Peter Hedström (sociologist)

Peter Hedström (born 1955) is one of the founders of and a well-known authority in the field of analytical sociology. He has made important contributions to the analysis of social contagion processes and complex social networks, as well as to the philosophical and meta-theoretical foundations of analytical sociology. He is one of the key contributors to the literature on social mechanisms.

Hedström received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1987. He then took a post as Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, and, in 1989, he received a Professor Chair at the Department of Sociology, Stockholm University. In 2003, he assumed a position as Official Fellow and Professor at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, which he left in 2011 to become the Director of the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm. During the 2008/2009 he was Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the Singapore Management University. Hedström is Past President of the Swedish Sociological Association and has served as editor of Acta Sociologica and as associate editor of the American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, and Rationality and Society. He is past President of the European Academy of Sociology, Secretary-General of the International Institute of Sociology, and a Fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Academia Europaea.

Key publications

• P. Hedström and P. Bearman (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• P. Hedström Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• P. Hedström and Richard Swedberg (eds.) Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

External links

• Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm
• An article about Hedström's approach to sociology