Herbert J. Gans

Herbert Julius Gans was born in Cologne, Germany on May 7, 1927. Gans arrived in the United States in 1940, becoming a citizen in 1945. Gans studied at the University of Chicago, receiving a M.A. in 1950. He went on to receive a PhD in Sociology and Planning from the University of Pennsylvania in 1957. Gans moved to Columbia University in 1971, serving as the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology in 1985. In the late 1950s, Gans was married to the artist Iris Lezak. Gans married Louise Gruner in 1967. Their son is David Herman Gans. Gans died at his home in New York City, on April 21, 2025, at the age of 97. ==Sociological research==

Although Gans viewed his career as spanning six fields of research, he initially made his reputation as a critic of urban renewal in the early 1960s. His first book, The Urban Villagers (1962), described Boston's diverse West End neighborhood, where he mainly studied its Italian-American working class community. The book is also well known for its critical analysis of the area's clearance as an alleged "slum" and the West Enders' displacement from their neighborhood. He published several other studies of the news media and the entertainment media, the best known being Popular Culture and High Culture (1974, 1999). In it, he challenged the conventional wisdom that high culture aesthetic standards were universal, arguing instead that cultural tastes reflect educational levels and other aspects of class. His work on the media, like his community studies, has a populist theme, aiming to look at American society from the perspective of the country's working and lower middle class majority. ==Public policy==

Like some other sociologists who began their careers in the mid-twentieth century, Gans was active both as a scholar and advocate, advising urban planning, antipoverty and other public policy agencies. He served as a consultant to the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (also known as the Kerner Commission), testified before the commission, and drafted what became Chapter 9 of the commission's final report (this chapter discussed why the experiences of earlier European immigrants at escaping poverty were not comparable to what contemporary Blacks were experiencing). In his writings on poverty, Gans offered rigorous, often scathing criticism of the weaknesses of such concepts as "the culture of poverty," and the "underclass," most notably in The War Against the Poor (1995). However, "The Positive Functions of Poverty" (1972), his most widely reprinted article, == Publications ==

• The Balanced community (1961) • • • People and Plans (1968) • More Equality (1973) • Popular Culture and High Culture (1974) • ''Deciding What's News: A study of CBS evening news, NBC nightly news, Newsweek, and Time'' (1979) • Middle American Individualism (1988) • People, Plans, and Policies (1991) • The War Against The Poor (1992) • Making Sense of America (1999) • Democracy and the News (2003) • Imagining America in 2033: How the Country Put Itself Together After Bush University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2009. • ==Terms coined==

• Symbolic ethnicity • Symbolic religiosity ==References==