Abstract
Graduate students are highly aware of the career consequences of first appointments and the importance of publications in the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology. Getting an elite appointment is nevertheless a lottery: only about one in twenty of the graduates in top-twenty departments get first appointments at this level. This produces an intense competition and strong pressure to conform. This system seems impervious to change, because of its association with the ASR/AJS journal system. There is nevertheless considerable debate over whether this hierarchy reflects genuine merit, and doubt about the kind of sociology that prospers under it.
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Notes
US News and World Report is a former news magazine that found that its rankings of academic programs were the financially viable part of its business and continues to produce this influential ranking.
As I have argued at length elsewhere (Turner, [2002] 2014a), the activity of what I call ‘bonding’, the certification of scientific merit by others, is central to science as a whole. One form of this bonding is approval by an editorial process; another is appointment to an elite university. But this is risky: construct the criteria for bonding too narrowly and one risks stifling innovation.
Michèle Lamont (2004) surveyed top sociology departments in 2004 to see how theory was taught, and found that theorists’ theory was denigrated, and the teaching of theory was done by people who applied it rather than produced it.
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© 2014 Stephen Turner
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Turner, S. (2014). The Elite and Its Power. In: American Sociology. Sociology Transformed. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137377173_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137377173_8
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