza’s examination of the beliefs and agency of youthful actors, which he saw as underlying their trajectories and decisions to commit occasional or more frequent deviant acts.
In the decade following his arrival as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Berkeley, he wrote two influential books, Delinquency and Drift (1964) and Becoming Deviant (1969), to explain his innovative theory on deviance and advance new methodological perspectives for research on delinquency and deviance. His influence on the field of the sociology of deviance was profound and extensive, beyond the measure of his limited publications. His work was particularly well received by critical cultural theorists in England in the 1960s, and Delinquency and Drift, partly written while on leave in England, was influenced by exchanges with and feedback from prominent English theorists of criminology and deviance, and the emerging area of critical cultural studies.
David Matza was part of the core group that worked with Professor Troy Duster to establish the Institute for the Study of Social Change (ISSC - the precursor to ISSI) in 1976. In the early 1980s, the Institute was Matza’s home base as he wrote a monograph on the development of the working classes. This research extended his earlier interest in poverty studies that accompanied research he had completed on delinquency and deviance. This work was informed by interviews he conducted in the Washington, DC area with social workers on their relationships with client communities
Professor Matza was always an active partner and collaborator with graduate students at the Institute. Students would regularly come to meet with him and seek his ideas and advice. He was always ready to read drafts of students’ papers and chapters and was humble and dedicated to offering feedback and commentary on student work. Many students gravitated to him, in search of intellectual guidance and feedback which they could not always get from their home departments.
Matza, as he was routinely called by friends and some graduate students, was an advocate for peace and social justice his whole life. In part his commitment to justice and engagement for political change around the Vietnam War and other social issues reflected his own social biography. In his later life, he reflected on the sense of loss and guilt that he felt over the death of his older brother, Abraham, in World War II, when Matza was a young teen.
Despite his relatively short stature, Matza was a speedy and powerful force in the ISSC/Sociology weekend volleyball games. David was survived by three children, Naomi, Karen, and Daniel. And his quick intellect and active spirit are remembered fondly by all who knew him, spent time talking with him about politics, life, and theory, and worked with him at the Institute.
By David Minkus, Ph.D.