Welcome to the “new” Sociological Quarterly (TSQ), with its new cover, new publisher, new editors, and new volume. Here is our new vision:
TSQ, a generalist sociology journal, invites submissions that speak to a broad, diverse, and wide audience by extending, deepening, and synthesizing our theoretical, methodological, and substantive knowledge of social forms, processes, and problems. Our goals are well-served by articles that address large issues, offer new directions or innovations, advance theory, show methodological rigor, present coherent and persuasive arguments, and are written with clarity and style.
We are delighted to begin volume 58 with Routledge, a member of the Taylor & Francis family, both established in the early to mid-nineteenth century and very much alive and now representing the best in academic journal production. The Midwest Sociological Society (MSS) is pleased with this joint venture and the commitment of the publishers to our journal.
TSQ also has a new team of editors with combined 121 sociological years. For the first time the editorial office is outside of the nine-state MSS region but the editors have strong Midwest connections in Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, and Nebraska. Peter Mandel Hall, Michael Lacy, and N. Prabha Unnithan along with office staff Keith Smith and Chris Moloney are excited to have this opportunity with the journal and to continue the tradition of TSQ as a general journal of rigorous standards and valuable contributions to the discipline. Our main task will be receiving, reviewing, and publishing the best articles, written by North American and international sociologists, that contribute to our knowledge.
Our thanks to outgoing editors Betty Dobratz and Lisa Waldner, and managing editor Leslie Kawaler for their commitment to TSQ’s tradition of publishing important contributions to our discipline, firmly carrying the banner of our society, and facilitating the transition to a new editorial team.
The history of TSQ began in 1960 with Paul Campisi (Southern Illinois University) as editor. The very first issue included articles by Jessie Bernard on forms of competition, Anselm Strauss on the changing imagery of city and suburb, Manford Kuhn on self-attitudes, Arnold Rose on intergroup conflict, and Herbert Blumer on industrialization and labor. It is well worth reading today: four of the five were leading interactionists and Jessie Bernard was a pioneering feminist scholar for whom the American Sociological Association has named an award. The issue will be on display at the 2017 joint meeting of the MSS and the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, to be held in Milwaukee from March 30 to April 2.
In the early years both the editorial office and publisher were located at a university. Southern Illinois University held all but one of those combinations. The University of Missouri was the lone exception in the period until 1985. At that time, universities and their presses were not interested in doing the publishing. When the MSS decided to seek an outside publisher, the editorship went to the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the first corporate publisher was the JAI Press. As a result, editors have come from more diverse locations such as University of Missouri-Saint Louis, University of Illinois, University of Iowa, Augustana College, and University of Kansas, and our predecessors at Iowa State University and the University of Saint Thomas. The University of California Press and Wiley-Blackwell have been our more recent publishers.
Over the next four years you will see some additions to TSQ. We intend to have commentaries on some articles. We open this volume with comments to the MSS Presidential Address and responses to those comments. On interesting issues, we plan to present dialogues between knowledgeable scholars. We also intend to have scholars from other disciplines author essays about important developments of relevance to sociology. Examples might include historical economics, global food systems, cross-cultural cognition, Pragmatist philosophy, and Holocaust studies. We will explore the possibility of visual sociology for the journal. These efforts will be spread out so submissions remain the primary journal content.
We begin this issue with the MSS Presidential Address of Douglas Hartmann on public sociology but provocatively focusing on the many audience publics and the necessity of developing multidimensional strategies for contextual differences. Annette Lareau and Vanessa Lopes Muñoz, coauthors, and Adia Harvey Wingfield raise critical issues and differing positions about Hartmann’s arguments and public sociology. Hartmann, in return, recognizes the value of their comments and sees them as part of the necessary conversation about public sociology. Moreover, Hartmann makes clear that public engagement is an important part of sociology as a vocation.
The articles in this issue all demonstrate the importance of contexts and intervening factors on relationships and implicating processes and, in one case, on perceptions. Ana Caetano’s article on the critical concept of personal reflexivity, a central idea in G. H. Mead’s work, constructs a valuable typology reflective of different contexts and processes.
The “ironic flexibility” described by Scott Schieman and Paul Glavin shows that the blurring of work and home boundaries, touted as a positive, may have negative consequences at home due to varying workplace cultures and employee perceptions. On the other hand, for Stacy J. Williams, the home serves as a productive context for women’s movements, countering an organizational and gender bias in the social movement literature.
Teresa Toguchi Swartz, Heather McLaughlin, and Jeylan T. Mortimer find that parental assistance to today’s young adults is helpful in attaining a college degree but that negative events can create a context of hardship and failure. The authors suggest the need for policies providing a public scaffolding that shifts the burden from the family context.
The final two articles concern various aspects of crime. Feodor A. Gostjev and Amie L. Nielsen show that English-language fluency is associated with neighborhoods of lower violent crime. Nathan W. Link and Caterina G. Roman show that ex-prisoner debt relates to employment difficulties and negatively affects community reintegration.
We welcome any comments you might have about this issue. You may write us at [email protected]. If you are interested in being a reviewer, let us know.