Kuhn was not confident about how his book would be received. Harvard University had denied his tenure a few years prior. However, by the mid-1980s, his book had achieved blockbuster status. When Kuhn's book came out in the early 1960s, "structure" was an intellectually popular word in many fields in the humanities and social sciences, including linguistics and anthropology, appealing in its idea that complex phenomena could reveal or be studied through basic, simpler structures. Kuhn's book contributed to that idea.