Here at the end of our editorial tour at The Sociological Quarterly, we’d like to start by remembering our colleague Peter Hall, who sadly died a few years ago. We hatched our editorship application during an idle Friday afternoon chat in our department corridor in 2015. We would never have gotten into this enterprise without Peter’s encouragement, and we only wish his health had permitted him to work the whole term with us. We miss his friendship, good humor, and insight.
We’d like to thank the many people who have helped us along the way. Appreciation first of all goes to the Midwest Sociological Society (MSS) Publications Committee and Board for selecting us as editors, and for their financial support during our editorship. While no professional association can afford to fully support editors’ work, MSS comes closer than almost any other, and made it possible for us to edit TSQ with only a modicum of self-exploitation. MSS has been nothing but supportive of our work. We also want to thank our advisory board for their thoughts and willingness to lend us their prestige by giving us their blessing. Our associate editors did that too, but more importantly served uncomplainingly as our reviewers of first recourse. To our many other reviewers, the overwhelming bulk of whom had no prior connection to the MSS or TSQ, we are deeply grateful. They often amazed us with their perceptive, thoughtful and constructive comments on the papers they were asked to review. Above all, we thank the many authors who submitted manuscripts to us. The faith that they showed in the judgment and fairness of the editors and our reviewers, and their patience with the peer review process, are much appreciated.
This leads us to a moment of reflection:
What have we learned as editors? Beyond exposure to a wide range of sociological work, the biggest part of our learning concerned what some may think of as the “crisis of reviewing”. Prior to editing TSQ, we had not adequately anticipated the difficulty of finding three scholars willing to review a manuscript reasonably promptly. As indicated above, as at many journals, “associate editors” at TSQ serve as a collection of “pre-obligated” reviewers. The trick for editors is to assemble a collection of associate editors whose interests and expertise match the topics and styles of manuscripts that actually arrive at the electronic door, but to do this in advance of experience with the manuscript flow. As we became more experienced with the reviewing problem, we ended up issuing many more “desk-rejects” (i.e. declining a manuscript prior to external review) than we had planned. When obtaining reviewers is difficult, one needs to avoid sending reviewers manuscripts that they might think were a waste of their time, and which don’t have much chance of eventual success. We tried to do this as fairly as we could, without letting our content or style preferences improperly influence our decisions.
On this last theme, we’d like to offer some comments on our philosophy as editors. We tried to make TSQ an “authors’ and reviewers’” journal, and not one expressing our personal preferences. We don’t doubt that TSQ subscribers may have been disappointed by seeing less of what they liked published in the journal, a sentiment we, too, have had at various journals. During our term at TSQ, what we published was a function of what authors sent us and what the reviewers said about the value and contribution of those manuscripts. We accepted and published many manuscripts that were well outside our own areas of interest, but which reviewers approved of. In this regard, one of us recalls one of the first manuscripts he supervised, and which he seriously considered desk-rejecting. As it turned out, reviewers eventually approved it and readers liked it. Having that kind of experience served as a reminder to us–not to mention a source of self-deprecating humor–as we tried to minimize the role of our personal preferences in our decisions. We also admit that this is a constant struggle, one that others who have served as editors of generalist journals will no doubt recognize.
We’d note in closing that both of us received our PhDs at MSS stalwart institutions (Nebraska and Kansas), and our colleague Peter spent the bulk of his career at Missouri. We now are mostly at the end of our careers, and are pleased and proud, as was Peter, to have had the opportunity to make the TSQ editorship one among the many last acts of our professional lives.