Israeli sociologist visiting from Hebrew University, on the sociology of science, which ultimately led to Collins' publication The Sociology of Philosophies decades later. Collins was introduced to Weberian conflict theory through Reinhard Bendix, a leading Max Weber scholar. Of his early career, Collins would later say "I was part of the generation of young sociologists who broke with functionalist theory and moved toward conflict theory." He later wrote a chapter for Bendix's work State and Society. This work enabled Collins to later combine this theory with Erving Goffman's microsociology, which resulted in Collins' publication Conflict Sociology in 1975 and later, Interaction Ritual Chains in 2004. Goffman was also one of Collins' professors during his time at Berkeley. Collins' dissertation advisor was organizational and industrial sociologist Harold Wilensky. It was titled Education and Employment: Some Determinants of Requirements for Hiring in Various Types of Organizations, and it was later published in 1979 as The Credential Society: A Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification. The monograph analyzed organizational data to show that rising educational requirements for employment were not due to technologically-driven demand for skills, but to changing standards of cultural respectability. Career Collins first taught as an acting instructor at Berkeley (1967–1968). He subsequently served on the faculties of University of Wisconsin-Madison (instructor; 1968–1969), the University of California, San Diego (assistant and associate professor; 1969–1977), the University of Virginia (professor; 1978–1982) and the University of California, Riverside (professor; 1985–1997) before taking his current position at the University of Pennsylvania. He took intermittent breaks from academia (1977–1978; 1982–1985) as an independent scholar and novelist. He has also held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago (1985), Harvard University (1994) and the University of Cambridge (2000–2001), as well as various schools in Europe, Japan and China. Collins has published almost one hundred articles since finishing his undergraduate education. He has also written and contributed to several books with a range of topics such as the discovery of society to the sociology of marriage and family life. In honor of Collins' retirement from the field, the University of Pennsylvania hosted "Social Interaction and Theory: A Conference in Honor of Professor Randall Collins." Leading scholars in sociology contributed talks, including Elijah Anderson, Paul DiMaggio, David R. Gibson, Michèle Lamont, Jonathan Turner, and Viviana Zelizer. Collins on Credential Inflation Collins has written extensively about credential inflation, proposing a set of mechanisms through which it operates. As