This book aims to overcome sociology’s preoccupation with individual authors by exploring a larger social phenomenon that occurs in all academic disciplines but has been paid little attention: the prestige elite. Members of this elite attain the highest levels of peer recognition, their books sometimes circulate by the hundreds of thousands, and every student has read about them. Based on large citation studies, Star Sociologists provides a roster of eminent sociologists, documents the changing elite’s composition over time, contrasts the elite’s career pathways with those of the Nobel Laureates in economics, gives insights into how scholars rise to or fall from eminence, and empirically probes the gatekeeping power of one of its key proponents. The book explores eminence by contextualising conditions that are outside of the elite and argues that in any discipline that is intellectually as disintegrated as sociology, eminence is to be understand as a nested phenomenon: scholars make it into the elite if their ideas are adopted in very different intellectual fields that share little common ground.
Author(s): Philipp Korom
Series: Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 225
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
1: Introduction
References
2: Eminent Scientists
Emergence of Research Universities
Enter the Professional Scientist
Prominent Scientists
In Search of a Geiger Counter to Detect Eminence
Citation-Based Eminence Research
References
3: Sociology as an Academic Discipline
The Emergence of Sociology as a Discipline on its Own
From Quasi-Hegemony to Pluralism
Rise and Fall of Hegemonic Schools in U.S. Sociology
Pluralism of National Sociologies
Contrasting Sociology with Economics
SSDs with and without a Core
High- versus Low-Consensus SSDs
Hierarchical versus Non-Hierarchical SSDs
Self-Contained versus Open SSDs
Journal versus Book-Based SSDs
References
4: Identifying the Elite
At the Peak of the Eminence Hierarchy
Two Methodological Pathways for Identifying Elites
Citations in Sociology—The Worst Proxy for Scholarly Recognition, Except for All the Others
Study I: Eminence in the Monographic and Journal Literature
Study II: Eminence in the Pluralistic World of Academic Journals
Validating the Methodology
Do Citations Correlate with Prizes and Memberships in Academies?
Are Textbook Citations Special?
Do Journals Mirror National and Specialist Sociologies?
References
5: Collective Biographies and Career Pathways
From (Auto-)Biography to Prosopography
Elites in Transition
Elite Careers in Economics and Sociology—A Comparison
References
6: The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence
Explaining (Fading) Eminence
Master–Apprentice Relationships
Elite Higher Education
Academic Tribes
Lipset and the Early Years of Political Sociology
Lipset: Remembered in Political Science, Neglected in Sociology
Why Has Lipset’s Eminence Faded in Sociology?
Pierre Bourdieu and U.S. Sociology: A Diffusion Study
Channels of Diffusion
Diffusing Publications and Concepts
Social Structures Impacting Diffusion Processes
Carrier Groups
Eminence in Sociology—A Nested Phenomenon Extending Across Many Specialties
References
7: Elites as Gatekeepers
The Case of Journal Reviewers
The Case of RKM—An Eminent Scholar Crisscrossing Social Circles
RKM as Gate-Opener—Analysis of 1460 Recommendation Letters
Elite Power in Sociology?
References
Appendices
Appendix A1: Ranking of sociologists considered to be comparable in stature to economists awarded the Nobel Prize
Appendix A2: Department Rankings
References
Index
