Contemporary Academic Publishing: Democratization and Differentiation in Careers

ABSTRACT

This study examined how publishing figures in the careers of academics as a means to study the social organization of higher education. Publishing is a means by which academics legitimate themselves. Yet previous work has demonstrated that most academics publish comparatively little. A classic literature in the sociology of science has used employing organization and career phase as chief devices by which to understand how academic fields are stratified. The study treated the field of sociology as a case by which to examine publication processes across cohorts of academics and stratified tiers of academic work. This article argues that a major transformation marks contemporary academic careers: Publication in science and scholarship is increasingly democratized. This article concludes with a discussion on three sets of macro conditions—massification, saturated labor markets, and neoliberalism—that may be understood for their democratizing effects on the career patterns of contemporary academics.

KEYWORDS:

• Faculty
• careers
• stratification
• productivity
• academic profession

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge with grateful thanks the helpful comments and suggestions provided by Mark Cooney and James Hearn on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. Zuckerman (1988) provided an historical and substantive review of this body of work. The samples upon which studies in the sociology of scientific careers were based and the theorizing that emerged from them have been drawn from academics situated in departments and universities, rather than scientists working in industry or government. Institutional and organizational reward systems characterized the ways in which scientific and most other academic careers were structurally situated. By virtue of how academic careers are structured, many (though not all) of the findings generated by the sociology of scientific careers likely possessed analogous application to the sociology of academic careers more generally at the time.

2. Top 10 departments as compiled by the NRC rankings (Goldberger, Maher, & Flattau, 1995), in rank order, included the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Michigan, the University of California-Los Angeles, the University of North Carolina, Harvard University, Stanford University, Northwestern University, and the University of Washington. The terms department and program are used interchangeably.

3. Burris (2004) used a “top 20” measure in his study. Thus, the present usage of “top 10” is more conservative. If we were to use a top 20 measure, the data would evince even less closure; that is, graduates from top-ranked programs would be found in greater proportion in both the top 10 and middle 10 programs and would likely also be in the bottom 10 programs.

4. Top tier press was coded for academic publishers that the sociological community generally construes as “the best” in the field. The presses included in the measure were the University of California Press, Cambridge University Press, the University of Chicago Press, Columbia University Press, Cornell University Press, Harvard University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, and Stanford University Press.

5. For analyses and discussion of these and related patterns by race and gender, see Hermanowicz and Clayton (forthcoming).

6. Outliers can be of note, and so we point to the individual who, more than any other member of the sample, had published 28 times in ASR and/or AJS, well more than the person next in line who had 18 publications in these outlets.