Star Sociologists

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.

Suggests links between the overall cognitive and intellectual structure of a discipline and the composition of the elite Asks which factors contribute to the diffusion of an author´s ideas across national and disciplinary boundaries Combines collective biography with in-depth case analyses of Pierre Bourdieu, Seymour M. Lipset, and Robert K. Merton

Auteur

Philipp Korom is a postdoc at the University of Graz, Austria. Korom was recently awarded the prestigious Gustav Figdor Award by the Austrian Academy of Sciences for his research on academic elites.

Texte du rabat

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.

Contenu
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 SociologyThe 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 SociologyA Comparison.- References.- 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence.- Explaining (Fading) Eminence.- MasterApprentice 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.- CarrierGroups.- Eminence in SociologyA Nested Phenomenon Extending Across Many Specialties.- References.- 7 Elites as Gatekeepers.- The Case of Journal Reviewers.- The Case of RKMAn Eminent Scholar Crisscrossing Social Circles.- RKM as Gate-OpenerAnalysis of 1460 Recommendation Letters.- Elite Power in Sociology?.- References.- 8 Making Sense of Prestige Elites.- The Discipline-Elite Nexus.- Toward a Sociology of Academic Elites.- References.