Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human

Sciences

Series Editors
Christian Fleck
Department of Sociology
University of Graz
Graz, Austria

Johan Heilbron
Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science
Politique (CESSP)
CNRS - EHESS - Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne
Paris, France

Marco Santoro
Department of the Arts
Università di Bologna
Bologna, Italy

Gisèle Sapiro
Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science
Politique (CESSP)
CNRS - Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Paris, France
This series is the first to focus on the historical development and current
practices of the social and human sciences. Rather than simply privileg-
ing the internal analysis of ideas or external accounts of institutional
structures, it publishes high quality studies that use the tools of the social
sciences themselves to analyse the production, circulation and uses of
knowledge in these disciplines. In doing so, it aims to establish Socio-­
Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences as a scholarly field
in its own right, and to contribute to a more reflexive practice of these
disciplines.
 Philipp Korom

Star Sociologists
Anatomy of a Disciplinary Elite
Philipp Korom
Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS)
Vienna, Austria

Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences

ISBN 978-3-031-13937-6    ISBN 978-3-031-13938-3 (eBook)
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 Acknowledgments

During my graduate studies I was, like most of my fellow students, part of a

social milieu extensively exposed to the thought of such key thinkers as
Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. It seemed to me that professors tended
to develop either a predilection or a relative disdain for various eminent
sociologists. Thus, early on I was given the impression that there exists little
consensus on the best examples of excellence that one can hope to emulate.
On the other hand, exam committees drawing up reading lists selected only
key writings of a handful of scholars who proved, in general, to be essential
to the academic curriculum in sociology worldwide. Intuitively, one would,
therefore, think that a small elite within sociology does in fact exist, not-
withstanding apparent disagreements on who the “star” sociologists are.
Having graduated, I embarked on several research projects that exam-
ined elites (e.g., top managers, the super-rich, or parliamentarians)
through a sociological lens, which always implies asking which character-
istics the powerful share. Even though the elite perspective focuses on a
few, it rarely confines the analysis to a single sector of society. This book
took shape when I started to ask myself whether one could extend elite
research to sociology as a discipline.
So far sociology has been preoccupied with individual intellectuals,
which appears almost paradoxical given that the discipline specializes in
the study of groups. Biographies of scholars such as Max Weber or Pierre
Bourdieu fill bookshelves, but one hardly finds any publications
v
vi Acknowledgments

comparing sociology’s masterminds. The present book, in contrast, has

been guided by a single question: What, if anything, do scholars such as
Robert K. Merton, Talcott Parsons, and Anthony Giddens have
in common?
At the beginning, I discussed this question extensively with Christian
Fleck at the University of Graz. He had previously worked on a collective
biography of German-speaking social scientists, titled A Translantic
History of the Social Sciences, that deeply inspired me. As an early sup-
porter of this project, he suggested comparing not only different cohorts
within the discipline, but also sociology with economics—comparative
frameworks that I used for this book’s study.
I acknowledge financial support by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
between 2016 and 2019; it was decisive in helping to realize my research
goals. This book is essentially an offshoot of the FWF project, “Academic
Super-Elites in Sociology and Economics” (P 29211).
I benefited as well from several opportunities for feedback, discussion,
and reflection on research that were offered by the University of
Wuppertal, for which I want to thank Thomas Heinze. The Gustav-
Figdor Award, which I received from the Austrian Academy of Sciences
for my work on academic elites, motivated me to further pursue my
research. My personal debts are to my family, who endured with stoicism
the writing of this book.
Most of the empirical studies included in the book have appeared pre-
viously in open access articles in various journals. The many anonymous
reviews I received forced me to sharpen my arguments and helped reduce
the number of shortcomings. Although journal articles, in some ways, are
intellectual fast food that one tends to consume without pleasure, I hope
that a book-length portrait of sociology and its elite is rather something
to feast on.
 Contents

1 I ntroduction  1
References   9

2 E
 minent Scientists 11
Emergence of Research Universities   11
Enter the Professional Scientist   16
Prominent Scientists  21
In Search of a Geiger Counter to Detect Eminence   26
Citation-Based Eminence Research   29
References  32

3 Sociology
 as an Academic Discipline 39
The Emergence of Sociology as a Discipline on its Own   39
From Quasi-Hegemony to Pluralism   44
Rise and Fall of Hegemonic Schools in U.S. Sociology   44
Pluralism of National Sociologies   52
Contrasting Sociology with Economics   55
SSDs with and without a Core   55
High- versus Low-Consensus SSDs   56
Hierarchical versus Non-Hierarchical SSDs   57

vii
viii Contents

Self-Contained versus Open SSDs   57

Journal versus Book-Based SSDs   58
References  58

4 I dentifying the Elite 65

At the Peak of the Eminence Hierarchy   65
Two Methodological Pathways for Identifying Elites   68
Citations in Sociology—The Worst Proxy for Scholarly
Recognition, Except for All the Others   68
Study I: Eminence in the Monographic and Journal
Literature  70
Study II: Eminence in the Pluralistic World of Academic
Journals  77
Validating the Methodology   88
Do Citations Correlate with Prizes and Memberships in
Academies?  88
Are Textbook Citations Special?   88
Do Journals Mirror National and Specialist Sociologies?   97
References  99

5 Collective
 Biographies and Career Pathways103
From (Auto-)Biography to Prosopography  103
Elites in Transition  107
Elite Careers in Economics and Sociology—A Comparison  114
References 129

6 The
 Rise to and the Fall from Eminence133
Explaining (Fading) Eminence  133
Master–Apprentice Relationships  135
Elite Higher Education  136
Academic Tribes  136
Lipset and the Early Years of Political Sociology  138
Lipset: Remembered in Political Science, Neglected in
Sociology 141
Why Has Lipset’s Eminence Faded in Sociology?  147
 Contents ix

Pierre Bourdieu and U.S. Sociology: A Diffusion Study  153

Channels of Diffusion  155
Diffusing Publications and Concepts  156
Social Structures Impacting Diffusion Processes  162
Carrier Groups  162
Eminence in Sociology—A Nested Phenomenon Extending
Across Many Specialties  166
References 167

7 E
 lites as Gatekeepers171
The Case of Journal Reviewers  171
The Case of RKM—An Eminent Scholar Crisscrossing Social
Circles 176
RKM as Gate-Opener—Analysis of 1460 Recommendation
Letters 181
Elite Power in Sociology?  195
References 197

8 Making
 Sense of Prestige Elites201
The Discipline-Elite Nexus  201
Toward a Sociology of Academic Elites  208
References 214

A
 ppendices219

I ndex223
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Membership of the American Economic Association and

American Sociological Association, 1960–2019 (Sources:
Siegfried [1998] and association homepages) 46
Fig. 4.1 Top-ranked 50 sociologists in the 1970s and 2010s, according
to aggregated reference scores. Early theorists who died before
World War I, such as Herbert Spencer or Karl Marx, were
excluded from the survey 74
Fig. 4.2 Top-ranked 50 sociologists: Disaggregated and weighted
references score. Quintiles were calculated separately for each
literature genre 76
Fig. 4.3 A three-dimensional depiction of the prestige elite. The arabic
numbers stand for authors as follows—1 for Pierre Bourdieu,
2 for Max Weber, 3 for Talcott Parsons, and so forth (see
Table 4.3). Pierre Bourdieu is located at the upper-right
corner because of an extraordinarily high number of references
and the fact that he belongs to the top 20% in 10 national
sociologies and 9 (out of 11) specialist sociologies 84
Fig. 4.4 Top-ranked 64 sociologists in order of year of birth: Awards
and memberships in honorary societies. Included are scholars
who were alive at the time of conducting the survey as well as
those who have died since 1950 89

xi
xii List of Figures

Fig. 4.5 Correlates of textbook references. All values in the correlation

matrices are Pearson correlation coefficients. AEA/APA/ASA:
American Associations of Economics, Psychology, and
Sociology; p. president; SSQ: Social Science Quotations; Ency.
Brit.: Encyclopedia Britannica; other ency.: other discipline-
specific encylopedias 95
Fig. 5.1 Family backgrounds of elite economists and sociologists  118
Fig. 5.2 Career trajectories in terms of ranking of departmental
prestige. Colored lines indicate the most frequent career
trajectories taken. For the institutional ranking, see
Appendix A2 121
Fig. 5.3 Years spent in a career position. The middle of the boxplot
indicates the median. The lower and upper hinges correspond
to the first and third quartiles—that is, the 25th and 75th
percentiles. Outliers, or observations that are located outside
the hinges, are represented by points 125
Fig. 5.4 Visiting relationships between research institutions in eco-
nomics. The size of the nodes represents the number of all
incoming and outgoing scholars and the thickness of the arcs
depends on the number of scholars moving unidirectionally
from one node to another 127
Fig. 5.5 Visiting relationships between research institutions
in sociology 128
Fig. 6.1 Weighted page count for Lipset’s monographs, book contribu-
tions, and journal articles 1947–2001. Considered are 23
books (including one research report), 139 book contribu-
tions, and 103 journal articles—see appendix of Korom 2019.
The page count was weighted simply by dividing for each item
the published pages by the number of authors. The average
number of published pages per year is 175 (dashed line).
Circles stand for research stays of at least one year; CASBS
stands for the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral
Sciences140
Fig. 6.2 Articles, book reviews, proceedings papers and editorials citing
Lipset’s works in political science and sociology journals
between 1955 and 2014. All citations were identified in the
Web of Science (WoS) that provides an interface for searching
the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). The cited author
 List of Figures xiii

search combines 11 different variants of Lipset using the

Boolean OR operator—for example, LIPSET SEYMOUR,
LIPSET SM, LIPSET S. The search was conducted in May
2018 and was confined to the WoS categories “political
science” and “sociology” 142
Fig. 6.3 Lipset’s changing research agenda measured in (weighted)
pages. Considered are 18 books and 92 journal articles that
are representative of Lipset’s works; for the complete list, see
Korom (2019). For each contribution pages were counted
and weighted by dividing published pages by the number of
authors145
Fig. 6.4 Reception of Lipset in political science and sociology journals,
1956–1987, 1988–2018. The articles, each of which cite at
least one of his works, are assigned to topic categories. For
example, because Political Man was assigned to the category
“democracy,” all identified articles citing it are attributed to
that topic. Figure based on data derived from the SSCI 146
Fig. 6.5 Proportion of articles citing Bourdieu (in %) in 20 sociology
journals between 1970 and 2010 157
Fig. 6.6 Usage of Bourdieu’s key concepts over time (1970–2010).
Considered are 19 journals and 2215 citation contexts. Theory
& Society is not included in the analysis because of its citation
format, which relies on endnotes that are not conducive to
automated content analysis 161
Fig. 6.7 Articles citing Bourdieu published between 1970 and 2010.
Each dot stands for one of the 1080 articles, assigned to either
elite or non-elite departments according to the affiliation of
the first-named author. Lines indicate the 25%, 50%, and
75% quartiles. Elite departments are: Columbia, Cornell,
Harvard, Indiana, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Princeton,
Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Los Angeles, Chicago, Michigan,
Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin,
Washington State, and Yale 163
Fig. 7.1 Representation of the elite among the top 1% of all AJS and
ASR reviewers 174
Fig. 7.2 Trajectories of RKM’s recommendations and article citations.
The former include 1460 recommendations contained in
boxes 103–117 of the his papers, while citations of his articles
xiv List of Figures

(N = 644) in the flagship journals American Sociological Review

and American Journal of Sociology were identified using the
Social Sciences Citation Index (1956–present). The chrono-
logical segments in the figure refer to the various stages of
RKM’s career at Columbia University 176
Fig. 7.3 Mentor–mentee relationships in the 942 recommendations
made by RKM to U.S. universities and colleges. Prestige
categories adopted from Weakliem et al. (2012). Top 10
departments: Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, Michigan,
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Berkeley, Princeton, N Carolina, Yale.
Top 20 departments: preceding list plus Penn, Ohio State,
UCLA, Washington, Cornell, Northwestern, Iowa, Illinois–
Urbana, Stanford, NYU 184
Fig. 7.4 Evaluation criteria used in RKM’s recommendations for
students. Considered are 942 recommendations written in
favor of (former) students. Categories were dichotomously
coded (1 = category applies) and aggregated at the level of
master categories—that is, general academic ability. The values
indicate, in percentage points, the relative share of each master
category. Calculations were conducted separately for male and
female students 190
 List of Tables

Table 4.1 The text corpus for Study I, consisting of textbooks,

handbooks and encyclopedias 71
Table 4.2 Forty-two journals representing either a national or a
specialist sociology 80
Table 4.3 Most referenced authors in 42 selected sociology journals 83
Table 4.4 Books by elite scholars that have received the widest
diffusion. In the far-right column the number of references
is given as a share (in %) of all references of a given author  86
Table 4.5 Comparison of sociology, economics and psychology
textbooks in the 1970s and 2010s 91
Table 4.6 Top referenced authors in diverse journals 98
Table 5.1 Comparison of the characteristics of the elite in sociology in
the 1970s and 2010s. The statistics relate to scholars alive at
the time of writing and those who have died since 1950 110
Table 5.2 Elite profiles in sociology and economics 119
Table 5.3 Career mobility within economics and sociology 123
Table 6.1 Top JSTOR topics in articles mentioning Lipset, divided
between political science and sociology 148
Table 6.2 Publications by Bourdieu (including books, book chapters
and journal articles) most frequently cited in journal articles
(n =1080) by U.S. sociologists 158
Table 6.3 Memberships in ASA sections of first-named authors citing
Bourdieu165

xv
xvi List of Tables

Table 7.1 Register of recommendations (N = 1460) 182

Table 7.2 Profiles of mentees recommended by RKM 186
Table 7.3 Types of reservation and hedging expressed by RKM
in his recommendations 188
Table 7.4 Success rates for candidates recommended by RKM 191
 1
Introduction

“Elite” is a contested term. Since becoming commonly used in everyday

language, however, its core meaning has not changed much. Individuals
are given the label when their prestige has reached the highest magnitude
possible. Elites can stand at the apex of whole societies, but in most cases
elite individuals ascend to the uppermost rung of the ladder of social
prestige by excelling in a single field—one thinks of the world chess
champion Magnus Carlsen, the Tesla CEO Elon Musk, or the German
chancellor Angela Merkel. Members of elites do not constitute a “class”
and sometimes not even a “group”; they may prefer to live in isolation
completely devoted to their individual tasks and be reluctant to organize
in any systematic way. Why, then, should sociologists study elites?
The obvious answer is that sociologists have mostly studied elites for
their power. By studying them it is possible to understand how power is
organized (Aron 1960). Sociologists, therefore, have a keen interest in
political, economic, and military elites. However, not all elites occupy
key positions in powerful organizations, with the capacity to implement
changes in their societies if they choose. Certainly, the “prestige elite”1
described in this book that includes scholars such as Robert K. Merton
and Pierre Bourdieu is not a “power elite” (Mills 1956). Its impact is

1
By “prestige elite” I mean the “typically thin layer of people … who generally have the highest
prestige within what is prestigious collectivity to begin with” (Zuckerman 1972: 159).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

P. Korom, Star Sociologists, Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13938-3_1
2 P. Korom

confined mostly to one academic discipline: sociology. Moreover, the

world of sociology is small. Its top departments around the world are
reported to have only about 3000 core staff members (Demeter and
Toth 2020).
Yet, what appears at first sight to be a mundane issue turns out to be
the perfect “fruit fly” for exciting investigations into the nature of the
“soft” science disciplines (e.g., political science).2 What makes fruit flies
ideal for genetic research is their simple genetic structure. Similarly, stud-
ies on the small and fairly young discipline of sociology, with its pro-
nounced core characteristics, open up all sorts of possibilities for
understanding the inner workings of disciplines that are less “codified”
than the natural or “hard” sciences (e.g., physics).
By “inner workings” I mean, inter alia, professional recognition. “Just
as man does not live by bread alone, so the scientist does not live by salary
alone” (Storer 1967: 77). Once in academia, individuals are thrown into
a world based on the accumulation of prestige and will surely find them-
selves wanting to add entries to their curricula vitae that mention awards,
grants, invitations to speak at events, and so on. Although the work of
most remains little read and some even struggle to find permanent posi-
tions, a few succeed in getting not only the attention of peers around the
world but also the highest honors of the discipline. Still, we cannot always
agree on who belongs to the sociological elite, why some make it into the
elite or drop out, and what exactly distinguishes a “star” sociologist from
an average one. It is exactly these questions that this book sets out
to answer.
What characterizes sociology primarily is its fragmented character.
Sociology today is a house of many mansions. From the late 1960s
onward, the discipline started to increasingly fall apart, losing organiza-
tional as well as intellectual coherence. Currently, it appears difficult to
even find two sociologists who completely agree on what their science
comprises. The discipline is largely a bricolage of qualitative and quanti-
tative, micro and macro, symbolic interactionist and functionalist,

2
The hard–soft distinction is a matter of relative degrees of disciplinary compactness. Hard sciences
(e.g., physics) have a greater consensus about key concepts and methods, whereas soft disciplines
(e.g., sociology) are essentially non-paradigmatic (Biglan 1973).
 1 Introduction 3

positivist and postmodernist, theoretical and data-driven, scientific and

activist. Such polymorphism and multivocality is, however, not unique to
sociology. Other disciplines that do not study phenomena in the natural
world, but in the diverse laboratories of the social world, are less suscep-
tible to control; for instance, anthropology, history, or political science
are also fragmented into subdisciplines, schools, or other scientific collec-
tives. Sociology only stands out through the extreme degree of disciplin-
ary incoherence.
Demystifying the elite in sociology thus may help, through the force of
example (Flyvbjerg 2006), to better understand “soft” sciences in general.
If sociology does not fit well within a certain proposition, a theory is very
likely to not hold for the “soft” sciences. Although not being primarily an
attempt to generalize, this book may, nevertheless, add to the collective
process of knowledge accumulation on academic elites and disciplines
that previously tended to be limited to the investigation of “hard” sci-
ences (e.g., Zuckerman 1977).
Before proceeding, it is necessary to address an objection that is most
likely to come from inside sociology—that is, that there is no consensus
on what constitutes the discipline’s elite. Because sociology is a (very)
“soft” discipline, so the argument goes, only a few leading scholars, such
as Pierre Bourdieu or James S. Coleman, will be recognized as clearly elite
by many (never all); consensus on the status of other sociological giants
such as Shmuel N. Eisenstadt will not be reached. Even though one must
concede that there is no magic bullet for identifying sociology’s elite,
uncertainty about outstanding (and recognized) academic excellence is
all but unique to sociology.
Take, for example, the “Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of
Alfred Nobel,” the economics discipline’s highest honor and the supreme
symbol of scientific excellence. Most of the Nobel laureates are caught
off-­guard by the news because there are always numerous candidates
deserving the recognition. When, for example, Robert J. Shiller, an expert
on exuberance and panic in financial markets, won the prize in 2013, it
was no surprise to many insiders. Only a few anticipated, however, that
he would share the prize with fellow economists Eugene Fama and Lars
Peter Hansen, although many guessed all three to be on the shortlist.
4 P. Korom

Occasionally, it is reported that even after lengthy deliberations within

expert circles and shortly before nominations are sent to the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences, with some 350 Swedish scientists of all
disciplines having the final say, the list of candidates still contains up to
at least twice as many names as there are years in which the award is
given. Thus, each year some scientists, who deserve credit, remain on the
list but go away empty-handed. “Uncrowned” laureates, such as Joan
Robinson and Anthony Atkinson, resemble in their achievements their
award-winning peers in many respects except one—they have not been
granted the prize.
Thus, although critics have a point in arguing that economists are
more likely to agree on whom to honor than sociologists, the discipline’s
Nobel Prize is by no means an unerring criterion of outstanding aca-
demic excellence. Neither are the identification methods proposed in this
book. It is, in general, unrealistic to assume that there exists in the social
sciences a perfect Geiger counter of eminence that resembles the real one
that always and reliably detects ionizing radiation. This, however, does
not imply that one cannot reach elite status in the social sciences at all,
and that, therefore, sociology’s elite must remain a mystery that escapes
scientific understanding. Even if attempts to identify the elite are at best
imperfect, which is partly because of the “fuzziness” of the elite concept
applied, new directions and new possibilities for research arise.
This book ventures into this as yet uncharted territory. Its core objec-
tive is to convince the reader that it is better knowing something about
the elite even if its composition remains, to a certain extent, uncertain,
than knowing nothing about the elite at all. The book is organized around
a number of key questions:

• What is meant when speaking of “the elite” in the social sciences?

• What is special about sociology?
• Who belongs to the elite in sociology?
• How do the elites of sociology and of economics differ?
• What is the “half-life” of eminence and why does eminence not endure?
• How do scholars rise to eminence?
• Do members of the elite hold power?
• What is the best “model” to explain eminence in sociology?
 1 Introduction 5

Book Outline
Chapter 2 provides a historical survey of the rise of research universities,
showing how professional scientists competed against each other for
research funds, awards, prestigious posts, opportunities to publish, and
prizes. This competition within academic disciplines led to a heavily
pyramidal distribution of internal prestige within scientific communities,
with a small number of extremely visible scientists occupying the top of
the pyramid: the elite.
Chapter 3 sheds light on the social space that the sociological elite
populates, namely, sociology as an academic discipline. Tracing the disci-
pline’s development, it becomes evident that sociology was only in the
early years of its institutionalization dominated by a few schools of
thought, all of them American, that promoted a number of paradigms.
The ambitious attempt by Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) to build a sys-
tematic conceptual base for all social sciences was one of the discipline-
wide paradigms that informed sociological work in very different
specialties, bringing them together under a common roof. Yet, the disci-
plinary matrix of accepted concepts, assumptions, and methodological
stances started to grow so rapidly from the 1960s onward that one could
not tell anymore which element of the matrix defined the discipline most.
The disintegration of the discipline shifted sociology and economics into
various directions, with sociology becoming an open, low-consensus,
mostly non-hierarchical discipline without a common and shared theo-
retical and methodological core. It is especially this development that
makes it interesting to ask whether and how the elite changed in sociology.
Chapter 4 introduces two methodological pathways for the identifica-
tion of sociology’s elite. Scientometrics is used to understand whose work
is valued most by peers around the world. This approach conceptualizes
citations as “frozen footprints in the landscape of scholarly achievement
which bear witness to the passage of ideas” (Cronin 1981: 16). The first
analysis takes the observation seriously that, in sociology, monographs
and academic journals function as equally important publication outlets
and subjects encyclopedias, textbooks, handbooks, and journals to cita-
tion analysis. The second gives due attention to the fragmented nature of
sociology and measures citations in a multitude of academic journals that
6 P. Korom

either stand for different specialties (e.g., cultural sociology) or national

sociologies (e.g., U.S. sociology). “Star” sociologists are identified as those
highly cited scholars that transcend the many internal divides of sociol-
ogy and impact peers working in numerous corners of the world as well
as in different subfields. It turns out that the rosters obtained from both
studies do overlap to a great extent, albeit not entirely. Once identified,
systematic inquiries into commonly shared characteristics by means of a
collective study of elite members’ work lives and intellectual impacts
become possible.
Chapter 5 asks, among other things, how the elite’s social and geo-
graphic origins changed between the 1970s and 2010s and finds that its
expansion beyond America, due to its long-established ability to recruit
scholars from underprivileged backgrounds, is the most pertinent feature.
To further understand what is unique about sociology’s elite, their aca-
demic careers are compared systematically with those of all Nobel laure-
ates in economics. The main takeaway is that, whereas outstanding
eminence in economics is difficult to reach without holding professor-
ships at the discipline’s top departments, the careers of legendary sociolo-
gists have, on the contrary, little in common. In general, the gist of what
one can learn from comparing disciplines and their respective elites is
straightforward: Where there are no unified and universally accepted
problem definitions, methodologies, and theoretical approaches, there is
clearly no homogeneous elite.
Chapter 6 expands on another finding that emerged from the citation
analysis—namely, that eminence in sociology is, like in most other disci-
plines, rather short-lived, as in the case of Seymour M. Lipset (1922–2006).
During his lifetime, Lipset was no doubt among the preeminent social
scientists, mostly sitting on the edge between sociology and political sci-
ence, and best known for his contributions on the social requisites of
democracy. Today, some sociology textbooks no longer even mention his
name. Interestingly, this quasi-eclipse of eminence cannot be explained
by his contributions becoming increasingly replaced by other progressive
work in the free marketplace of ideas. The major driving force behind his
work’s apparent demise was rather sociology’s fragmentation into special-
ties that turned Lipset, who was once a central figure of sociology, into a
figurehead of only one single specialty—namely, political sociology. The
 1 Introduction 7

case study shows that scholars do not necessarily fall from preeminence
because of certain intrinsic qualities of their work. Other factors (e.g.,
disciplinary developments) make them vulnerable to the waxing and
waning of eminence.
This chapter also tackles the question of how scholars rise to “stardom”
by analyzing the reception of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
(1930–2002), who became the world’s most cited sociologist. What is
traced empirically by means of citation analysis is the diffusion of
Bourdieu’s ideas across a multitude of generalist and specialist journals
between 1970 and 2010. It emerges that reaching eminence in sociology
implies having successfully spread his ideas in many, if not all, of sociol-
ogy’s internal knowledge communities. In the case of Bourdieu, the
reception started out within the narrow confines of educational sociology
and broadened substantially when he became the icon of (American) cul-
tural sociologists—a powerful “academic tribe” within sociology.
Chapter 7 switches the focus to the power of the sociological elite by
drawing on yet another case study, an investigation of Robert K. Merton
(1910–2003) as an academic gatekeeper. The term that denotes scientists
in particular positions within disciplines who can influence the distribu-
tion of resources (e.g., research funds and job or publishing opportuni-
ties) appears to only inadequately capture the outstanding role of Merton
in the academic labor market of American sociology. Instead, the analysis
of about 1460 recommendation letters for students and colleagues sug-
gests Merton to have functioned as a gate-opener: Merton dedicated a
significant part of his working time to writing letters on behalf of his
colleagues and students, thereby effectively helping them to further
develop their academic careers. The prestige of the letter writer appears to
have had a significant impact on selection committees that had to decide
between candidates with (mostly) similar academic achievements. This
case study suggests, more generally, that the elite’s impact is not restricted
only to the world of ideas.
Chapter 8 synthesizes the most important insights gathered from the
empirical investigations pursued in the previous chapters and proposes a
number of generalizations. Taking up a postulate first advanced by
Whitley (1976), it is contended that the case of sociology confirms that
there is a nexus between the overall intellectual structure of a discipline
8 P. Korom

and the composition of its elite. This interrelatedness, that I have referred
to previously as “the nexus between the overall intellectual structure of a
discipline and the composition of its elite” (Korom 2020), is not particu-
lar to sociology, it is argued, but rather universal. Any discipline that
mutates and takes on features like sociology is apt to be dominated by
scholars without a strong sense of communality. Further, a research pro-
gram is outlined that is likely to deliver the best explanation for why
certain sociology scholars enter, or fall out of, the discipline’s prestige
elite. At the core of this program are contextual conditions outside the
elite and the focus lies on diffusion patterns across national sociologies
and specialties. In this proposed explanatory framework, the originality
of contributed ideas alone does not suffice to attain eminence. What is
needed are, among other things, carrier groups that circulate an author’s
ideas across the numerous internal divides that characterize sociology as a
discipline.
All chapters, except the last one, are sufficiently self-contained that a
reader can parachute into any of them. Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 are essen-
tially empirical in nature. As Healy and Moody (2014) noted, somewhere
along the line sociology became a discipline that prioritizes dense tables
over apparently unsophisticated figures. I prefer the clarity of a (good)
figure over the numerical treatment of statistics that may signal scientific
rigor, but is often indecipherable; in consequence, the book includes 22
figures, located in chapters 3–7.
Taken as a whole, this book oscillates between the general and the
particular. At certain stages during the research process I abandoned the
collective biography approach, as I felt that only by delving into the
“how” and “why” of eminence would it be possible to uncover the web of
mechanisms that make it explicable. By comparing the reception by the
sociological community of two eminent scholars, my intention was to
produce a more generalizable picture. It is my contention that case stud-
ies, by explaining how eminence comes about and why it is of continuing
importance, can add depth to the collective portrait and thus enhance
our understanding of who these eminent men and women were and are.
 1 Introduction 9

References
Aron, Raymond. 1960. Classe sociale, classe politique, classe dirigeante.
European Journal of Sociology 1 (2): 260–282.
Biglan, Anthony. 1973. The Characteristics of Subject Matter in Different
Academic Areas. Journal of Applied Psychology 57 (3): 195–203.
Cronin, Blaise. 1981. The Need for a Theory of Citing. Journal of Documentation
37 (1): 16–24.
Demeter, Marton, and Tamas Toth. 2020. The World-Systemic Network of
Global Elite Sociology: The Western Male Monoculture at Faculties of the
Top One-Hundred Sociology Departments of the World. Scientometrics 124
(3): 2469–2495.
Flyvbjerg, Bent. 2006. Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research.
Qualitative Inquiry 12 (2): 219–245.
Healy, Kieran, and James Moody. 2014. Data Visualization in Sociology. Annual
Review of Sociology 40 (1): 105–128.
Korom, Philipp. 2020. How Do Academic Elites March Through Departments?
A Comparison of the Most Eminent Economists and Sociologists’ Career
Trajectories. Minerva 58 (3): 343–365.
Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.
Storer, Norman W. 1967. The Hard Sciences and the Soft: Some Sociological
Observations. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 55 (1): 75–84.
Whitley, Richard. 1976. Umbrella and Polytheistic Scientific Disciplines and
Their Elites. Social Studies of Science 6 (3/4): 471–497.
Zuckerman, Harriet. 1972. Interviewing an Ultra-Elite. Public Opinion
Quarterly 36 (2): 159–175.
———. 1977. Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States. New York:
Free Press.
 2
Eminent Scientists

Emergence of Research Universities

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, universities were not central
hubs of research, but rather parochial institutions subordinated to the
will of churches, businessmen, and politicians. Because state or federal
funding did not exist, universities were dependent on private donors and
local authorities to keep schools operating. Knowing that they were the
sole supporters, these financiers often felt that they had the right to
remove professors from the faculty, interfere with the school curricula, or
prohibit the university from hiring someone whose religious or political
beliefs appeared to them unacceptable. In 1879, for example, the
Congregational minister and president of Yale, Noah Porter, ordered
William G. Sumner (1840–1910), Professor of Political and Social
Science, not to use Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology1 as a textbook
because he feared that Spencer’s atheistic materialism would intellectually
and morally harm students (Bledstein 1974).

1
In general, the reactions to the publication of The Study of Sociology varied: “Those who found
science congenial and who felt it could be extended validly and fruitfully to the study of society,
generally greeted the book warmly” (Carneiro 1974: 547). The religiously orthodox, however,
including Noah Porter of Yale, feared that it could threaten Christian theology.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 11

P. Korom, Star Sociologists, Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13938-3_2
12 P. Korom

Some decades later, during the “Gilded Age,” the clerical domination of
university boards of trustees often passed to (newly) rich businessmen—
for example, John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), who established the
University of Chicago, or the tobacco industrialist James B. Duke
(1856–1925), the patron of Duke University. Although this changeover of
authority indicated the secularization of higher education, it did not auto-
matically bring about an autonomous community of researchers. The
social scientist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), who had been a participant
observer in various U.S. institutions of higher learning (including Harvard,
Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and University of Chicago) openly rebelled
against the (unaccountable) power of the new university presidents.
In his penetrating book, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum
on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, Veblen argued that rich busi-
nessmen tended to hire university presidents of their own kind, who trans-
formed what should be “intimately personal contact and guidance, in a
community of intellectual enterprise” into a “business house dealing in
merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of
erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in the
largest feasible output.” Clearly, for Veblen, university presidents were not
intellectuals or scientists interested in dispassionate inquiries into the truth
but rather subordinates serving business by producing, for example, trained
employees. What troubled him the most was the idea that all academic
initiatives were, at least in his eyes, subjected to “persistent and detailed
surveillance” (Veblen 2015: 120, 210–223).
Even if Veblen’s account may have exaggerated the role of vested inter-
ests, his ethnographic observations tell us that the boundaries between
business and academia were somewhat blurry at the turn of the century.
The essence of universities, as they are known today, was not defined yet.
Veysey (1965) portrays the second half of the nineteenth century as a
period of continual dispute over deeply held views on the ultimate goals
of higher education. He identifies four rival concepts:

• Develop moral and mental discipline.

• Serve an increasingly democratic society by providing a range of pro-
grams that would prepare young men and women for a wide variety of
employment.
 2 Eminent Scientists 13

• Be a place of free, skeptical, and scientific inquiry—a place of research.

• Be a place of liberal culture, sustained through study in the humanities.

Around 1900, Veysey argues, it was research values and practices that
became institutionalized at several universities while liberal “culture felt the
illusory exhilaration of a few victories but lagged far behind in terms of
influence” (1965: 257). It was, therefore, only just over a century ago that a
new type of higher education institution emerged in the United States,
which went on to become the twentieth century’s leading power. Seriously
committed to research as an institutional goal, it soon became the intellec-
tual organization that remains recognizable today—the research university.
The core ideas for founding this type of institution flowed mostly from
Germany, which the key reformers of U.S. higher education—for example,
Daniel C. Gilman (1831–1908) at Johns Hopkins, Charles W. Eliot
(1834–1926) at Harvard, William R. Harper (1856–1906) at Chicago,
and Henry Tappan (1805–1881) at Michigan—had visited either to study
or conduct research and whose model of higher education they decided to
emulate. The ascent of the research university came close to an “academic
revolution” (Jencks and Riesman 1968), as teaching and research moved
under the de facto control of faculties, which by virtue of tenure and exper-
tise achieved emancipation from administrative whim and caprice. But
what, exactly, were the ideas that inspired this major transformation?
An early exposition of how the research process should be organized at
universities can be found in the memorandum “On the Internal and
External Organization of Institutions of Higher Education in Berlin,”
written most probably around 1810 by the politician and diplomat
Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who was responsible for culture
and schools at the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Humboldt’s philo-
sophical vision of the modern university encompassed the following key
principles:

• The unity of science and scholarship.

• The freedom to teach and to learn (Lehr- und Lernfreiheit).
• The community of students and teachers.
• The unity of disciplines under one university roof.
• The education of character through academic knowledge.
14 P. Korom

• A fairly high degree of government control, coupled with the respon-

sibility to finance institutions of higher education.
• The right of universities to regulate their internal and academic affairs
themselves.

The memorandum emphasized that research (and academic learning

through research) involves a never-ending quest for truth, which must be
pursued continuously:

… when it comes to the internal organization of the higher scientific insti-

tutions, everything depends on preserving the principle of seeing science as
something that has not been and can never be entirely found, and to con-
stantly pursue it as such (von Humboldt 1956, author translation).

This manifesto became famous only when the university in Berlin cel-
ebrated its centenary in 1910; Humboldt, in fact, was never particularly
present in the German nineteenth-century debate about the university,
and his ideas were not widely disseminated during his lifetime (Östling
2018: 11). Even if Humboldt’s fame was to develop only later, the mani-
festo is an early expression of the idealistic conceptions of science circu-
lating in Germany as a community-based practice that asked for
unfettered freedom to be realized. Moreover, Humboldt was the driving
force behind the foundation of the University of Berlin (Friedrich-­
Wilhelms-­Universität, FWU) that turned into the “mother of all research
universities” (McClelland 2017).2 Its name was finally changed in 1949
to honor Wilhelm Humboldt and his brother, the world-famous explorer
and scientist Alexander.
While the FWU was unarguably located cheek by jowl with the
monarchical court and educational ministry, it emerged as Germany’s
premier research center during the nineteenth century. McClelland’s
detailed historical account for the period 1860–1918 shows that the

2
While Wilhelm Humboldt was indeed the driving force behind the setting up of the University of
Berlin, which came about in 1810, his overall political influence was limited. He spent barely
16 months in the Prussian Ministry of Culture and never attained the rank of minister. Humboldt’s
international reputation seems to derive from only a few papers on higher education that were not
published in his lifetime (Henningsen 2006).
 2 Eminent Scientists 15

transformation was a gradual one: academic freedom was often under-

mined, disciplines were not unified within one faculty, and faculty mem-
bers below the full professor level did most of the teaching; thus, often it
was difficult to conduct any research at all. After a rather checkered start,
however, the trademark of FWU became the devotion to research and the
independence of professors—the “uncrowned kings” (Mommsen 1994:
69)—who could research, more or less, whatever they wanted in their
respective subject areas.
In the process of reform, the German universities, in particular that of
Berlin, served as the international model of university reformers (Wittrock
1993). Universities worldwide turned into educational institutions host-
ing self-governing communities of professors freed from special interests.
Wissenschaft (i.e., knowledge creation through research) became the cen-
tral plank of the modern university and universalism, communism, dis-
interestedness, and organized skepticism the four core values of scientific
research (Merton 1973).3
The diffusion process was driven mainly by competitive mechanisms.
Johns Hopkins, for example, opened in 1876 with a faculty that had
mostly studied in Germany. Until the end of 1880s, it produced more
PhDs than Harvard and Yale combined (Geiger 1986: 8), and its adop-
tion of the Germanic conceptions of scholarship attracted faculty mem-
bers from other universities; again, this acted as a stimulus for encouraging
independent research at such places as Harvard. In general, even though
in the past competition was rather non-existent in academia, from the
1890s onward university administrators started hiring away from else-
where scholars who were nationally recognized as leaders in their fields.
Thus, for example “nothing so clearly marked Columbia as a comer than
its success in recruiting such already nationally known scholars as James
McKeen Cattell and James Harvey Robinson from Pennsylvania; Henry

3
By communism, Merton (1973) implied that research results should be the common property of
the whole scientific community; universalism implied that the validity of knowledge claims should
only be assessed based on impersonal criteria; disinterestedness carried the expectation that scien-
tists should have no emotional or financial attachments to their work; and, finally, the norm of
organized skepticism implied caution in reaching conclusions and demands to continually chal-
lenge conventional wisdom.
16 P. Korom

Field Osborn and Franklin Giddings … from Bryn Mawr; [and] John
Bates Clark from Amherst” (McCaughey 2012: 202).
The main criteria for faculty selection had previously included political
skills, administrative talents, links to the university board of trustees, or
simply an agreeable temperament. By the late nineteenth century a schol-
ar’s worldwide academic standing became the preeminent factor.
Although during the eighteenth century professional educators were at-
will employees who retained their jobs on informal yearly contracts,
which enabled administrators to tightly control the conduct of their fac-
ulty, modern research universities introduced the tenure system as a safe-
guard to protect employees’ rights (Hertzog 2017). Most indicative of
this rise of professionalism is the establishment of the American
Association of University Professors (AAUP). The drafters of the AAUP’s
“Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure” (1915)
insisted that university faculty were “appointees,” like judges, with “pro-
fessional functions to perform in which the appointing authorities have
neither competency nor moral rights to intervene.” They also had a very
clear picture of which criteria their peers had to meet: “[F]ew things can
be more important than [to] enhance the dignity of the scholar’s profes-
sion, with a view to attracting into its ranks men of the highest ability, of
sound learning, and of strong and independent character” (Van Alstyne
1993: 393ff.).

Enter the Professional Scientist4

With the rise of professionalism, scholarly reputation came to matter.
Aspiring academics had to live up to the rules of the competitive “aca-
demic game” to gain recognition and meeting the expectation of peers
became a necessity to succeed in the academic marketplace. But what
were the rules of this game?
Teaching, research, and miscellaneous administrative functions were
recognized everywhere as essential parts of an academic’s work. Some

4
On the etymology of the word “scientist,” see Merton (1997).
 2 Eminent Scientists 17

sociologists acquired distinction through teaching by either building up

a large following of students or attracting large audiences to their lec-
tures. Students of George H. Mead (1863–1931)—a leading intellec-
tual figure at Chicago who published infrequently—were, for example,
the prime disseminators of his ideas through frequently referring to
Mind, Self, and Society during the period immediately after its publica-
tion (Huebner 2014: 191ff.). Georg Simmel (1858–1918), a now
world-famous scholar who was a somewhat marginal figure in German
academia during his lifetime, gained his reputation as a popular lec-
turer. As Coser (1958: 637) notes, “it is no exaggeration to say that
many of Simmel’s lectures were public events and often described as
such in the newspapers.”
A report from the University of Minnesota indicated that the factors
influencing promotion between 1913 and 1931 were, in descending
order of importance: teaching (43.4%); productive scholarship (27.6%);
student counseling (11.6%); administrative work (11.0%), and public
service (6.4%) (Wilson 1942: 101). In a similar vein, August
B. Hollingshead—a sociologist with a distinct interest in social stratifi-
cation—reported in his study “Climbing the Academic Ladder,” which
investigated promotion histories of 207 scholars at Indiana University,
a weak, if not negative, relationship between publication behavior and
tenure: “the man who published only one item had just as good a chance
to be promoted as the man who wrote prolifically” (Hollingshead
1940: 110).
Over time, however, research came to replace teaching as the basis for
promotion. To gain a reputation with peers, sociologists felt under
increasing pressure to publish. During the 1950s, the sociologists
Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee visited 10 major U.S. universi-
ties in 164 vacancy-and-­replacement situations involving a full-time
faculty position in liberal arts departments. Over a two-year period, the
dean and at least one academic peer were asked, mostly with open-
ended questions, about the person who left, the person who replaced
him, and how the candidate for the replacement was found, evaluated,
and appointed. When Caplow and McGee went over the transcribed
18 P. Korom

interviews, they noted that 122 respondents defined “productivity”

unmistakably as research or publication of research; only 14 referred
either directly or indirectly to the teaching of students; and 11 of these
14 qualified the importance of teaching in some way (Caplow and
McGee 1961: 83).
By the 1900s, U.S. universities such as Chicago, Columbia, Harvard,
and Johns Hopkins had introduced campus-based journals in which fac-
ulty members published their research and reviewed the published con-
tributions of colleagues based elsewhere. Most notable is the Chicago
sociologist Albion Small (1854–1926) who founded the American Journal
of Sociology (AJS) in 1895. Small’s regular early critical AJS reviews of
articles published in the French L’Année sociologique, a journal started by
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) in 1898, not only indicate that the pro-
fession of sociology was not limited by national boundaries but also that
there was already a global status competition between leading sociologists
of their time.
Howard S. Becker, a sociologist who left the University of Chicago
with a PhD in 1951, described the way his cohort of fellow students kept
up with the literature, as follows:

Sociology had fewer publications then. The major journals (the American
Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and Social Forces) and
a handful of (very minor) local, regional, and specialty journals contained
what everyone read. Sociological books didn’t appear in the quantities now
common. There weren’t many sociologists, and they didn’t buy or assign
enough books (other than textbooks) to make publishing them worthwhile
until the GI Bill filled the graduate schools in the late 1940s.… We read
every article, whatever field it was in and whatever subject matter it dealt
with. It was all sociology and worthy of our attention, and besides, what
else was there to read? (Becker 2017: 44–45).

The number of sociology journals skyrocketed in the decades to come.

During the period 1953–1967, the discipline witnessed the appearance
of no less than 29 new sociology journals of which 18 were published
 2 Eminent Scientists 19

outside the United States (Pease and Rytina 1968). Today, the digital
library JSTOR hosts as many as 150 sociology journals.5
For a discipline in the making, such as sociology, the writing of text-
books was another way to make one’s name. In 1921, Robert E. Park
(1864–1944) and Ernest W. Burgess (1886–1966) persuaded their col-
leagues at University of Chicago Press to publish a 1040-page doorstop-
per titled Introduction to the Science of Sociology. The textbook included
excerpts from a wide array of sociological themes, contained no photo-
graphs or wide margins, and became so popular in colleges and universi-
ties across the United States that students started to refer to it as the
“green bible” (Sica 2012). Clearly, this major effort to institutionalize
sociology was a success story.
The first edition of Sociology and Modern Social Problems by Charles
A. Ellwood (1873–1946) that appeared in 1915 turned out to be simi-
larly influential. It sold 300,000 copies—an astonishing number given
the relatively small size of the U.S. college student population during the
era (Turner 2007: 134). To put this number in context: The sociological
giant Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) informs the reader in the introduc-
tion to the second Free Press paperback edition of the landmark study,
The Structure of Social Action, that the original McGraw Hill edition
(1937) sold only 1500 copies (Parsons 1968: v).6
The academic market for books in the United States was, by and large,
late to feature the writings of sociologists. Initially, publication was almost
invariably subsidized, and only those few authors who were supported by
foundations or universities could publish book-length monographs. A
case in point is the monograph Middletown by Robert S. Lynd
(1892–1970) and Helen M. Lynd (1886–1982), published in 1929. The
first sociological study of a U.S. community, it became an instant sensa-
tion, receiving an unprecedented front-page review in the New York

5
JSTOR was initially conceived in 1994 by William G. Bowen, then-president of The Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation, to help university and college libraries handle an ever-increasing amount
of published scholarship by converting printed scholarly journals into electronic formats and stor-
ing them in a digitial archive (Schonfeld 2003). In 2020, the JSTOR digital library offered access
to about 12 million academic journal articles.
6
This small number might be due in part to the book’s printing plates being requisitioned for war
use (Sica 2016: 127).
20 P. Korom

Times. The path to publication was not smooth. The directors of the
Institute for Social and Religious Research (ISSR)—a personal charity of
John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937)—decided, following a series of battles
with the authors over the study’s content and methodological approach,
against including it in their monograph series. Ultimately, rather than the
Institute, Alfred Harcourt published Middletown.7 Vigorously promoted
by the publisher, and prominently featured in bookstore windows, it
went through six printings in 1929 alone, selling more than 30,000 cop-
ies over the next eight years (Gilkeson 2010: 69).
With the expansion of sociology (see Chap. 3) and the growth of the
international market for scholarly books, the publication of monographs
and edited volumes became a common vehicle of scholarly communica-
tion. Today, “book people” and “journal article people” are to be found
side by side in nearly every sociology department worldwide. If garnering
attention at all, each publication genre may generate various types of
reputation. Books are more likely to facilitate entry into intellectual and
lay communities that transcend immediate networks of colleagues,
whereas articles are more likely to establish authority in special research
areas but come at the cost of not reaching broad audiences (Clemens
et al. 1995).
That publications rather than lectures have turned out to be the domi-
nant source of reputation has a simple reason: Unpublished lecture notes
rarely receive collegial evaluations. In turn, the importance of peer review
to the newly formed profession of sociology cannot be overestimated.
Much like lawyers or doctors, sociologists have had reason to prefer self-
policing over external controls. When peers started to assess the “quality”
of colleagues on a regular basis, whether it was in promotion committees,
academic conferences, or on the editorial boards of scholarly journals,
gradients in the reputational standing of scholars became visible. Like in
other academic disciplines—and not much different than in society at
large (Speier 1935)—the reputation of a sociologist hinges on two fac-
tors: the number of persons familiar with one’s work, and the number of
7
On several grounds, the publication ran into opposition from the Institute staff. It deviated from
the quantitative portrayals for which the Institute was already well known. Further, it did not serve
the Rockefeller interests because it stressed class divisions in “Middletown” (Muncie, Indiana)
rather than community harmony (Harvey 1983).
 2 Eminent Scientists 21

those willing to recognize one’s contribution to the advancement of the

discipline.
Some have been judged by competent peers as fair to middling, others
as reliable if not exceptional, and a few as towering over the rest. For
some, it is, for example, crystal clear that if a Nobel Prize was awarded for
sociology, there was no question that Robert K. Merton would have been
a recipient (Kaufman 2003). Thus, the elite was a clear by-product of a
system of peer judgment that by now pervaded the discipline. Interestingly,
research on prominent scientists had started long before in other
disciplines.

Prominent Scientists
Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), a Victorian polymath and cousin of
Charles Darwin (1809–1882), was obsessed with genius. He hypothe-
sized that (outstanding) mental abilities were like physical characteris-
tics—passed on through evolution by natural selection—but how could
he prove that? For him, eminent men clearly exhibited genius most
clearly; thus, he started gathering evidence by surveying biographical dic-
tionaries. All those who stood out because of a consensus concerning
their importance were included one by one in his “database.” Galton then
researched these selected men and their genealogies, finding that the
chances of relatives attaining fame were above average.
Regarding eminent men of science, Galton came to the following
conclusion:“to every 10 illustrious men, who have any eminent relations
at all, we find 3 or 4 eminent fathers, 4 or 5 eminent brothers, and 5 or
6 eminent sons” (Galton 2001: 378). Findings, such as this one, were
interpreted as compelling evidence for the hereditary nature of genius. Of
course, Galton also came across some disconfirming evidence that was,
however, consolidated with his “theory” by showing that rare surnames
are destined to disappear over time (Watson and Galton 1875).
Galton’s work proved not only to be consequential for the develop-
ment of psychology because it popularized statistical applications, but
also had at least some impact on the study of eminence when his ideas
22 P. Korom

began to cross the Atlantic.8 The carrier of Galton’s ideas was James
McKeen Cattell (1860–1944) who obtained his psychology degree at
Bryn Mawr and met Galton when he became a lecturer at Cambridge
University. Cattell was impressed by Galton’s versatility and emphasis on
statistics, which he started to teach after being appointed the first profes-
sor of psychology in the world at the University of Pennsylvania in 1888.
He later moved to Columbia and acquired the weekly journal Science,
which became the world’s top academic journal.
Cattell followed in Galton’s footsteps by continuing to collect bio-
graphical data on scientists that were finally published in the directory
American Men of Science (AMS). The first edition of AMS (Cattell 1906)
featured about 4000 biographical sketches. Each entry contained, among
other things, place and date of birth, education and academic degrees,
mailing address, departmental affiliation, and information on career
positions and areas of research.
What set AMS apart from other biographical rosters was not only its
comprehensiveness but also the practice, in selected entries, of inserting
an asterisk before the field of research, to indicate that the scholar was to
be regarded as one of the country’s leading men of science (“starred”
entries). Thus, a “star” was, literally, everybody with an asterisk next to
their name. How did Cattell identify these stars? He implemented the
following simple procedures: the 10 leading representatives in the 12
principal sciences (e.g., anatomy) who were members of the National
Academy of Sciences were asked to rank order the “most eminent” scien-
tists (e.g., anatomists) in their respective background disciplines. By con-
flating these ratings, Cattell identified the most eminent U.S. scientists
who were ultimately flagged with a mark of distinction.
It is interesting to observe that initially the star system was, in part,
quite well received, as is evident from the following review, published in
the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society:

8
It should be noted that Galton not only coined the term “eugenics”, advocating that eminent men
and women should be encouraged to intermarry and produce offspring, but even went so far as to
call on the (British) Sociological Society to launch eugenics as a national program (Renwick 2011).
 2 Eminent Scientists 23

In view of the great difficulties in forming a correct estimate of the merits

of the work of contemporaries, the present undertaking appears a bold one,
but the importance of accurate knowledge on this point seems to justify
such ventures. All men of science … must feel keenly the difficulties
encountered in the effort of judging the relative merits of the work of those
who may be under consideration; and as such judgements are sometimes
imperatively necessary, any reliable aid is a great desideratum (Miller
1906: 34).

In a similar vein, the Berkeley physicist L. B. Loeb argued in a personal

letter to Cattell that because only a small number of physicists could be
elected to the National Academy, the star system provided an effective
means of identifying and rewarding successful scientists (Lankford 1997:
246). Given this reception, it appears that the AMS had unintended con-
sequences. Although Cattell intended to use the AMS for communica-
tion purposes and for scientific investigations only, others saw it as a
valuable “judgment device” (Karpik 2010) with practical applications:
The roster promised to reduce knowledge deficits relating to achieve-
ments in the rapidly expanding sciences and to establish a hierarchy of
recognition.
Over time, taking a negative stance toward AMS became a widely
shared attitude. Criticism focused mainly on the limited number of fields
in which Cattell assigned stars, the fact that so few stars were assigned in
total, and the biases of the judges he had chosen (Sokal 1995). Even
though there may have been several factors at play causing biased judg-
ment, the most vexing problem was the complexity of the task at hand.
When asking individuals to evaluate peers, Cattell wanted judges to con-
sider multiple criteria. While contributions to research were to be given
priority, he also suggested that teaching, administration, editing, and the
compilation of textbooks should be taken into consideration. Careful
attention was to be paid to the mix of activities that made a man or
woman efficient in advancing science (Lankford 1997: 246).
24 P. Korom

However, based on archival material,9 it is possible to detect that

despite these instructions the judges’ conceptions of what it meant to be
a leading scientist in America were often inconsistent. Some, for example,
based their judgments on publications only, while others made an
appraisal considering all dimensions. Critics bemoaned other apparent
deficits as well. For example, the validity of the the AMS star system suf-
fered considerably from the self-imposed restriction that individuals who
had received a star in a prior edition of AMS should retain their star until
death (Cattell and Brimhall 1921: viii). In consequence, there were fewer
slots left for “rising stars” (Rossiter 1992: 289–90). It is not clear, how-
ever, whether these severe deficits of the roster finally led to the demise of
the star system or whether war-related turbulence ended it. In any case,
the seventh edition (1944) edited by Jacques Cattell, the son of James,
was the last to include asterisks.
Even if today Cattell’s star system appears a remote chapter in the his-
tory of science, it is, in fact, full of insights. It shows, among other things,
that any classification of scientists is likely to create resistance. Why?
Most likely because scientific status usually resides largely in tacit and
informal judgments. Peer evaluations, like those collated by Cattell, often
not only break the silence but also distinguish quite boldly between a few
top scholars and the rest. To many this imposed dichotomy appears arti-
ficial, giving the widely shared impression that academic reputation has
many more gradients and, consequently, raises the hackles of many.
Cattell’s work on eminence was to lay forgotten for some 30 years until
interest in the history of psychology started to grow. In the late 1960s,
Robert I. Watson (1909–1980) and Edwin G. Boring (1886–1968)
developed a list of 1027 individuals as a first step in the preparation of a
biographical dictionary, projected to contain 500 entries, of persons
important in the history of psychology (Annin et al. 1968: 303). The list
was wide and varied in its remit, including psychiatrists, anthropologists,
and biologists from the seventeenth through to the twentieth century.
To restrict the list to the most outstanding contributors to the advance-
ment of science, Cattell’s approach of expert evaluations was used. Watson
and Boring asked seven other psychologists—four Americans, one

9
The James McKeen Cattell papers are housed in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
 2 Eminent Scientists 25

Belgian, one Frenchman, and one Japanese—to rate all names on a scale
of 0 to 3, giving three checkmarks if the individual should be among the
500 great psychologists, two checkmarks if the judge was able to identify
key contributions of the given scholar, and one checkmark if the judge
only was able to recognize the name in the history of psychology. Although
raters were not asked to apply any specific criteria in the determination of
their ratings, they were advised to do their rating “cold”—that is, without
any consultations. The ratings for each name were then tallied; the high-
est possible score was 27 if all nine raters assigned three checkmarks.
Annin et al. (1968) report 53 names that received a score of 27, among
them Alfred Adler, Edmund Husserl, Karl Pearson, Herbert Spencer, and
Edward Thorndike.
Again, as in the case of Cattell, this survey of professional opinion on
who counts as an eminent scientist was met with severe criticism. Leonard
Zusne, for example, doubted the methodology on the following grounds:

Of the three points that could be assigned an individual by a judge, two

were to be given on the basis of the judge’s familiarity with him. Thus,
while even the most eminent individuals could not be rated higher than 3
by a judge, the lower echelons of eminence received a boost from the his-
torians, familiar with more historical names than most (Zusne 1975:
492–93).

Clearly, definitive and objective criteria for identifying excellence had

yet to be established. Most critical observers of these early endeavors had
the gut feeling that different expert panels would very likely give different
ratings. The result would be rosters of eminence that only partially over-
lap. Some felt the urge to find alternative measurement strategies.
Renewed efforts to define eminence were based on the fundamental
assumption that it was not about originality in the first place, but about
the amount of attention a scholar attracted at a given time. What was,
therefore, needed was a tool, a kind of Geiger counter, which could dis-
tinguish between scholars whose work was being widely discussed and
those whose ideas and contributions were rarely adopted by fellow scien-
tists. But what would such a Geiger counter look like?
26 P. Korom

In Search of a Geiger Counter to

Detect Eminence
Psychology, like other disciplines, turned to citations to gauge the extent
to which someone’s research was used by others in the field as the key
indicator of recognition.10 The rationale was simple:

One of the most significant ways in which scientists are rewarded is by hav-
ing their work used by other scientists. Thus, the number of citations a
scientist receives may be taken as an indicator of the amount of recognition
his work has received (Cole and Cole 1973: 34).

One should add, however, that there has always been a common aware-
ness that citations were a feasible but not a perfect Geiger counter.
Jonathan and Stephen Cole themselves, for example, pointed these sub-
stantive problems out. The significance of a scientist’s work is not always
recognized immediately, and innovators may remain obscure in their
own lifetime. In addition, citations may refer to contributions that are
being criticized or even rejected rather than commended or employed in
support of the author’s research. Another vexing problem is that citations
have distinct functions. While some are “substantive” (i.e. truly needed
for understanding of the referring text), others are “perfunctory” (i.e. an
acknowledgment that other work in the same general area has been
performed).
In the second case, citations indicate the intellectual precursors. In one
of the early in-depth studies on the use of citations, Moravcsik and
Murugesan (1975) found that about 40% of citations were perfunctory.
Furthermore, citations could be of the “methodological type”
(Bornmann and Daniel 2008), which cause a systematic bias because
papers reporting new methods or research instruments tend to be cited
more often than purely theoretical contributions. Finally, the validity of

10
It is noteworthy that Eugene Garfield, who pioneered the Science and Social Science Citation
Indexes that were to become the main research tools in the evaluation of scientists and institutions,
argued early on that such citations primarily indicated the utility rather than the importance of
academic contributions. In his words: “A highly cited work is one that has been found to be useful
by a relatively large number of people” (Garfield 1979: 246).
 2 Eminent Scientists 27

any citation count could be seriously influenced by mutual reference

arrangements. Sometimes what is observed is “citation stacking”—that
is, authors working in the same team or department citing each other to
raise their prestige. In face of these objections, the question arises as to
whether citations are an accurate reflection of recognition by peers.
Radioactivity is impossible to observe visually but can be detected
through use of a Geiger counter. Similarly, most social scientists would
agree that eminence in science can be best deduced from citations. There
is firm evidence to support this stance, namely the high levels of correla-
tion with a usually unquestioned indicator of academic eminence: the
Nobel Prize. The will of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, written in 1895,
dedicated most of his estate to prizes for those who had “conferred the
greatest benefit on mankind” by making “the most important discovery
or invention” in the fields of physics, chemistry, and physiology or medi-
cine (as well as contributions to literature and peace). It was only from
1968 onward that the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
started to be awarded annually. The main reason this prize is commonly
regarded as the ne plus ultra of honors in science is the elaborate selection
process applied.
The economist Assar Lindbeck (1930–2020), who sat on the prize
committee for many years describes its principles as follows (Lindbeck
1985). Every October a candidate proposal form is sent to professors at
around 75 departments of economics, as well as to previous economic
laureates, all over the world. About 150 to 200 completed forms are
received, usually including some 75 to 125 nominees. When committee
commission experts study these proposals, they pay the most attention,
not to the candidates who received the greatest number of nominations,
but to those who were recommended by the most highly competent
nominators. In-depth studies are commissioned for each candidate, nar-
rowing the field down to the 20 to 30 candidates whom the committee
regards as having made the most outstanding contributions.
After several meetings of the prize committee, a prize proposal is sent
to the social science class of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,
which is obliged to accept it. Finally, the prize is decided on by a simple
majority in a secret ballot during a plenary session; this is where all
Swedish members of the Academy (260 persons) have the right to vote.
28 P. Korom

Clearly, the selection procedures are far more rigorous, for example, than
those of Watson and Boring, not least because the prize is the expression
of the opinion of numerous competent judges.11
Now, if citation counts are a powerful proxy for eminence, one should
be able to use citation analysis to forecast Nobel Prize winners. In an early
study Eugene Garfield established that of the 50 most-cited economists,
17 had won the prize until 1991. Seven had died and therefore were not
eligible for the prize. Overall, his results led him to conclude that “a
simple, quantitative, and objective algorithm based on citation data can
effectively corroborate—and even forecast—a complex, qualitative, and
subjective selection process based on human judgement” (Garfield and
Welljams-Dorof 1992: 117). In a later study, Bjork et al. (2014) analyzed
the citation trajectories of Nobel Prize winners in economics. Their main
finding is that, even though the trajectory patterns differ between the
prize winners, the Swedish Academy tended to award, on the average at
least, the prize close to the winners’ citation peak.
The evidence at hand implies that citations, despite the complexities,
do account for recognized achievement because that is exactly what the
Nobel Prize honors. Many efforts have already been invested into refining
citation studies to make them less error-prone. Currently, the gold stan-
dard appears to be one that demands a combination of various citation
studies conducted for the same sample of people, as well as a joint con-
sideration of other criteria of excellence that need to be demonstrated to
correlate with citation counts (Gingras 2016). In general, academic jour-
nal-based citations are the most widely used. These are viewed as “blue
collar” indices of intellectual impact, relying on the citation “votes” of the
entire scientific community rather than on the judgment of selected
experts.
Later, with the launching of the Social Science Citation Index
(SSCI)—a digital database that contains the abstract and key words

11
The Nobel Prize in Economics was, however, never free of criticism. It was, for example, argued
that the chairman, Assar Lindbeck, dominated the prize committee during the first 25 years in such
a way that the prize-winning theories provided a scientific stamp of approval for a market-liberal
policy agenda in Sweden that he aimed to strengthen. Even if it is true that the committee enjoyed
some leeway to favor one candidate over another, the harshest critics state that the committee did
not “stray too far from the discipline’s internal prestige rankings” (Offer and Söderberg 2016: 141).
 2 Eminent Scientists 29

rather than the full text of journal articles, as well as a complete list of
references—journal citation counts became easily available and started to
be used, and abused, globally. A recurrent criticism leveled against SSCI-
based citation studies is their reliance on academic journals only, and
their neglect of other genres of literature. Already during the 1960s, a
leading bibliometric expert urged his colleagues to reflect on the follow-
ing question:

Important from whose point of view? Who is more important for the disci-
pline, a sociologist who is recognized as such by the multitudes who have
passed through an introductory sociology class or one who is recognized by
the select few who are exposed to the American Sociological Review?
(Oromaner 1969: 334, emphasis added).

Indeed, textbook citations became in the years that followed another

commonly used proxy for eminence (Wright et al. 2000). In their study
of the citation rankings of authors in the sociological monographic and
journal literature Cronin et al. (1997) reported that there may be two
distinct populations of influential authors, one in monographs, the other
in journals, with only a small degree of overlap. One can only guess at the
reasons for this. A possible explanation could be the median age of litera-
ture cited in each genre.
Obsolescence is not as rapid for books as it is for journal articles.
Another reason could be that “journal people” tend to cite methodologi-
cal contributions more often. Whatever the reason, given this insight,
sole reliance on SSCI citations appears problematic. Even in psychology,
a discipline in which journal articles are the predominant form of com-
munication, eminence is measured by citations in introductory textbooks
and discipline-specific journals (Diener et al. 2014).

Citation-Based Eminence Research

In contrast to various other disciplines such as economics (e.g., Szenberg
1993), political science (e.g., Bingham and Vertz 1983), and psychology
(e.g., Haggbloom et al. 2002), sociology has never embarked on a
30 P. Korom

systematic citation-based investigation of its most eminent members as a

collective. The sparse work on eminence contributed by sociologists is
instead marked by an obsession with individual outstanding scholars,
such as Pierre Bourdieu (Medvetz and Sallaz 2018) or Anthony Giddens
(Loyal 2003). One can only speculate on the reasons for sociologists’
refusal to indulge in large-scale and citation-based eminence research.
Several possible complementary hypotheses suggest themselves.
Most likely, one reason is sociologists’ skeptical stance toward the eval-
uative quantification of research and the very process of creating rank-
ings. Once selective indicators of eminence, such as awards or citation
counts, are given numbers, they can be aggregated into a single eminence
score, producing commensurability among what were previously non-
comparable authors. Such practices transform “qualities into quantities,
difference into magnitude” (Espeland and Stevens 1998: 316).
Quantifications that can foster simplistic views—for example, “Pierre
Bourdieu’s sociology offers more insights than that of Raymond
Boudon”—are, understandably, problematic for most sociologists. This is
because, obviously, what is presumed is that the works of both scholars
can be subjected to the same metric of excellence. Rankings have numer-
ous pitfalls, and it is no wonder that scientists have grown wary of them.
Here is an example demonstrating that even the comparison of football
teams can raise rather complex issues that, if not settled, let rankings
appear to be a flawed practice of comparison:

If we argue that actually Real Madrid is better than Juventus F.C., the
advocate of Juventus might ask us to elaborate on how we came to such a
conclusion: Do Real play more efficiently? Do they have a more attractive
style? Do they have a particularly rich tradition? The proponent of Real
Madrid might have just as many good reasons as does the champion of
Juventus F.C. And things would get even more complicated in the case of
multiteam comparisons in which you would have to explain not only the
hierarchy between Real and Juventus but also the relative greatness of all
other teams in the world (Ringel and Werron 2020: 142).

Another is that in many places academic sociologists’ performances are

evaluated based on presumably solid indicators of excellence (e.g., Google
 2 Eminent Scientists 31

Scholar citations) to such a degree that it has become difficult to imagine

such an assessment without any reliance on quantification (Ferretti et al.
2018). Many feel unfairly treated if, for example, they are not promoted
to a professorship because of underperformance based on several indica-
tors that seek to impose numerical values on a phenomenon that is diffi-
cult to measure—research excellence. They also have a hard time believing
that citation of an article implies that it has actually been read, and they
question that there is just a handful of standards to assess the quality of
academic work. Consequently, a widespread attitude has developed that
despises any quantitative assessment of research.
A final reason is the widely shared conviction that sociology is one of
the most fragmented social science disciplines that is not only highly
structured by language and national settings but also by many different
and incompatible standards for what constitutes good work (Stinchcombe
1994). It is, therefore, often felt that a consensus on the question of who
belongs to the elite is simply impossible to reach. Many would argue that
while one could potentially identify reputational leaders in some sub-
fields of sociology, a universally recognized elite simply does not exist.
The fact that sociology does not know of any ne plus ultra award but is
rather marked by a seemingly ever-growing number of distinct awards,
prizes, and honors (Best 2008) is arguably proof of the impossibility of
identifying a single elite based on a single citation matrix.
Although there is (a grain of ) truth to these arguments, I take the
stance in this book that it is possible to identify sociology’s elite based on
citations. As I go on to demonstrate in the following chapters, outstand-
ing high-­citation counts do correlate with other indicators of academic
prestige and therefore are suited to detect those few who stand on the top
of sociology’s internal prestige pyramid. In this book, citations are not
being used as a ranking device but serve to detect eminence. Thus, the
trap of comparing what is noncomparable is avoided. Finally, the citation
analyses conducted take into consideration that sociology is not orga-
nized in any coherent way, as the discipline’s core feature is integrated
into the actual research design applied.
What is more, this book combines quantitative and qualitative meth-
odologies. Primarily, citation counts are used to lay bare the most
32 P. Korom

important trends in processes of professional recognition. As will become

apparent, quantifications of how references to scholars evolve over time,
or of how they vary across fields of research, raise many questions that can
only be answered through qualitative in-depth analyses. Finally, it is
important to point out that this study is not an exercise in evaluation
based on simple metrics, nor does it claim that citations are unambiguous
indicators of elite status. I argue, however, that citation counts are the
worst proxy for scholarly recognition, except for all the others.
Once the elite is identified based on citation (see Chap. 4), a collective
portrait becomes possible. One can leave the well-trodden paths of writ-
ing intellectual biographies of individual thinkers by looking at star soci-
ologists as a group. The common aspects of their intellectual lives will be
targeted rather than their individual histories. It is important to look for
general factors that explain their eminence. To find answers, I will, at
some point, exchange the macroscopic for a microscopic perspective and
“zoom in” on the cases of Pierre Bourdieu, Seymour Lipset, and Robert
K. Merton; the goal is to identify patterns in the reactions to their work
that are likely to be held by the majority of star sociologists.
With this having been stated, one can easily proceed with identifying
and describing the elite. I feel it necessary, however, to reflect first on
what is special about sociology. It is, as the next chapter shows, only
through historical reflections on the disciplinary development that it is
possible to effectively understand sociology’s character.

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 3
Sociology as an Academic Discipline

 he Emergence of Sociology as a Discipline

T
on its Own
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the social sciences as an
academic subject did not yet exist aside from the juridical sciences
(Staatswissenschaften) that are often perceived as a forerunner (Shils 1970).
It was only during the late nineteenth century that the organizational
structure of the social sciences became fixed with academic disciplines as
foundational pillars (Stichweh 1992). In 1857 Francis Lieber (1800–1872)
at Columbia College, for example, was granted the first official Professorship
in Political Science in the United States (Farr 1988) and in 1884 Alfred
Marshall (1842–1924) was appointed to the Cambridge Chair of Political
Economy. It is telling that Marshall questioned in his inaugural address
the unity of the social sciences: “It is in vain to speak of the higher author-
ity of the social science. No doubt if that existed Economics would gladly
find shelter under its wing. But it does not exist; it shows no signs of com-
ing into existence” (Hodgson 2005: 132). Thus Marshall, like most of his
contemporaries, already perceived the young social sciences of his time as
being departmentalized into different disciplines.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century several important books
with the name “sociology” in their titles were published. Among them
were Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology (1872), Ludwig

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 39

P. Korom, Star Sociologists, Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13938-3_3
40 P. Korom

Gumplowicz’s Grundriss der Soziologie (1885), Émile Durkheim’s Les

règles de la méthode sociologique (1895), and Georg Simmel’s Zur Soziologie
der Familie (1895). Apparently, the authors felt a need to emphasize that
they studied the social world from an analytical perspective that was
unique to the discipline of sociology. But, what exactly is a discipline?
A discipline is at least three things simultaneously: Ensembles of vari-
ous perspectives from which several problems are viewed. Both econo-
mists and sociologists, for example, have studied capitalism, albeit
through different analytical lenses. Sociologists have been interested in
capitalism as a culture or a system of ideas and principles, even as econo-
mists have been drawn to the quest of discovering its driving forces. For
a second example, consider poverty research: “If we ask academics why
poor people are poor … different disciplines will answer … in their own
unique ways: each with certain kinds of data, certain methods, [and]
certain habits of thinking about the problem” (Abbott 2001: 142). In
fact, almost every social phenomenon has been studied in a different way
by two social science disciplines.
Further, disciplines are institutional structures. Departments at uni-
versities have disciplinary names, students pursue degrees in disciplines,
and professors have discipline-specific professional qualifications. Finally,
disciplines are also cultures. Scholars sharing membership in a disciplin-
ary grouping have most likely been exposed to the same fundamental
debates, read the same “classical” books, learned the same methodologies,
and formed similar preferences for styles of scholarship1 (Wallerstein 2003).
Disciplines are likely to emerge in the context of other, previously
established ones. Professional sociology in the United States started to
grow in the shadow of economics. The American Economic Association
(AEA) was initially the intellectual hub of aspiring sociologists discussing
the socioeconomic problems of the day (Young 2009), and it was not
merely coincidental that Franklin H. Giddings (1885–1931) was

1
A study of peer review panels judging research proposals has revealed that a comprehensive style
of scholarship can be distinguished from a constructivist, positivist, and utilitarian one (Lamont
2009). The comprehensive style “values verstehen, attention to details, and contextual specificity”
(p. 57); the constructivist style “emphasizes proposals that ‘give voice’ to various groups (p. 57); the
positivist style “favors generalizability and hypothesis testing” (p. 57); and, finally, the utilitarian
style “values only the production of instrumental knowledge” (p. 58).
 3 Sociology as an Academic Discipline 41

appointed professor of sociology in the Columbia economics department

in 1894. In an early article, he defined sociology as a subbranch of eco-
nomics that studied how “wealth-production and distribution” interacts
with “human nature and social organization” (Giddings 1888: 29). Many
early sociologists, such as Edward A. Ross (1866–1951), received their
PhDs in economics and even after the foundation of the American
Sociological Society (ASS) in 1905—which was later renamed the
American Sociological Association (ASA)—cross-collaborations between
both disciplines persisted.
What started as sponsorship, however, turned into partnership and
finally ended in rivalry. The disciplinary split stemmed mostly from the
“marginalist revolution” inside economics. The economy ceased to be
perceived as being enmeshed in broader social, political, historical, and
institutional settings. The broader conception was replaced by a narrow
one that put market exchange, individual choice, and maximizing behav-
ior center stage and dispensed with history. Currently, almost every econ-
omist is some kind of marginalist. By turning economics into a science of
choice, the discipline began to lean toward the natural sciences (e.g.,
physics), and it diverged critically from sociology where it is often postu-
lated that social processes shape individual preferences (Fine and
Milonakis 2009).
In addition, the mathematization of economics (Debreu 1991) has
created not only a bond that ties economists together but also has caused
economists’ key publications to increasingly feature complex technical
“models”2 that are largely inaccessible to other social scientists. One could
even speak of a second “formalist revolution” that led to a growing insu-
larity of economics within the social sciences which manifests itself,
among other things, in vastly asymmetric citation patterns. These days,
articles in the American Political Science Review cite the top 25 economics
journals more than five times as often as the articles in the American
Economic Review cite the top 25 political science journals. The citation

2
Economists conceptualize models as simplified setups that are intended to shed light on the econ-
omy’s workings by clarifying the relationships among exogenous/endogenous effects, and interme-
diating processes. Economic science, it is believed, will advance by testing abstract models against
reality (Rodrik 2016).
42 P. Korom

asymmetry turns out to be even starker when compared to the American

Sociological Review (Fourcade et al. 2015: 93).
When sociology started to disentangle itself from neighboring disci-
plines, universities were about to transition from a focus on teaching to
one on research (see Chap. 2). The discipline became intellectually con-
solidated especially through the establishment of its first separate depart-
ment at the University of Chicago that was created more by coincidence
than by deliberate intention in 1892.3 Its first president William
R. Harper (1856–1906), a prominent Baptist educator, was known for
being “more interested in individuals of outstanding talent than in well-
delineated disciplines or departments” (Diner 1975: 515). Harper
endeavored to lure the country’s highest profile professors to Chicago,
such as historian Herbert B. Adams (1850–1901) and political econo-
mist Richard T. Ely (1854–1943).
Job negotiations, however, failed, and Harper arranged appointments
with alternative candidates, among them Albion Small (1854–1926).
Like other early social scientists, Small held that the young discipline
owed its justification to a valid program of social reform (Barnes 1926).
In general, a widespread belief among sociologists of the time was that
the discipline could not only discover the “laws” of society but also change
things for the better. The intellectual structure of sociology was essentially
divided. On the one side, there were meliorists aiming for social reform;
on the other, there were those who were interested only in scholarly
pursuits.
Small, whom Harper finally appointed head professor of social science,
became the discipline builder of U.S. sociology. He not only founded the
American Journal of Sociology, the first U.S. periodical of consequence
devoted to the subject, but also recruited key future figures of sociol-
ogy—for example, William I. Thomas (1863–1947), Robert E. Park
(1864–1944), and Ernest Burgess (1886–1966)—to the faculty. Thus, it
started to be known across the country as the “Chicago School” (Bulmer
1986)—a school of thought that became consequential for many

3
Sociology courses had been taught earlier at various universities such as those led by William
G. Sumner (1840–1910) at Yale (Small 1916).
 3 Sociology as an Academic Discipline 43

reasons.4 Two of them being that, at its peak in 1925, one-­third of all
graduates in U.S. sociology were enrolled in Chicago; and that as late as
1971, half of all presidents of the old American Sociological Society and
its replacement, the American Sociological Association, were either on
the Chicago faculty or were former students of the department (Turner
1988: 330). Finally, Park and Burgess authored sociology’s most influen-
tial textbook titled Introduction to the Science of Sociology.5
The textbook sold more than 30,000 copies, equivalent to 332,000
copies in today’s book market (Sica 2012). The bestseller helped students
prepare for exams, and its importance in giving a whole generation of
young students their first introduction to sociology cannot be overesti-
mated. In its introduction, the discipline-builders Park and Burgess
clearly established the character of sociology in contrast with its disciplin-
ary others: Sociology, it was argued, was not a philosophical science but
was geared toward systematic (empirical) research to expand the field.
Further, it was not to be regarded as a “mere congeries of social-welfare
programs and practices” but as “the science of collective behavior.”
Sociology can claim to be unique because no other science treated “social
control” as its “central fact and central problem” (Park and Burgess
1921: 42).
The question “What is sociology?” was to be repeated on innumerable
occasions within subsequent textbooks. Even though there exist perhaps
as many different views on sociology as there are sociologists (see Kinloch
2013), and widely accepted definitions range from “the study of social
order” to the “study of the process and forms of social organization,” the
goal of textbook introductions remains the same—namely, to demarcate
the sociological turf. All authors similarly claim that what differentiates
sociology from other social sciences is not the subject matter studied but
the approach adopted. Carr (1945: 137), for example, perceives only
sociologists being properly concerned with the analysis of “human
togetherness”:

4
The term “school of thought” implies that research practices, methodological stances, and ways of
building theories common to a group of scholars are formed and consolidated within one institu-
tional framework.
5
Under the editorship of Morris Janowitz, the second “student edition” (1969) was shortened to a
450-page paperback edition.
44 P. Korom

What are the problem phenomena of the anthropologist? Basic anatomical

likenesses and differences, and culture, the accumulated, transmissible
results of past behavior in association. What does the psychologist study?
Human behavior under controlled conditions. What is the social psycholo-
gist looking for? Human behavior under actual life-conditions. What is the
historian interested in? Unique events and their connections through time.
The economist? Subsistence behavior, its forms and processes. The political
scientist? Control behavior, its forms and processes. All these—anthropol-
ogist, social psychologist, historian, economist, and political scientist—
take the togetherness of men for granted, or at best they observe it only
incidentally.

Thus, to become a discipline on its own, sociology had to be defined as

a unique perspective on the social world (Erikson 1997). Sociologists
scan the same human scene as other social scientists, but they select dif-
ferent details, and sort them in different ways. It is not what sociologists
see but the way they see it that gives the discipline its distinction. Sociology
as a discipline, however, is not structured around ideas alone. It is only by
establishing social facts (e.g., departments, institutes, chairs, associations,
periodical or book series) that a discipline can secure identity among
other disciplines (Mucha 1998). Therefore, an analysis of the most impor-
tant institutional arrangements promises further insight into sociology as
a discipline.

From Quasi-Hegemony to Pluralism

Rise and Fall of Hegemonic Schools in U.S. Sociology

The institutional “home” to both faculty and students is the academic

department. Curricula, degree programs, grading practices, research ini-
tiatives and faculty careers are shaped there. Departments also provide
the main intellectual environment in which disciplines evolve.
U.S. sociology departments have always been highly stratified in terms
of prestige. Research consistently finds that for PhD students who are not
recipients of degrees from the top schools, the chances of obtaining
 3 Sociology as an Academic Discipline 45

teaching positions in leading departments are slim, and that the higher
the prestige of a department the greater the proportion of home-grown
faculty (Gross 1970). There is a long tradition of U.S. departments moni-
toring and recording their observations of the quality of graduate faculty
members, providing the opportunity for longitudinal analysis. Despite a
turnover of faculty and the rise and fall of dominant ideas and research
programs, one can observe an astonishing stability in departmental pres-
tige over long periods of time (Burris 2004: 241). Until the 1970s,
Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard consistently made up the “elite” in
sociology (Weakliem et al. 2012).
This axis of prestige existed at a time when U.S. sociology expanded
dramatically. After the Second World War, the number of professionally
trained sociologists grew exponentially. Sociology departments were
granting about 8000 Bachelors’ degrees per year by 1950, which rose to
35,000 during the 1970s; similarly, the number of PhDs awarded
increased from around 150 in 1960 to 700 a decade or so later. This went
hand in hand with an expansion of many sociology graduate programs at
less elite universities (Turner 2006: 23).
The growth of sociology, especially during the 1960s, also manifests
itself in the comparative assessment of memberships in social science pro-
fessional associations (see Fig. 3.1). The figure shows sociology to have
almost stood on a par with economics during the post-war period (House
2019). Finally, although the 1930s and 1940s were a low point for sociol-
ogy financially, the post-Sputnik period, until the early 1970s, brought
increased financial support, especially from the military (Turner and
Turner 1990: 131–41).
The faculties at Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard, during sociology’s
“golden age” (1940–1970), can be conceptualized as schools of thought
that exerted a quasi-hegemony,6 because majorities within the profession
accepted their research agenda as the best way to perform “normal sci-
ence.” As Tiryakian notes, such schools solidify around a small number of
charismatic leaders, who formulate key ideas that are taken up and refined

6
Sociology has always been a multiple paradigm science with several paradigms competing for
hegemony but never reaching it. At times, however, a few overarching paradigms clearly out-
weighed the importance of all other existing ones. This is why I speak here of a quasi-hegemony.
46 P. Korom

Fig. 3.1 Membership of the American Economic Association and American

Sociological Association, 1960–2019 (Sources: Siegfried [1998] and association
homepages)

by many followers, thereby elevating their spiritus rector to paradigm sta-

tus (Tiryakian 1977).
The leading three departments magnetically attracted students from all
over the country who perceived the discipline to be arranged in a top-
down way. Arthur J. Vidich (1922–2006)—a then young student in soci-
ology who became a sociology professor—remembers the image his
cohort had of the discipline, as follows:

In Madison, where I studied in 1946–48, MA students thought of the

Department of Sociology and Anthropology as a take off point for bigger
and better things elsewhere. Harvard and Columbia were believed to be the
places where one could find all the answers and the fundamental truths
about the social sciences.… The once-prominent Chicago had lost its lus-
ter…. Madison looked like a way station. The real thing was in the east
(Vidich 2000: 607).

The hierarchical structure implied that “the top institutions would

teach younger scholars, who would fan out across the country in the
hopes of producing work sufficiently important in character that they
would be asked back to join one of the elite schools” (Wolfe 1992: 776).
 3 Sociology as an Academic Discipline 47

Some anecdotal evidence also suggests that the elite had a strong ten-
dency to reproduce itself during sociology’s “golden age.” Seymour
M. Lipset, who spent most of his professional life in U.S. elite institu-
tions (see Chap. 6), remembers, for example, that most top sociology
departments had hired Columbia students by the mid-1950s
(Lipset 1955).
What were the dominant agendas of the few hegemonic schools of
U.S. sociology? Until about the 1940s,7 “Chicago sociology” reigned as
the first quasi-hegemonic paradigm that became associated with such
names as Robert E. Park or Everett C. Hughes (1897–1983). For Chicago
School researchers, the city, and its explosively growing immigrant work-
ing class, was of utmost importance as a “laboratory for the investigation
of collective behavior” (Park 1967: 22). Urban field studies were con-
ducted using a variety of methods including first-hand observation,
interviewing, maps, and even the study of newspapers. Social surveys
were largely considered “unscientific,” and the focus was geared toward
groups, thus the micro-level of society; social classes or organizations
were barely studied by the Chicago School (Turner 1988: 333).
After 1945, Columbia and Harvard rivaled or surpassed Chicago in
terms of faculty production, faculty quality, and graduate training
(Cortese 1995: 248). Survey and statistical methods were rising in popu-
larity. Columbia University was, as an early textbook writer underscores,
“the home of statistical sociology” (House 1936: 372). After Richmond
Mayo-Smith (1854–1901) acquired calculating machines and a library of
statistical publications, a statistical laboratory also was started to comple-
ment the sociology curriculum at Columbia (Wallace 1992: 503).
Franklin H. Giddings, another founding father of sociology and
Columbia professor, was firmly convinced that it is “the statistical method
[that] has become and will continue to be the chiefly important method
of sociology” (1904: 633–34). Giddings and his students, such as William
F. Ogburn (1886–1959) and Howard W. Odum (1884–1954), were to

7
Coser (1976: 146) dates the end of Chicago dominance to 1935 when the American Sociological
Society decided, in a minor coup d’état, to establish its own journal, the American Sociological
Review, thereby loosening the long-time cross-links of the discipline to the Chicago Department of
Sociology.
48 P. Korom

develop a distinct vision of sociology as a science based on quantifi-

able facts.
With sociologist Robert K. Merton becoming professor at Columbia
in 1941, “middle range theories” that can only be applied to selected
social phenomena (e.g., organizations) became another trademark of the
“Columbia School.” Although formulated in an abstract language, these
theories incorporate propositions that permit empirical testing. At
Columbia University, Merton collaborated for 35 years with the method-
ologist Paul F. Lazarsfeld (1901–1976). Together they established the
Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR), which became one of the
leading institutions of social research after the Second World War and a
place where long-term relationships between Merton and his many men-
tees were forged (see Chap. 7). Lazarsfeld’s many methodological innova-
tions (e.g., panel analysis, latent structure analysis) as well as the
foundation of the BASR—that was intended to be transformed into a
“Professional School for Training in Social Research” (Jeřábek 2001)—
decisively advocated the institutionalization of empirical social research
in sociology.
Another hotspot of sociology was located at Harvard University, where
Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) established the interdisciplinary Department
of Social Relations in 1946. Parsons’ main contribution was to have
developed a series of abstract analytical concepts that arguably capture
central features of human action “without having to account for the myr-
iad of empirical phenomena that threatened to drown the researcher in a
sea of particularities” (Coser 1976: 148).8 The name “Parsons” stood for
“grand theory.” His long-time collaborator, Neil Smelser (1930–2017),
recalls his synthetic powers: Parsons “converted the specific into the gen-
eral, and then set the general into some systematic conceptual relation-
ship with something else that was general” (Smelser 1981: 149).
One important conceptual tool introduced was the “action frame of
reference,” which revolves around the “unit act” consisting of four

8
Fox et al. (2005) point out that Parsons consistently sought to develop conceptual schemes to
facilitate empirical investigations and that his writings on specific empirical phenomena were also,
for Parsons, a means of applying, testing, and refining basic concepts. It is also obvious, however,
that his many classification schemes cannot be empirically tested because, as such, they do not
make any propositions.
 3 Sociology as an Academic Discipline 49

elements: actor, end, situation, and normative orientation. In Parsons’

view, every social action contains exemplars of each element, regardless of
time, place, or sociocultural context. The idea of analyzing society
through a general theoretical system was widely welcomed and the recast-
ing of familiar subject matter (e.g., the economy, modernization) into
distinctively Parsonian conceptual forms became a kind of industry.
Between 1946 and 1956 the Department of Social Relations awarded
206 PhD degrees in total and 80 in the field of sociology to a future gen-
eration of leading sociologists, including Bernard Barber, Albert
K. Cohen, Harold Garfinkel, Morris Zelditch, Renée C. Fox, Robert
N. Bellah, and Neil J. Smelser (Johnston 1998).
The three distinct schools of thought were not only critical for the
emergence of three main approaches within modern sociology—induc-
tive observation, statistical generalization, and analytical abstraction
(Camic 1995)—but they also provided sociology with some kind of over-
arching intellectual coherence. Of course, the short descriptions given for
each school oversimplify reality because American sociology’s leading
departments were not intellectually integrated but ecosystems of plural
knowledges (Calhoun and VanAntwerpen 2007). This is the case espe-
cially for the Chicago School, which never constituted a perfectly coher-
ent system of thought. Further, it can be argued that to think of Chicago
and Columbia as representing the dichotomous (qualitative vs. quantita-
tive) nature of empirical sociology is overdone since, among others,
William F. Ogburn (1886–1959), a proponent of quantitative work dur-
ing those years, joined Chicago early on (Harvey 1986). Finally, besides
the Merton–Lazarsfeld collaboration at Columbia, Parsons and Samuel
Stouffer (1900–1960) at Harvard were an influential partnership in the-
ory and research.
The main point here, however, is that what makes these three schools
unique in the history of U.S. sociology is, besides a certain distinctive-
ness, their far-reaching if not discipline-wide intellectual impact. Chicago,
Columbia, and Harvard at various times set standards of research excel-
lence that were difficult to ignore in the profession. Further, all three
departments were characterized, although to a different extent, by a social
structure that, according to Tiryakian (1977), can be seen as prototypical:
A “founder-leader” (e.g., Park, Merton, and Parsons) who presents a clear
50 P. Korom

expression of the way in which reality is to be approached, surrounded by

an inner circle of “interpreters” and “converts.” Interpreters communicate
the school’s paradigm and its significance to a larger audience, while con-
verts (who may share a similar age with the founder-leader), further detail
key ideas. At the same time, other followers simply may validate the
school’s paradigm through empirical study. Contacts made by converts
with colleagues in other schools are vital in disseminating the founder-
leader’s key ideas.
The closely-knit social network between all members of a school,
including agents of institutionalization, eventually draws in more and
more followers. It was this widening network of like-minded sociologists
that helped elevate its key members to prominent levels of eminence. It
set Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard apart from Berkeley, the latter an
upstart center of sociology created from scratch during the 1950s. It was
not marked by one or two dominant effective consensual figures but
rather by a pluralistic assemblage of eminent figures (Shils 1980).
Even though it is, again, controversial as to whether Herbert Blumer
(1900–1987), Louis Wirth (1897–1952) and Everett Hughes were inter-
preters or converts of Park at Chicago or simply scholars who happened
to work in the same department (Harvey 1987), it is clear that the roles
of Merton and Parsons as “founder-leaders” are straightforward as a closer
look reveals. For example, Merton’s proposed research program in the
sociology of science, which intended to trace the way in which institu-
tions and norms impinge on science, was partially carried out by his for-
mer students Jonathan Cole and Stephen Cole (1941–2018).
The prominence of the “Columbia School of organizational sociology”
(Haveman 2009) not only stems from Merton’s key contributions (e.g.,
“Bureaucratic Structure and Personality” (1940)) but also from Alvin
Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (1954) or Peter M. Blau’s
The Dynamics of Bureaucracy (1955). Gouldner and Blau had clearly
absorbed Merton’s approach to the study of organizations, and both
belonged, like Seymour M. Lipset (1922–2006) and James S. Coleman
(1926–1995), to a generation of future leading sociologists who trained
at Columbia.
Similarly, the Harvard-trained sociologist Robert N. Bellah
(1927–2013) studied religions using Parsons’ so-called “AGIL” scheme
 3 Sociology as an Academic Discipline 51

that was based on the premise that all systems should fulfill four basic
functions (i.e., adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latent pat-
tern maintenance) to endure within complex environments, while Neil
Smelser extended Parsons’ research program to the study of the economy
as a subsystem of society. Like another former Parsons student, Renée
C. Fox (1928–2020), Bellah and Smelser became eminent social scien-
tists. Already this glimpse into scholarly networks reveals why hegemonic
schools are relevant to the study of changing eminence in sociology:
Scholars who become eminent are known to closely network with other
scholars with high levels of fame—as predecessors, contemporaries, and
successors (Collins 2002); this is especially so if there exists a relatively
unitary disciplinary core.
The 1970s, a time in which the growth of U.S. sociology started to
stagnate (see Fig. 3.1), mark a break with hegemonic schools in sociology
in the United States, and, thus, with the belief that the discipline can
build on a guiding body of theory and methods. A post-war, rebellious,
generation of young social scientists started to dismantle some of sociol-
ogy’s dominant theories—that is, the Parsonian framework that was
judged as conservative and in favor of the status quo (Deflem 2013).
Lipset, who received his PhD in sociology from Columbia in 1949, viv-
idly describes how excitement for sociology as a (possible) normal science
gave way to disillusionment:

We literally believed that we, or rather our elders, were creating, for the first
time, a scientific sociology based on a functional and conceptual scheme
derived from Marx, Weber, and Durkheim as elaborated by Parsons and
Merton, and [a] rigorous analytical statistical methodology, as developed
by Lazarsfeld and Stouffer. … The postwar consensus behind a positivist
view of sociology, including the widespread acceptance of structure func-
tional theory and quantitative methodology, broke down with a vengeance.
No theoretical or methodological orientation commanded wide acceptance
anymore (Lipset 1994: 201, 211).

Sociology had entered a new stage that ceased to be dominated by a

few towering figures and their respective schools even as the interdepart-
mental prestige-hierarchy and the divide between “elite” and “mass
52 P. Korom

sociology” persisted. Top departments continue to appoint (with rare

exceptions) one another’s graduates, forming “labor cartels” (Turner
2014); but the hegemonic intellectual structure vanished. Of course,
there still exist various schools of thought—for example, the Jeffrey
Alexander School of Cultural Sociology at Yale University (Emirbayer
2004)—but they are not designated as hegemonic anymore because their
influence is limited to specialties (e.g., culture or theory) within sociol-
ogy. Instead of hegemony, the acceptance of diversity and theoretical plu-
ralism as a normal condition has established itself firmly within the
discipline. Not only intellectually but also organizationally, centripetal
forces that integrated have given way to centrifugal forces.
The dominant organizational form within U.S. sociology has become
the “groupuscule,” a small research team “that operate[s] without much
contact with, or direction from, the main theoretical concerns of the
field” (Turner 2014: 61). The American Sociological Association (ASA)
can be described as a brokerage organization that brings together at its
annual meeting a significantly increased number of sections, each of
which covers a different specialty. In addition, one can observe that
debates almost entirely take place between scholars who share similar
research interests while ignoring all others. Finally, specialist journals,
which have started to considerably outnumber generalist ones, incentiv-
ize the pursuit of arguments within the narrow boundaries of subdisci-
plines. Given this fragmentation, individual rather than collective
research agendas began to dominate within the discipline that had
become significantly more polycentric.

Pluralism of National Sociologies

The United States was given special attention because until the 1970s the
preeminence of sociology in its professional sphere throughout the world
may have been “even greater than the corresponding world influence of
most other American cultural efforts” (Gouldner 1970: 22).9 This hege-
mony can be explained not only through the simple fact that a
9
It is worth mentioning that intellectual leadership in the social sciences previously had shifted
from Europe to the United States (Goudsblom and Heilbron 2015).
 3 Sociology as an Academic Discipline 53

well-funded sociology became institutionalized earlier in U.S. depart-

ments than anywhere else, but also through the internationalization of
sociology through three channels: (1) U.S. sociological books were fre-
quently translated into other languages; (2) foreign nationals were given
scholarship aid to obtain training in the United States; and (3) major
U.S. foundations (e.g., Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie) or the U.S. gov-
ernment Fulbright program financed international research programs
(Hiller 1979).
Although an international stratification of sociology with the United
States at the top persists, albeit much less strident, defining subdivisions
within sociology became increasingly dictated by different nations (and
languages). One can speak of national sociologies in the sense that most
studies are conducted within one society, intellectual products are distin-
guishable in terms of the national culture, and sociologists often confine
professional contacts within national boundaries. A single illustration
may suffice here to demonstrate the importance of the nation state for the
shape of sociology. Armer (1987) classified journal articles in the 1985
volumes of the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of
Sociology according to whether the (empirical) study focused on the
Unites States only or whether social variations were at least referred to.
He found that an astonishing three-­quarters of all contributions were
localist.
Any comparison of two national sociologies reveals distinct research
traditions and cultural differences. Whereas in France, for example, the
role of the public intellectual is highly valued and the national prestige of
the humanities inhibited the spread of an empiricist scientific ethos
within the discipline, leading U.S. sociologists, on the other hand, tend
to refrain from political activities and more often use sophisticated statis-
tical methods in research (Lamont 2000). Finally, communication pat-
terns are nationally structured, which turns out to be not only because of
linguistic barriers. For example, Haller (2019: 354), based on citation
analysis, finds that about one-third of the references in journal articles by
British sociologists cite the work of scholars working in the United States,
while U.S. sociologists practically neglect their British colleagues.
Some nation-centeredness stems from the boundedness of knowledge
in the social sciences. While mathematical formulas easily travel through
54 P. Korom

time and space, nearly all sociological findings apply only to certain con-
texts. Moreover, it is mostly state agencies rather than international orga-
nizations that provide sociologists with data. Further, career opportunities
are also nationally structured. Besides language barriers, the so-called
Habilitation—a second, more advanced PhD thesis—acts as a barrier for
international candidates in Germany. In France, to give one more exam-
ple, one needs to pass the agrégation de l’enseignement supérieur to advance
from assistant to full professor, which is a lengthy process that practically
rules out foreigners not familiar with French bureaucracy. In general,
sociology is not internationalized in many countries because of the preva-
lence of endogamous recruitment that is based on local contacts rather
than on research and teaching performance (Afonso 2016).
That the recent development of sociology has been shaped both insti-
tutionally and intellectually by distinct national contexts is best illus-
trated by countries with various political and legislative entities that have
their own official language. In Belgium, an orientation toward French
sociology is dominant in the Walloon part, even as Flemish sociologists
forge close ties with the (partially English-speaking) sociological com-
munity in the Netherlands (Vanderstraeten and Louckx 2018). In
Canada, the internationalization of sociology in Quebec is driven mostly
by an increasing proportion of PhDs trained in France, while the propor-
tion of faculty trained in the United States is especially high in English-
dominated Canadian sociology (Warren 2014).
Further, notions of research excellence differ significantly between
national sociologies, as became evident from interviews that Hokka
(2019) conducted with leading Finnish and Swedish sociologists.
Although the former, for example, regard internationally refereed journal
articles in top-tier journals as the single best indicator of research excel-
lence, the latter disdain the “journal ranking business.”
Clearly, national contexts matter in sociology. Like everyday life that is
lived within separate containers marked by borders of nation-states, the
most common frame to sociology is the nation-state. Sociology as a dis-
cipline thus resembles the Tower of Babel, because it is subjected to two
centrifugal forces. First, with the disappearance of hegemonic schools,
 3 Sociology as an Academic Discipline 55

the discipline has become dominated by a wide variety of paradigms and

an ever-increasing number of specializations. Second, with sociology
remaining intimately rooted in the nation-state, national sociologies have
resisted becoming consolidated within a global sociology.

Contrasting Sociology with Economics

To understand sociology as a discipline, one not only can trace its devel-
opment over time but also compare it to other social science disciplines
(SSDs). The comparative framework chosen here focuses on the two least
similar “sister” disciplines: economics and sociology. Although it is diffi-
cult to establish when exactly both parted ways, it is well established that
at Harvard Talcott Parsons agreed on a form of pact with his colleagues
in the Economics Department that marked each other’s turf and was
loosely summarized as follows: “You, economists, study value; we, the
sociologists, will study values. You will have claim on the economy; we
will stake our claim on the social relations in which economies are embed-
ded” (Stark 2009: 7).
Sociology contracted after the 1970s, coinciding with the expansion of
economics, which became its chief competitor for students. When ratio-
nal choice economists, such as the Nobel laureate Gary Becker
(1930–2014), pushed the boundaries of the discipline outward, sociolo-
gists reacted to “economic imperialism” by establishing the new subdisci-
pline of economic sociology. To a limited extent, both disciplines study
the same phenomena (e.g., financial markets). They differ, however, in
their cognitive and social structure in significant ways. At least five dimen-
sions of difference can be distinguished.

SSDs with and without a Core

The intellectual core of a discipline consists of theories, methods, and

exemplars that are almost universally accepted by practitioners as both
important and true (Cole 1994). Through bibliometric studies it is
56 P. Korom

possible to identify the discipline’s core because researchers of very diverse

specializations are likely to draw on ideas from their discipline’s certified
knowledge. Based on co-citation data generated from the Social Science
Citation Index (SSCI),10 Diana Crane and Henry Small visualized cross-
linkages between specialties in sociology and economics and found the
intellectual structure of sociology to be much more diffuse. In contrast to
economics, the authors concluded that sociology lacked a “sizeable core
that incorporated a number of major subfields” (Crane and Small
1992: 222).

High- versus Low-Consensus SSDs

In his seminal work, The Intellectual and Social Organization of the

Sciences, Whitley (1984) stressed that disciplines differ with regard to the
uncertainty that exists over the “right” ways of doing, for example, eco-
nomics or sociology. He further distinguishes between “technical uncer­
tainty” (a degree of unpredictability and variability within a field regarding
the accepted methods to solve empirical problems) and “strategic uncer-
tainty” (consensus or lack of consensus on which problems are important
and, thus, on how to gain respect). Economics is a high-consensus SSD.
It is very much agreed that economics can, like physics, bring regulari-
ties to light by applying mathematics, and that it is not only a quantita-
tive science but also a “science of efficiency” in the use of scare sources
(Allais 1968). Sociology, in contrast, is a low-consensus SSD that is not
“able to argue with one voice about what is elementary” (Stinchcombe
1994: 80). There also exists within sociology a fundamental methodolog-
ical divide between qualitative and quantitative research (Schwemmer
and Wieczorek 2020).

10
The SSCI contains information from articles published in the most important high-impact schol-
arly journals in the social sciences. Each registered article is indexed, and the references in each
article are extracted, which allows researchers to conduct (co-)citation analysis.
 3 Sociology as an Academic Discipline 57

Hierarchical versus Non-Hierarchical SSDs

A high degree of consensus on what constitutes good science implies a

similarly high degree of centralized control over research outputs. The
relationship between both is, as Fourcade et al. (2015: 96) argue, an intri-
cate one: “[T]here might be more consensus because there is more con-
trol (for instance if a consistent view of what constitutes quality research
is promoted by those who control the top journals); conversely, control
might be more effective and enforceable because there is more consensus.”
In economics, having one’s articles published in top-tier journals such
as American Economic Review is key to obtaining tenure and promotion
and establishes one’s professional reputation. The editorial boards of the
top five journals are tightly controlled by the five most prestigious depart-
ments of the discipline, which serves to concentrate the power to shape
the profession within the hands of a select group of editors (Heckman
and Moktan 2020). Such a hierarchical control system does not exist in
sociology to the same extent. Publishing in prestigious journals such as
the American Journal of Sociology or American Sociological Review can cer-
tainly nurture one’s career, but is by no means a prerequisite for tenure.
Many sociologists either do not submit articles to journals at all or opt to
publish in specialist journals. Frequent publication in top journals turns
out to be not even a salient characteristic of the presidents of the American
Sociological Association (Platt 2016).

Self-Contained versus Open SSDs

Survey research reveals that U.S. economists (57%) disagree significantly

more than U.S. sociologists (25%) with the proposition that “in general,
interdisciplinary knowledge is better than knowledge obtained from a
single discipline” (Fourcade et al. 2015: 95). In addition, analyses of cita-
tion patterns of sociology’s flagship journals consistently reveal that the
discipline is fairly receptive to the literature of other SSDs, while econo-
mists pay less attention to other SSDs, with the notable exception of
political science (Angrist et al. 2020).
58 P. Korom

Journal versus Book-Based SSDs

While findings in economics are predominantly published in academic

journals, articles and books are equally important publication outlets in
sociology (Wilder and Walters 2020). Many sociologists favor a book
format because it allows authors to go into greater depth and further
elaborate their arguments. On the other hand, some evidence suggests
that published articles in peer-review journals have become more impor-
tant for academic careers in sociology (Lutter and Schröder 2016).
If one synthesizes all identified interdisciplinary differences, the cohe-
sive structure of economics and the fragmented character of sociology
clearly emerges. Sociology is marked by a series of unresolved tensions
between specialized sociologies with little common ground, national
sociologies, “journal people” and “book people”, “qualities” and “quanti-
ties”, that make sociologists tend to go their separate ways. In sociology’s
Tower of Babel, ideas spread within only loosely integrated national com-
munities or specialties, which is not only to be attributed to passive hur-
dles to transmission (e.g., language barriers) but also to a lack of consensus
about what constitutes “good” sociology.
The boundaries with other disciplines are porous, the core is weak, and
the publication market is diverse. To some extent, the French cultural
sociologist with a qualitative focus and the U.S. political sociologist who
specializes in survey research often interact with each other in much the
same way as the folk singer and the heavy metal musician do—they rec-
ognize the other as a sociologist (or a musician), but they do not play on
the same stage. With this background in mind, we can now turn to the
main subject of this book: sociology’s elite.

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 4
Identifying the Elite

At the Peak of the Eminence Hierarchy

There is abundant evidence that stratification exists within all scientific
disciplines—that is, the allocation of symbolic recognition in the form of
citations, honors, or prizes to individual scientists is highly unequal (Cole
and Cole 1973). Although “particularistic” elements (e.g., having power-
ful mentors) may have an impact (see Chap. 7), the work produced by
scientists, and the opinions of their work held by the scientific commu-
nity, are by far the most important determinants of a scientist’s status.
Most recent large-scale evidence, based on publication and longitudinal
career data of virtually all individuals working in Germany’s sociology
departments, buttresses the meritocratic character of stratification in sci-
ence. The study’s main finding is that the number of publications that
have undergone a double-blind peer review based on “universalistic” cri-
teria is the best predictor of tenure (Lutter and Schröder 2016).
At the very top of a discipline’s prestige hierarchy, one finds what I
have described in the preceding chapters as the “elite,” although the

Parts of this chapter were previously published in Korom (2018, 2020).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 65

P. Korom, Star Sociologists, Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13938-3_4
66 P. Korom

terminology used for referring to this small group of leading scholars var-
ies considerably in the literature. Some use the phrase “most eminent
scholars,” others speak of “academic celebrities” to emphasize the cult-
like aspects of academic prominence (Walsh and Lehmann 2019); others
again find “academic superstars” to be a more befitting term (Heesen
2017). To avoid terminological confusion, this chapter mostly uses the
“elite” concept that has a long, although checkered, history in sociology.
One research tradition in elite research goes back to Vilfredo Pareto
(1848–1923), who was the first to use the term for small groups of people
standing out from the overall population because of their superior
achievements.1 In the same vein, it is assumed here that the elite in sci-
ence are bestowed with prestige by knowledgeable peers because of their
(perceived) outstanding contributions to the body of disciplinary wis-
dom. My focus is not on the “power elite” within academia so much as
on those scholars whose work finds broad and enthusiastic acceptance
within the scientific community and those who constitute the “pres-
tige elite.”
There is an important relational aspect to prestige (Goode 1978): what
has been achieved also has to be recognized by others as achievement.
Prestige rests in distinction in the eyes of others. Any prize winner, for
example, depends on the judgment of peers concerning the quality of his
or her work. High prestige is, therefore, only achieved if granted by (sig-
nificant) others, and for as long as they continue to do so. Elite status in
the sciences is not set in stone but changes with the ebb and flow of col-
legial recognition. Although prestige in academia hinges in general on the
ongoing evaluation of peers and the wider community, it does so more in
some disciplines compared to others. The variations inversely relate to a
discipline’s certainty of being considered a “science,” as Rebecca Goldstein
points out:

1
Pareto suggested a highly formal elite definition: “Let us assume that in every branch of human
activity each individual is given an index which stands as a sign of his capacity, very much the way
grades are given in the various subjects in examinations in school. The highest type of lawyer, for
instance, will be given 10. The man who does not get a client will be given [a] 1—reserving zero for
the man who is an out-and-out idiot. … So let us make a class of the people who have the highest
indices in their branch of activity, and to that class give the name … of élite” (Pareto 1935: 1423).
 4 Identifying the Elite 67

Thus at one end of the spectrum occupied by sociologists and professors of

literature, where there is uncertainty as to how to discover the facts, the
nature of the facts to be discovered, and whether indeed there are any facts
at all, all attention is focused on one’s peers, whose regard is the sole crite-
rion for professional success. Great pains are taken in the development of
the impressive persona. … At the other end, where, as the mathematicians
themselves are fond of pointing out, “a proof is a proof,” no concern need
be given to making oneself acceptable to others; and as a rule none what-
soever is given (Goldstein 1983: 202).

At least three characteristics distinguish the few members of the pres-

tige elite from the vast majority in science: First, their writings attract a
disproportionate amount of attention from their peers. Attention can be
quantified in various ways (e.g., citations of their publications or awards
received—that is, high peer attention). Second, their contributed key
ideas do not quickly fall into oblivion but are discussed by at least more
than one generation of scholars (i.e., enduring peer attention). Third,
success can result in multiple forms of acknowledgment: elite scholars are
not only highly cited but are also given honors such as memberships in
different academies (i.e. recognition within the wider academic
community).
Methodologies used for identifying prestige elites in sociology must take
into proper account the special character of sociology, as discussed in the
previous chapter. Sociology recognizes two main modes of scholarly pro-
duction: journal articles and books (primarily monographs). Sociologists’
preferences with regard to what they read and where they publish are often
based on their beliefs concerning which intellectual enterprise they con-
sider sociology to belong to: journals are considered as having a “scientific”
orientation and the monographic literature as having a “humanistic” one.
Yet they coexist in sociology and both need to be considered.
Further, there is no single interpretation of the discipline’s mission,
much less a shared theoretical approach to, or a dominant empirical para-
digm for, the study of the social. Therefore, sociology clusters into various
specialties that very likely harbor their own elite. What is more, the dis-
cipline clearly develops into nation-specific knowledge communities, with
few scholars succeeding in bridging the internal divides. These divides at
68 P. Korom

the core of the discipline very likely have an impact on the structure of
the elite within it and, therefore, need to be considered in any citation
study trying to identify prestige elites in sociology.
In the next section I present two approaches to citation analysis that
are not intended to rank scholars hierarchically but rather to detect elite
status. Numbers are treated as orders of magnitude. Similar to the
approach adopted by economists who select the “top 1%” in the wealth
distribution to identify “the rich” (Piketty 2014), my intention is to
locate the “prestige elite” by exploring the topmost stratum of citation
distributions.

 wo Methodological Pathways
T
for Identifying Elites
 itations in Sociology—The Worst Proxy for Scholarly
C
Recognition, Except for All the Others2

Differences in the contributions to the advancement of knowledge are dif-

ficult to judge because there exist divergent theoretical views on which cri-
teria should be applied to identify outstanding achievements (Deutsch et al.
1986). Peer review has, since the earliest studies of eminence, been the pri-
mary method for identifying exceptional scientific achievements (see Chap.
2) and it remains the main method of determining the allocation of the
most prestigious awards. Competent peers decide, for example, to whom
the Nobel Prize should be given. However, peer judgments are not always
readily available. Rather than approaching experts to provide lists of the
most widely recognized workers in their field, eminence researchers often
rely on these awards to act as indicators of outstanding accomplishment.
In the case of sociology, there are a considerable number of interna-
tional awards (e.g., the European Amalfi Prize, the Holberg Prize, and the
Princess of Asturias Award). Although the selection is always made by a
jury that includes distinguished social scientists, the nomination

2
This is a variation of Winston Churchill’s dictum that “democracy is the worst system of govern-
ment, except for all the others.”
 4 Identifying the Elite 69

processes, prize amounts, award categories (e.g., life work, past research),
and boundaries of eligibility vary enormously (Schögler 2015). Given the
fact that no prize has yet reached the elevated reputation and public
awareness of the Nobel Prize (in economics), or the Canadian Fields
Medal (in mathematics), and that most sociological awards have been
established relatively recently, these manifestations of scholarly recogni-
tion do not appear to be the best indicator of elite status in sociology.
Another high honor that a scientist can receive is being elected a mem-
ber of the Academy of Sciences (Cao 2004). Academies can function
simply as a means of awarding honorifics (e.g., Royal Society of London,
National Academy of Sciences), or honorifics in combination with
research activity (e.g., French Academy of Sciences). In general, only
academy members can submit formal nominations and candidates are
admitted only after having passed a vetting process. Given the high num-
ber of social science fellows and foreign or honorary members in acade-
mies around the world, however, being elected to one or many may only
serve as another imprecise indication of belonging to the academic elite.
The only remaining indicator for outstanding quality is citation counts.
What do citations exactly stand for?3 Citation counts are essentially a mea-
sure of the value of scientific work: “A highly cited work is one that has
been found to be useful by a relatively large number of people” (Garfield
1979: 246). Furthermore, citations inform us about how much attention
is paid to a scholar’s work. Finally, citations can report about the perceived
“quality” of a researcher’s work if it is empirically shown that citations cor-
relate with other types of scientific recognition (Gingras 2016). Even
though it is the case that research is cited for other reasons than quality,
this argument becomes difficult to maintain when leveled at citation elites
(Parker et al. 2010). Extraordinarily high citation counts have frequently
been shown to go hand in hand with the high prestige granted by peers.
The citation-based approaches developed subsequently are tailored to
the idiosyncratic character of sociology described in Chap. 3. The first
considers various genres of literature and concentrates on two shorter
time windows—the 1970s and 2010s. The second covers a longer time

3
For a comprehensive overview of the various motivations of citers, see Bornmann and
Daniel (2008).
70 P. Korom

span (1970–2010) and uses as research material journals that stand for
unique national or specialist sociologies. In a final step, I validate all
results by, among other things, cross-checking whether the identified elite
members received at least one prestigious award or were elected to at least
one academy.

 tudy I: Eminence in the Monographic

S
and Journal Literature

This first study builds on a newly generated text quantity of approxi-

mately 49,000 pages which encompasses four different genres of litera-
ture: encyclopedias, textbooks, handbooks, and journals. There are
basically two rationales underlying the selection of text sources for Study
I: First, given the fact that sociologists “attend to and cite leading books
at even higher rates than they cite leading articles” (Sullivan 1994: 171),
more weight was given to monographs than to journal literature. Second,
extraordinarily high citation counts in each genre of literature indicate
distinct variants of eminence. Citations in textbooks and encyclopedias
that provide authoritative statements on the discipline reveal whether
someone has contributed “certified knowledge” that has been approved
by at least one generation of scholars.
Using Stephen Cole’s nomenclature (Cole 1983), one can further
argue that encyclopedias and textbooks stand for the “core” (i.e., fully
evaluated ideas) while journals represent the “research frontiers” of a dis-
cipline (where not all contributions will turn out to be significant).
Handbooks are situated in between the core and various research fron-
tiers. Given this variety, the design of Study I covers the relatively stable
core of a discipline as well as the (inner and outer) periphery marked by
a more rapid turnover of dominant ideas. The text corpus used consists of
10 textbooks, two handbooks, two encyclopedias, and five “top” journals
from either the 1970s or the 2010s (see Table 4.1).
The following provides an overview of the data sources I reviewed:

• Journals: The present sample includes two “major” journals of U.S. soci-
ology, American Sociological Review (ASR) and American Journal of
Sociology (AJS), and one slightly less highly ranked, Social Forces (SF).
 4 Identifying the Elite 71

Table 4.1 The text corpus for Study I, consisting of textbooks, handbooks and
encyclopedias
1970s 2010s
Textbooks
Bierstedt, Robert. (1974). The Social Giddens, Anthony, and Philip
Order: An Introduction to Sociology. W. Sutton. (2009). Sociology.
New York: McGraw-Hill. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Broom, Leonard, and Philip Selznick. Henslin, James M. (2015). Essentials of
(1973). Principles of Sociology. A Sociology: A Down-To-Earth
Text with Adapted Readings. Approach. Boston: Pearson.
New York: Harper & Row. Kendall, Diana E. (2011). Sociology in
Horton, Paul B., and Chester L. Hunt. Our Times. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/
(1964). Sociology. New York: Cengage Learning.
McGraw-Hill. Macionis, John J. (2012). Sociology.
Inkeles, Alex. (1964). What Is Boston: Pearson.
Sociology? An Introduction to the Schaefer, Richard T. (2013). Sociology:
Discipline and Profession. A Brief Introduction. Dubuque, Iowa:
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. McGraw-Hill.
Lenski, Gerhard. (1970). Human
Societies: A Macrolevel Introduction
to Society. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Handbooks
Faris, Robert E. L. (1964). Handbook of Calhoun, Craig J., Chris Rojek, and
Modern Sociology. Chicago: Rand Bryan S. Turner, eds. (2005). The SAGE
McNally and Co. Handbook of Sociology. London:
Sage Publications.
Encyclopedias
Sills, David L., ed. (1968). International Wright, James D., ed. (2015).
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. International Encyclopedia of the
New York: Macmillan and Free Press. Social & Behavioral Sciences.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Also considered were the British Journal of Sociology (BJS) and the
European Journal of Sociology (EJS), two European generalist journals,
which already were firmly established during the 1970s. For each jour-
nal, every research article published in all volumes for the years 1970
and 2010 was considered—a total of 995 articles.4
• Textbooks: As it is impossible to select the most widely used textbooks
based on sales figures because of a lack of information, this study

4
Excluded from the analysis were journal contributions that do not adhere to the usual standards
of referencing, such as correspondence, editorials, obituaries, and book reviews.
72 P. Korom

s­ettled on an alternative proxy for sales. The digital tool WorldCat

specifies the number of libraries in which a certain textbook is avail-
able; this became the main selection criterion here.
• Handbooks: Contributors to the SAGE Handbook of Sociology (Calhoun
et al. 2005) are clearly more international than the mostly U.S. authors
who provided chapters in the Handbook of Modern Sociology (Faris
1964). It is, however, far from clear whether this indicates a bias
because sociological research during the 1970s was in fact predomi-
nantly conducted by scholars from the United States (MacLeod 1970).
• Encyclopedias: As encyclopedias devoted purely to sociology, such as
the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (2007), have become available
only comparatively recently, it was decided to include the 1968 and
2015 editions of the International Encyclopedia of the Social (and
Behavioral) Sciences, both of which cover all the social sciences. The
encyclopedic material alone constitutes a large text corpus. Sills (1968)
contains 1716 articles by 1505 contributors, while Wright (2015) fea-
tures approximately 4000 entries by 4945 contributors.5

Data were collected from bibliographies (not the body of the text)
without the use of automated retrieval routines.6 Depending on the style
of referencing, this study also considered footnotes or endnotes. Thus,
what is counted are not citations but the number of references to a given
author in all bibliographies. The data were weighted in consideration of
multi-authorship. Single authors were given one point, two joint authors
one-half of a point each, three authors one-third of a point each, and so
on.7 Adding up reference counts across sources from an unbalanced text
corpus would give disproportionate weight to encyclopedias containing
considerably more bibliographies than other sources (e.g., journals).
Therefore, scores were normalized for all scholars for each source
5
Biographical entries were excluded because they would have heavily biased the results.
6
There are several reasons for why it makes little sense to apply automated retrieval routines. First,
referenced names (e.g., Hauser, Wright) may refer to different individuals. Second, the reference
styles differ hugely across time and text sources, which makes even flexible reference search strate-
gies error-prone. In general, working with bibliographies rather than text citations allows for more
rapid identification of authors.
7
This weighting procedure was not applied again in Study II as a comparison between weighted
and unweighted data revealed only minor differences overall.
 4 Identifying the Elite 73

s­eparately. The range of reference counts varies within each literature

genre (e.g., handbooks) between 0 and 1, while reference counts aggre-
gated across all four literature genres vary between 0 and 4.
To identify the prestige elite, sociologists were ranked in Fig. 4.1 by
reference scores aggregated across the four different literature genres. The
figure suggests that Talcott Parsons was still by far the most eminent soci-
ologist during the 1970s. Max Weber and Robert K. Merton ranked sec-
ond and third, respectively, and were closely followed by Émile Durkheim
and Seymour M. Lipset. James S. Coleman, Kingsley Davis, and Peter
M. Blau were marked by similar outstandingly high scores. The ranking
of these top-ranked scholars changes slightly if unweighted citation data
are considered. Disregarding coauthors, Lipset ranks second and Merton
third. Additionally, Otis D. Duncan and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who were
both known for empirical contributions written jointly with collabora-
tors, enter the uppermost ranks.
During the 2010s, Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, Anthony
Giddens, Manuel Castells, Michel Foucault, and Charles Tilly joined the
small group of highly influential scholars. Apart from Émile Durkheim
and Max Weber, only two twentieth-century scholars (i.e., Merton and
Parsons) remained among the top 10 between 1970 and 2010 and only
about one-fifth remained among the top 50 scholars. It also becomes
obvious, however, that the idea of a whole new generation of eminent
scholars supplanting an older one is not the case in sociology. Although
the average “half-life” of the prestige elite in sociology appears to be
shorter than half a century, there are also some scholars (e.g., Weber or
Parsons) whose eminence was, and is, enduring.
Another major insight that can be gleaned from the ranking is the
meteoric rise of Bourdieu and the precipitate decline, amounting to a
quasi-eclipse, of Lipset. Both extraordinary cases deserve further investi-
gation and are therefore analyzed in depth in Chap. 6. What is further
noteworthy is that if one does not introduce any arbitrary convention as
to whom to count as a sociologist but considers all scholars even if they
might not call themselves sociologists, then a significant number of
anthropologists (e.g., George P. Murdock during the 1970s) or philoso-
phers (e.g., Jürgen Habermas during the 2010s) turn up in the rankings,
not to mention psychoanalysts (e.g. Sigmund Freud, ranked tenth in the
74 P. Korom

Fig. 4.1 Top-ranked 50 sociologists in the 1970s and 2010s, according to aggre-
gated reference scores. Early theorists who died before World War I, such as
Herbert Spencer or Karl Marx, were excluded from the survey
 4 Identifying the Elite 75

1970s). This rather unexpected finding clearly underlines the disciplinary

openness of sociology.
In Fig. 4.2 the aggregate score is decomposed by literature genres. All
scores are assigned to text source-specific quintiles. To give two illustra-
tive examples: If the four different literature genres are analyzed, Talcott
Parsons ranked first in each separate analysis and thus always occupied a
rank situated in the first quintile of the four citation distributions ana-
lyzed. During the 1970s Kingsley Davis, on the other hand, shows two
(of four) citation scores that are assigned to the second quintile in the
encyclopedia and journal-specific distribution.
For the 1970s, the figure points to the comparatively low citation
scores of anthropologists (e.g., George Murdock, Clyde Kluckhohn,
Margaret Mead, and Alfred Kroeber) in the journal-specific distribution.
This finding suggests that peer-reviewed journal articles tended to pro-
mote primarily disciplinary knowledge at a time when non-sociologists
exerted considerable influence on the discipline. The opposite can be seen
in the case of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Sills
1968), which covered the state of knowledge in many different disci-
plines, among them anthropology and economics. Further, it is also
interesting to note that sociologists (e.g., Paul DiMaggio, Andrew Abbott,
even Pierre Bourdieu) have not (yet) achieved textbook eminence. This
finding supports the argument that sociology textbooks of the time fea-
tured theoretical perspectives on the discipline that have tended to over-
look the work of leading contemporary key thinkers (Manza et al. 2010).
In line with expectations, it is especially the uppermost ranked scholars
who were likely to score high in all four literature genres.
If one delves deeper, some further interesting results emerge. Although
Parsons was clearly one of the most influential sociologists during the
1970s across the four literature genres, Merton was more present in ency-
clopedias and journals during the 2010s. How can this be explained?
Merton is. like Foucault, a theorist whose influence extended (and contin-
ues to extend) far beyond sociology. As has been shown previously, some of
Merton’s concepts were commonly applied in different social science
­disciplines such as communications research, urban studies, industrial rela-
tions, and linguistics (Garfield 1980). The multidisciplinary International
Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Wright 2015)
76 P. Korom

Fig. 4.2 Top-ranked 50 sociologists: Disaggregated and weighted references

score. Quintiles were calculated separately for each literature genre
 4 Identifying the Elite 77

precisely captures this widespread influence. The decreasing importance

of Parsons in the world of journals, on the other hand, stemmed mostly
from the empirical orientation of contributing authors. Currently, some
journal articles still base their empirical research on some of Merton’s
concepts, but almost none of them refers to Parsons, which simply reflects
that mainstream sociology prefers data over theory.

 tudy II: Eminence in the Pluralistic World

S
of Academic Journals

All analyses of sociology, regardless of whether they are personal accounts

of how (eminent) researchers experienced the internal structure of sociol-
ogy (e.g., Lipset 1994) or statistical analyses of citation patterns (e.g.,
Crane and Small 1992), reveal the picture of a highly fragmented disci-
pline. Put metaphorically:

Much like viewing mountain ranges from a single peak on a cold foggy
morning, we can see other peaks but not the valleys connecting them. As
such, while we know our own mountain well (having worked hard to scale
it), we have little sense of the general topography that links our mountains
to the broader sociological landscape (Moody and Light 2006: 67).

Given this background, it appears warranted to investigate whether

there are scholars whose ideas disperse across the many internal divides.
Past research has not considered sociology’s balkanized intellectual struc-
ture at all, preferring to measure the overall citation impact of scholars
(e.g., Cronin et al. 1997; Oromaner 1980). However, are aggregated cita-
tion counts really the best available proxy for eminence?
The second study’s focus was not on the depth but on the width of the
imprint scholars leave on the discipline. Even though the most cited
authors are likely to have impacted the largest number of different fields
within the discipline, one does not necessarily imply the other. High-­
impact scholars may dominate a few core specialties, where the bulk of
sociologists work, but may not be read in most of the peripheral
78 P. Korom

specialties. In turn, the impact of some most-cited scholars may be lim-

ited to a few dominant national sociologies (e.g., U.S. sociology).
To illustrate the breadth of a scholar’s intellectual imprint on the field
of sociology, a global view is complemented by more disaggregated ones
that trace impacts on different levels and allow for questions such as: Is a
scholar’s impact high across the French-, German-, and Spanish-speaking
sociologies? Does a scholar impact not only theorists but also empirical
researchers? The prestige elite identified in the second study design con-
sists, thus, not necessarily of only the most-cited scholars but also schol-
ars who receive the broadest attention and whose ideas diffuse the most
broadly within sociology.
Given sociology’s fractured structure, it is likely one will find various
types of citation elites. Because the discipline and its practitioners do not
share characteristics that provide a sense of unity, coherence, and com-
mon tradition, sociology clusters into a variety of specialties that each
harbors its own elite. For example, Travis Hirschi, the most-cited scholar
in criminology throughout the world, turns out to be a sociologist who
has not significantly impacted the discipline’s many other specialties. I
therefore refer to scholars whose impact spans only a few specialties
within sociology as the “specialist elite.”
Furthermore, sociology develops effectively within nation-specific
knowledge communities. A consequence of the predominance of nation-­
states is that each nation has a distinct elite, which is best demonstrated
by the case of Niklas Luhmann. He continues to be considered one of the
most distinguished sociologists in Germany. Although his work has been
translated into English, few of his ideas circulate, for example, within
U.S. sociology. Thus, it is not surprising that a sociologist in the United
States starts his review of Luhmann’s monumental book, Theory and
Society, with the ironic remark: “Who now reads Luhmann?” (Khan
2014: 49). A nation’s most cited scholars will henceforth be referred to as
its “national elite.” Yet stark internal divisions can be overcome, as illus-
trated by the examples of Bourdieu and Merton. Bourdieusian and
Mertonian paradigms commonly are used in very different (national)
fields of sociology. These scholars with global influence have been dubbed
“core elite.”
 4 Identifying the Elite 79

Study II focuses on 42 journals that either represent a national or a

specialist sociology (see Table 4.2). Of the selected journals, 20 stand for
a national sociology because they were published by a national associa-
tion (e.g., Polish Sociological Review), are an association’s official flagship
journal (e.g. Sociology) or feature articles in national languages (e.g.,
Zeitschrift für Soziologie). In many cases, at least two of these three criteria
apply. Another 22 selected journals stand for specialist sociologies because
their official mission statements invite authors to send in contributions to
a special subfield of sociology.
To give two examples: According to the official homepages, the journal
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility features “the highest, most
innovative research on issues of social inequality,” and the editors of
Gender and Society emphasize that the journal is dedicated to “gender and
gendered processes in interactions, organizations, societies, and global
and transnational spaces.” As national sociologies (e.g., German sociol-
ogy) or specialized fields of sociology (e.g., sociology of gender) are inter-
nally heterogeneous, it was decided to select two journals that, if jointly
analyzed, allowed for a broader investigation. Cultural sociology, for
example, is covered by considering the journals Cultural Sociology and
Poetics. The former leans toward qualitative approaches and the latter
toward quantitative approaches.
As can be seen from Table 4.2, the selected journals cover different
time spans. Whenever possible, the analysis goes back to the 1970s. The
complete journal content covered not only includes research papers but
also other content (e.g., book reviews or corrections). In total, the analy-
sis considers 82,045 documents. To analyze the journals the computer-
ized Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)8 was used; it is a database that
does not contain the full text of journal articles but rather, among other
things, the complete list of references contained therein. These reference
lists were also used in Study I. It is, however, an oddity of the SSCI that
only the first author of a cited publication is identified.
For elite identification purposes, Study II searched for the most refer-
enced authors in all 82,045 documents considered. The creation of any
final ranking of top scholars necessitates choosing references that separate

8
The Social Sciences Citation Index can be accessed online through the Web of Science website.
80 P. Korom

Table 4.2 Forty-two journals representing either a national or a specialist

sociology
Country or Coverage Coverage No. of
specialism Type Journal first year last year documents
Australia National Australian and 1970 1997 2111
New Zealand
Journal of
Sociology
Australia National Journal of 1998 2019 1238
Sociology
Canada National Canadian Journal 1975 2019 2882
of Sociology
Canada National Canadian Review 2008 2019 374
of Sociology
China National Chinese 2011 2019 147
Sociological
Review
China National Chinese Sociology 1970 2011 1021
and
Anthropology
France National Revue Française de 1970 2019 3443
Sociologie
France National Sociologie du 1970 2019 3160
Travail
Germany National Kölner Zeitschrift 1972 2019 6170
für Soziologie
und
Sozialpsychologie
Germany National Zeitschrift für 1972 2019 1472
Soziologie
Hispanosphere National Revista Española 2008 2019 523
de
Investigaciones
Sociológicas
Hispanosphere National Revista 2007 2019 564
Internacional de
Sociología
Nordic National Acta Sociologica 1970 2019 2267
countries
Nordic National Sociologisk 1974 2019 1788
countries Forskning
Poland National Polish Sociological 2005 2019 496
Review
Poland National Studia 2008 2012 246
Socjologiczne

(continued)
 4 Identifying the Elite 81

Table 4.2 (continued)

Country or Coverage Coverage No. of
specialism Type Journal first year last year documents
United National British Journal of 1970 2019 4819
Kingdom Sociology
United National Sociology 1970 2019 6128
Kingdom
USA National American Journal 1970 2019 11055
of Sociology
USA National American 1970 2019 3939
Sociological
Review
Comparative Specialist Comparative 1970 2019 2495
soc. Studies in Society
and History
Comparative Specialist International 1970 2019 1935
soc. Journal of
Comparative
Sociology
Culture Specialist Cultural Sociology 2007 2019 592
Culture Specialist Poetics 1992 2019 422
Economics Specialist Economy and 1972 2019 1350
Society
Economics Specialist Socio-Economic 2009 2019 357
Review
Gender Specialist Gender & Society 1987 2019 2669
Gender Specialist Men and 2006 2019 760
Masculinities
Methodology Specialist Sociological 1985 2019 386
Methodology
Methodology Specialist Sociological 1973 2019 1174
Methods &
Research
Politics Specialist Journal of Political 1973 2006 1314
& Military
Sociology
Politics Specialist Politics & Society 1970 2019 973
Qualititative Specialist Qualitative 2008 2019 370
Sociology
Qualititative Specialist Symbolic 1984 2019 1305
Interaction

(continued)
82 P. Korom

Table 4.2 (continued)

Country or Coverage Coverage No. of
specialism Type Journal first year last year documents
Religion Specialist Journal for 1970 2019 2790
Scientific Study
of Religion
Religion Specialist Sociology of 1993 2019 1523
Religion
Stratification Specialist European 1993 2019 1202
Sociological
Review
Stratification Specialist Research in Social 2010 2019 329
Stratification and
Mobility
Theory Specialist Sociological Theory 1994 2019 498
Theory Specialist Theory and Society 1974 2019 1791
Work Specialist Work and 1982 2019 1320
Occupations
Work Specialist Work, Employment 1991 2019 2647
and Society

the elite from other widely referenced scholars. Any cut-off point is nec-
essarily an arbitrary choice. It was decided to include 70 scholars and thus
to settle on a threshold of 898 references. To facilitate the reading of
Table 4.3, the following example is given: In the reference sections of the
analysed documents, the cited author name “Bourdieu, P.” or “Bourdieu,
Pierre” or “Bourdieu” appears 9853 times.
To better understand whether the mere quantity of references indicates
the breadth of diffusion of a scholar’s ideas across the discipline, a three-­
dimensional cube was used. The x-dimension of the cube reflects the
number of top quintile (top 20%) memberships in national sociologies,
the y-dimension indicates the number of top quintile (top 20%) mem-
berships in specialist sociologies, and the z-axis represents the total num-
ber of references in the 42 sociology journals considered. All 70 scholars
 4 Identifying the Elite 83

Table 4.3 Most referenced authors in 42 selected sociology journals

Rank Author References Rank Author References
1 Bourdieu, Pierre 9853 36 Meyer, John W. 1439
2 Weber, Max 6135 37 McAdam, Doug 1408
3 Parsons, Talcott 4011 38 Inglehart, Ronald F. 1407
4 Durkheim, Emile 3939 39 Lamont, Michèle 1369
5 Goffman, Erving 3870 40 Abbott, Andrew 1333
6 Foucault, Michel 3773 41 Burawoy, Michael 1319
7 Giddens, Anthony 3722 42 Skocpol, Theda 1298
8 Marx, Karl 3203 43 Breen, Richard 1297
9 Luhmann, Niklas 3058 44 Hochschild, Arlie R. 1267
10 Habermas, Jürgen 3038 45 Boudon, Raymond 1262
11 Coleman, James S. 2606 46 Elias, Norbert 1257
12 Goldthorpe, 2522 47 Wright, Erik O. 1257
John H.
13 Tilly, Charles 2509 48 Goodman, Leo A. 1253
14 Blau, Peter M. 2444 49 Burt, Ronald S. 1201
15 Beck, Ulrich 2402 50 Gouldner, Alvin W. 1178
16 Merton, Robert K. 2370 51 Kalleberg, Arne L. 1148
17 DiMaggio, Paul J. 2204 52 Castells, Manuel 1112
18 Granovetter, 2103 53 Blalock, Hubert M. 1105
Mark S.
19 Becker, Gary S. 2055 54 Wallerstein, 1100
Immanuel M.
20 Connell, 2029 55 Massey, Douglas S. 1067
Raewyn W.
21 Collins, Randall 1838 56 Callon, Michel 1060
22 Latour, Bruno 1829 57 Geertz, Clifford 1049
23 Berger, Peter L. 1827 58 Mills, C. Wright 1040
24 Lipset, Seymour M. 1827 59 Snow, David A. 1038
25 Simmel, Georg 1785 60 Elster, Jon 1029
26 Esping-Andersen, 1653 61 England, Paula S. 1029
Gøsta
27 Stark, Rodney 1638 62 Garfinkel, Harold 982
28 Becker, Howard S. 1614 63 Rose, Nikolas 979
29 Duncan, Otis D. 1558 64 Hall, Stuart 975
30 Portes, Alejandro 1544 65 Hauser, Robert M. 945
31 Alexander, 1537 66 Reskin, Barbara F. 941
Jeffrey C.
32 Bauman, Zygmunt 1494 67 Mead, George H. 911
33 Putnam, Robert D. 1451 68 Blumer, Herbert 908
34 Blossfeld, 1449 69 Boltanski, Luc 902
Hans-Peter
35 Erikson, Robert 1445 70 Korpi, Walter 898
84 P. Korom

Fig. 4.3 A three-dimensional depiction of the prestige elite. The arabic numbers
stand for authors as follows—1 for Pierre Bourdieu, 2 for Max Weber, 3 for Talcott
Parsons, and so forth (see Table 4.3). Pierre Bourdieu is located at the upper-right
corner because of an extraordinarily high number of references and the fact that
he belongs to the top 20% in 10 national sociologies and 9 (out of 11) specialist
sociologies

were projected onto this cube. The numbers in Fig. 4.3 stand for a schol-
ar’s rank in the overall distribution of references (see Table 4.3).
It can be inferred from the figure that the mere quantity of references
is a rough proxy for the breadth of reception of an author’s work, espe-
cially if the author belongs to one of the most-cited scholars’ category.
The relationship is, however, far from perfect, which is best demonstrated
by the prominent cases of Talcott Parsons (rank 3) and John Goldthorpe
(rank 12). One would expect to find both in the cube’s upper-right cor-
ner given their overall impact. They are rather, however, situated in the
middle (Parsons) and lower-left corner (Goldthorpe). This suggests that
Parsons has lost his leading status in many specialties while Goldthorpe
continues to be accorded a high degree of recognition in only a few
nations (e.g., Nordic countries, U.K.) and specialties (i.e., Stratification,
 4 Identifying the Elite 85

Work). The lower the rank, the more unpredictable the position of a
scholar in the cube. Paul DiMaggio and Raewyn Connell, for example,
were ranked seventeenth and twentieth, respectively, in the overall distri-
bution of references. Nevertheless, in the cube they have marginal posi-
tions because both are marked by a narrow reception in sociology as
compared to other top scholars.
Figure 4.3 further reveals that only 14 scholars have achieved a global
and discipline-wide impact (“core elite”), four have succeeded in over-
coming national boundaries (“national elite”), and the ideas of another
11 have gained recognition in many diverse subfields of the discipline
(“specialist elite”) (see Table 4.4). Aside from this handful of scholars,
the impact of all other influential thinkers in sociology tends to stay
limited in scope; national and interdisciplinary boundaries are rarely
transcended.
For each elite category, Table 4.4 lists one of the scholar’s publications
that is the most referenced in all 42 sociology journals. Jointly considered
are all editions and translations of this key contribution. The table reveals
that the percentage of references made to the most influential contribu-
tion varies greatly between 7.8% and 41%. In the case of Gøsta Esping-­
Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism accounts for 41% of all
references; in the case of Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity for 7.8%
of all references. Despite his multifaceted works, Robert K. Merton is
more often cited for his Social Theory and Social Structure than Karl Marx
is cited for Capital. Some authors (e.g., Arlie R. Hochschild and Robert
Putnam) are well-known in various national and specialist sociologies
mainly because of one single publication success (e.g., The Managed
Heart, Bowling Alone). The ideas of others (e.g., Anthony Giddens,
Talcott Parsons, and Charles Tilly) have spread through multiple
contributions.
If one compares the rankings of top scholars gained in the two citation
studies conducted, it becomes apparent that 7 out of a total of the 29
scholars listed in Table 4.4 do not occur in the final list constructed in
Study I. Nearly all of these scholars (e.g., Robert D. Putnam, Howard
S. Becker, and Gøsta Esping-Andersen) belong to the group of “specialist
elites” who do not reach wide audiences within sociology, but rather
heavily impact few research communities within sociology. Most likely
86 P. Korom

Table 4.4 Books by elite scholars that have received the widest diffusion. In the
far-right column the number of references is given as a share (in %) of all refer-
ences of a given author
Author Most referenced work Type %
Core elite
Marx, Karl Capital/Das Kapital Monograph 30.9
Weber, Max Economy and Society / Wirtschaft und Monograph 30.0
Gesellschaft
Beck, Ulrich Risk Society / Risikogesellschaft Monograph 29.3
Becker, Gary S. Human Capital Monograph 26.0
Coleman, James Foundations of Social Theory Monograph 25.2
S.
Durkheim, Division of Labour in Society / De la Monograph 21.2
Emile division du travail social
Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action / Theorie Monograph 19.6
Jürgen des kommunikativen Handelns
Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Monograph 19.4
Erving
Foucault, Discipline and Punish / Surveiller et punir Monograph 16.9
Michel
Latour, Bruno Science in Action / La science en action Monograph 16.8
Bourdieu, Pierre Distinction / La distinction Monograph 16.7
Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity Monograph 16.0
Anthony
Inglehart, The Silent Revolution Monograph 15.8
Ronald F.
Parsons, Talcott The Social System Monograph 13.6
National elite
Merton, Robert Social Theory and Social Structure Monograph 36.4
K.
Granovetter, Economic Action and Social Structure: The Article 23.2
Mark S. Problem of Embeddedness
Luhmann, Social Systems / Soziale Systeme Monograph 10.2
Niklas
Bauman, Liquid Modernity Monograph 7.8
Zygmunt
Specialist elite
Esping-­ The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism Monograph 41.0
Andersen,
Gøsta
Putnam Robert Bowling Alone Monograph 37.2
D.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart Monograph 33.8
Arlie R.

(continued)
 4 Identifying the Elite 87

Table 4.4 (continued)

Author Most referenced work Type %
Blau, Peter M. The American Occupational Structure Monograph 32.7
Skocpol, Theda States and Social Revolution Monograph 28.9
Snow, David A. Social Networks and Social Movements: A Article 24.9
Microstructural Approach to Differential
Recruitment
Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent Monograph 23.3
Michael
Becker, Howard Art Worlds Monograph 22.9
S.
Tilly, Charles From Mobilization to Revolution Monograph 15.8
Collins, Randall The Credential Society Monograph 14.1
Portes, Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications Article 11.9
Alejandro in Modern Sociology

this difference in outcomes can be explained through the heavy reliance

of Study I on monographic literature making up the “core” of sociology,
and thus partially neglecting some specialist literature, for example,
Putnam on democracy, Becker on deviance and symbolic interactionism,
and Esping-Andersen on the welfare state. Do these differences in the
eminence rankings imply that the tools used fail to reliably distinguish
the elite from the rest?
I argue here that this is not the case because the social world does not
possess many regularities, so it obviously does not consist of atomic units
with interactions that obey various rules. Thus, it is simply unrealistic to
expect any instrument for “elite” detection to work as reliably as a Geiger
counter that never fails to detect radiation. If we think of Academy mem-
berships as indicators of outstanding academic achievements, there are
always some scholars who are worthy of membership but not yet elected—
a phenomenon that has become known as the “41st chair” (Zuckerman
1978). This name derives from the French Academy of Sciences’ practice
of restricting the number of members to only 40 scientists at any time.
The human world, it appears, is rather messy and, in my view, scholarship
should embrace such messiness rather than seek to bring artificial order to
it. What one can do, however, is to ensure the soundness of the “detection
tool” by studying, among other things, whether it really captures prestige
conferred on scholars by their peers.
88 P. Korom

Validating the Methodology

 o Citations Correlate with Prizes and Memberships
D
in Academies?

It is crucial to know whether citation counts correlate with other mani-

festations of outstanding peer recognition. Figure 4.4 displays whether
scholars identified as elite in Study I were recognized for their achieve-
ments in other ways. It can be inferred that most of the selected scholars
received at least one prestigious award and were elected to at least one
academy. If one simply considers the number of awards, then Charles
Tilly appears to be the most distinguished contemporary sociologist,
whereas Robert K. Merton gained the most memberships in honorary
societies.
A few eminent scholars (e.g., Louis Wirth, C. Wright Mills, Alvin
Gouldner, Michel Foucault) received no formal recognition of their
achievements in their lifetime. It is difficult to provide a wholly satisfac-
tory answer as to why this is the case. Wirth and Foucault died at a young
age, while Mills and Gouldner had real struggles with the sociological
establishment. Among contemporary scholars, George Ritzer and Arlie
Hochschild, who have retired only recently, have also yet to receive for-
mal recognition.
A possible explanation is that none of these scholars mentored students
who became important adherents or developers of their mentor’s ideas.
Given these insights, it is easy to rebut one recurrent criticism in the litera-
ture that citations are weak indicators of the extent to which outstanding
achievement is recognized. At least if citations are measured, as was the
case in Study I, then one surely generates information that reliably corre-
lates with peer evaluations of outstanding scientific achievements.

Are Textbook Citations Special?

So far, I have operated on the assumption that citations in various genres

of literature are informative about different aspects of eminence. Citations
in textbooks, it has been argued, might inform one about the extent to
 4 Identifying the Elite 89

Fig. 4.4 Top-ranked 64 sociologists in order of year of birth: Awards and mem-
berships in honorary societies. Included are scholars who were alive at the time of
conducting the survey as well as those who have died since 1950
90 P. Korom

which someone contributed core knowledge to the discipline. Like the

pudding that one must eat to know what’s inside, textbook citations must
be studied in their own right to understand what they represent. It has
been a common assertion that “…introductory textbook coverage reflects
the degree to which textbook writers believe the work of a scientist is
important”; and this is found to be an oversimplification of the nature of
introductory texts (Diener et al. 2014: 21). In his article “Confessions of
a Textbook Writer,” James McConnell (1978: 167) points to five differ-
ent audiences (i.e., students, instructors, peers, colleagues, and publish-
ers) that “make very different and often conflicting demands on the
writers. It is well known that textbook writers and editors closely observe
the textbook market and that textbooks go through extensive peer review.
Some even argue that intrusive market pressures and editorial control
make ‘books write authors’” (Agger 1989).
Another difficulty inherent in the writing of textbooks is that authors
are not only supposed to present the well-established fundamentals of the
discipline, but also to take account of recent work in a rapidly moving set
of research problems about which there is substantial disagreement. Such
new developments provide them with room to differ from previous text-
books, despite the predominance of uniform market strategies. Thus, a
priori, what a textbook citation represents is not fully clear and needs to
be established empirically.
To address this issue, I decided to select five of the most widely used
textbooks from the 1970s, and a further five from the 2010s, which are
representative of one of the three disciplines in the Anglo-Saxon world:
economics, psychology, and sociology.9 This comparative research design
allows one to probe whether eminence resulting from citation in text-
books has universal features that do not vary between disciplines. The
selection of books was not based on sales figures but on information
retrieved from WorldCat, which lists libraries worldwide where a given
monograph is available. Working from the author indices, the number of
textbook pages on which scholars10 were referenced was determined.

9
For a list of all books included, see Korom (2018).
10
Excluded were non-scientists and other persons who have not contributed to the respective
discipline.
 4 Identifying the Elite 91

As can be seen from Table 4.5, sociology, economics, and psychology

textbooks differ only slightly in extent, but very considerably in terms of
how they are organized. Between the 1970s and the 2010s the average
extent in psychology remained virtually unchanged at around 730 pages,
whereas in sociology it increased from 510 to 750 pages, and in econom-
ics from 620 to 800 pages. The typical organization into chapters was by
far the most fine-grained in economics, with an average of 34 chapters in
2010. The most-pronounced interdisciplinary differences were observed
regarding citations. In scholarly work, citations are sparse in economics;
in both the 1970s and 2010s samples, fewer than 500 scholars are listed
in the index, suggesting a strong tendency to discuss economic models
without any reference to their intellectual origin.11 The “person index”
has become substantially longer in psychology textbooks (average of

Table 4.5 Comparison of sociology, economics and psychology textbooks in the

1970s and 2010s
Sociology Economics Psychology
1970s 2010s 1970s 2010s 1970s 2010s
Textbooks
No. of textbooks 5 5 5 5 5 5
Length of textbook, pages 507.8 747 622.8 800.6 728.4 724.8
(average)
No. of chapters (average) 13.4 19.6 34.6 33.8 20.8 15.8
Person index
No. of scholars listed in the index 629.6 1388.8 429 475 595.6 3456
(average)
No. of references to scholars in the 1371.4 2076.8 820 812 934.8 4343
index (average)
Bottom 50%: share of citations 19.2 29.1 21.3 26.3 26.0 32.3
Mid 40%: share of citations 39.9 32.0 33.0 36.7 33.3 35.1
Top 10%: share of citations 40.9 38.9 45.7 52.5 40.7 34.8
Most cited scholars
Cut-off point selection 9 8 3 3 7 8
No. of most cited scholars 91 102 46 54 94 102

11
Paul A. Samuelson’s Economics stands out because of the comparatively substantial number of
references. Other economics textbooks studied for the survey refer to fewer than 100 economists.
92 P. Korom

3456 scholars listed) than those in sociology (average of 1389 scholars

listed).
Psychologists also tend to reference the scholars listed in the appendix
more often, which is indicative of the encyclopedic nature of the key
textbooks available in the discipline. In sociology and economics, schol-
ars with the highest number of pages on which they were cited (“top
10%” in terms of page count) received 40–45% of all references.
Contemporary psychology textbooks stand out insofar as references
found in the name index are more equally distributed between the bot-
tom 50%, the middle 40%, and the top 10% of listed scholars.
With the identification of scientific eminence the prime concern, I
selected scholars with the highest page score, settling on two different
inclusion criteria. First, the scholar must be mentioned in at least two out
of the five textbooks. Second, a cut-off point was set in such a way that it
was possible to compare an almost equal number of scholars across time
in each discipline, thereby excluding a minimum number of scholars who
were, in general, ranked among the most eminent representatives of their
discipline. These decisions meant there were various numbers of top-ref-
erenced scholars in each discipline. Even by putting the page count as low
as three pages in economics, it was still possible to include only 54 emi-
nent economists for the 2010s.
To probe the meanings of textbook citations for the most-referenced
authors, associations with other “variables” were tested, which stand for
productivity and/or publication impact, certified eminence, and aca-
demic prestige. In what follows I explain how these variables were
generated.

• Google Scholar citations: Google Scholar covers print and academic

journals, conference proceedings, books, theses, and other outlets
available from major academic publishers, professional societies, or
government agencies. Its citation data are likely to provide a valid mea-
sure of impact within (and somewhat outside) academia, especially for
a book-heavy field like sociology.12 Overall citations were used as well
as the number of citations given to the most-cited publication.

12
To analyze Google Scholar citation data, the Harzing’s Publish or Perish (PoP) software was used;
see: https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish.
 4 Identifying the Elite 93

• H-index (Google Scholar-based): The h-index indicates the number of

“papers” by a scholar that have been cited at least h times. Thus, an h
of 40 indicates that a scholar has produced 40 papers cited at least 40
times. The h-index is arguably the best indicator for assessing the fre-
quency and consistency with which authors have produced work that
has had an impact on scholarship.
• Eponyms: Eponymy is defined by Merton (1957: 642–43) as “[the]
practice of affixing the name of the scientist to all or part of what he
has found. … In this way, scientists leave their signatures indelibly in
history; their names enter[ed] into all the scientific languages of the
world.” Eponyms function as implicit citations of contributions by
certain scholars who are widely recognized and have stood the test of
time, at least in part. In most cases a law, theory, hypothesis, effect, or
principle is named after the first scholar to have discovered it (e.g.,
Pavlovian conditioning, Schumpeterian entrepreneur). For psychol-
ogy and economics, eponymous dictionaries (Roeckelein 1998; Segura
and Rodríguez Braun 2004) were used to count the eponyms referring
to one of the selected scholars. In sociology, eponyms are rare and can
be disregarded.
• Encyclopedia entries: Entries in encyclopedias are another manifesta-
tion of “certified eminence.” Editors of key encyclopedias in their
respective disciplines typically devote entries only to those sociologists,
economists, and psychologists who are perceived to have deeply influ-
enced the development of the discipline and whose influence on intel-
lectual life is, at least to some degree, persistent. The sources used here
are the Encyclopedia Britannica, three discipline-specific encyclopedias
(Durlauf and Blume 2008; Kazdin 2000; Ritzer 2007), and a book
titled Social Science Quotations: Who Said What, When and Where
(SSQ)—a supplement of the International Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences—which contains a broad selection of quotations from schol-
ars of authority and consequence (Sills and Merton 2000). One can
find in SSQ quotations from sociology, economics, and psychology
scholars alike, not only who wrote well but whose ideas also had a
formative impact on social thought. In short, the book is about “mem-
orable ideas memorably expressed” (Sills and Merton 1992: 168).
94 P. Korom

• Elected president: Being elected president of the American Sociological

Association (ASA), the American Economic Association (AEA), or the
American Psychological Association (APA) confers prestige on the
scholar and is a clear sign that his or her work has merit. ASA presi-
dents also are characterized by distinguished academic records (Platt
2016). In economics, the number of journal publications is an impor-
tant determinant of election to president (Diamond and Toth 2007).
• Honorary awards: Another important source of prestige in academia,
these are, symbolically, an important part of the academic reward sys-
tem. Considered here are the Nobel Prize for economics, the
“W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award” for
sociology, and the “APA Award for Distinguished Scientific
Contributions” for psychology. Obviously, there is no equivalent to
the Nobel Prize in the two other disciplines. In the case of both the Du
Bois and APA awards, however, it might be said that the awarding
committees established an elaborate system to ensure that the award
goes only to deserving scholars.

To explore the most important correlates of textbook references, sev-

eral intercorrelations are explored in a basic correlation matrix. The first
vertical row in Fig. 4.5 presents correlations between the textbook page
count and all other variables. As can be seen from the matrix, the correla-
tion with the number of quotations in SSQ is the highest in all three
disciplines. In psychology, the correlation is as high as 0.8, suggesting
that the two variables measure very similar concepts. Further, it can seen
that for sociology and psychology, the textbook page count relates to
Google Scholar citation measures (i.e., h-index, number of total cita-
tions). For economics, however, the correlation with the h-index is so low
that one must conclude that there is no substantive overlap.
If one looks at indicators of certified eminence (e.g., number of
eponyms or encyclopedia entries), correlations of between 0.3 and 0.4 in
all disciplines can be seen. In contrast, indicators of institutionalized
merit-based academic prestige (e.g., the presidency of the ASA, AEA, or
APA) are only loosely associated with indicators for textbook eminence.
Perhaps the most striking result is that in economics textbook eminence
Fig. 4.5 Correlates of textbook references. All values in the correlation matrices
are Pearson correlation coefficients. AEA/APA/ASA: American Associations of
Economics, Psychology, and Sociology; p. president; SSQ: Social Science Quotations;
Ency. Brit.: Encyclopedia Britannica; other ency.: other discipline-specific
encylopedias
96 P. Korom

and the scientific productivity and impact of a researcher, as measured by

the h-index, are almost unrelated. To give some examples: Milton
Friedman and Paul A. Samuelson are the only economists who exhibit
both a large textbook page count and a high Google Scholar-based h-
index in both the 1970 and 2010 textbook samples. Most other econo-
mists score high on one or the other dimension, not on both.
The Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, for exam-
ple, have h-indexes above 140 but are mentioned in fewer than 10 text-
book pages. In contrast, central bankers (e.g., Paul Volcker and Alan
Greenspan) are mentioned on more than 10 pages, while having a com-
paratively low h-index. In sociology, there are multiple people (e.g.,
Merton, Parsons, Foucault, Berger, and Goffman) who score extremely
high on both dimensions. Their exceptionally high h-index is partially
explained by the broad reception of their work in several academic disci-
plines. Martin Seligman and Robert Plomin are examples of productive
psychologists who are much cited in the “journal world” and whose work
also finds recognition in introductory textbooks.
Apparently, the meaning of textbook eminence, to some degree, can
differ across disciplines. Nevertheless, one common factor prevails. Across
all three disciplines, quotations by scholars cited in SSQ were the key cor-
relates of textbook eminence. The editors of SSQ included authors who
were consequential and memorable insofar as they “have been quoted
over the generations, entering into the collective memory of social scien-
tists and at times diffusing into popular thought” (Sills and Merton 2000:
xvi). Eponyms, together with entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica, show
similar associational meanings, albeit at lower levels. Thus, as assumed,
high citation counts in textbooks stand for having contributed certified
knowledge that is considered to have lasted and contributes to the stock
of theories and empirical findings that together constitute “the core” of
the discipline. The design of the study was based on the assumption that
citations in various literature genres can signify different things; it appears
to have been broadly correct given the evidence presented here.
 4 Identifying the Elite 97

 o Journals Mirror National

D
and Specialist Sociologies?

In contrast to other bibliometric studies that involve simple rank order-

ing, Study II examined two dimensions of variation: the range of sub-
stantive subfields in which an author’s work is frequently cited, and the
range of national contexts in which the work is cited. This study design
was developed to consider the two most important divisions in sociology.
But does it really make sense to use specialist journals that are supposed
to represent national sociologies or different specialties to understand
which scholars dominate, for example, French sociology or sociologi-
cal theory?
To answer this question, I checked for the easiest form of validity,
where one only applies a superficial assessment of whether the study mea-
sures what it is supposed to measure (“face validity”). One can also think
of it as being similar to “face value.” Going through Table 4.6, which lists
the most-referenced authors, one finds few surprises, which speaks in
favor of the method applied. The German sociologist Hans-Peter
Blossfeld, a leading scholar in labor market and data-panel data research,
is, for example, the top-referenced author in ESR, that represents social
stratification research in Study II; and Niklas Luhmann leads the list for
the KZfSS, a flagship journal of German sociology. On the other hand, it
is also apparent that each journal stands for a mixture of things. To give
just one example: ASR tends not only to feature U.S. sociologists but also
data-driven articles; this explains why Otis D. Duncan turned out to be
the second most-­cited author. To partially remedy this apparent “bias,”
Study II always included two journals for measuring one type of sociology.
Potentially, one could almost endlessly continue to evaluate the various
aspects of the measurement tools used, although the cross-check analyses
have so far not revealed any finding that contradicts their validity. What
one must keep in mind, however, is that indicators of eminence are
extremely time-sensitive, which explains why the rankings differ between
Studies I and II. Cross-sectional citation studies will most likely always
find some different top-cited scholars than studies that cover longer
time-episodes.
98 P. Korom

Table 4.6 Top referenced authors in diverse journals

ASR KZfSS RFSOC ESR SOCIRELI IJCS
Blau, Peter Luhmann, Bourdieu, Blossfeld, Stark, Wallerstein,
M. Niklas Pierre Hans-­Peter Rodney Immanuel
M.
Duncan, Otis Weber, Durkheim, Breen, Wuthnow, Inglehart,
D. Max Emile Richard Robert Ronald F.
Parsons, Esser, Boudon, Erikson, Smith, Meyer, John
Talcott Harmut Raymond Robert Christian W.
Weber, Max Parsons, Weber, Max Esping-­ Berger, Peter Jorgenson,
Talcott Andersen, L. Andrew K.
Gøsta
Coleman, Bourdieu, Boltanski, Becker, Gary Warner, Weber, Max
James S. Pierre Luc S. R. Stephen
Tilly, Charles
Blossfeld, Goffman, Goldthorpe, Weber, Max Inkeles, Alex
Hans-­ Erving John H.
Peter
Lipset, Habermas, Halbwachs, Bourdieu, Ammerman, Chase-Dunn,
Seymour M. Jürgen Maurice Pierre Nancy T. Christopher
DiMaggio, König, Crozier, Ganzeboom, Chaves, Mark Portes,
Paul J. René Michel Harry B. G. Alejandro
Bourdieu, Durkheim, Coleman, Inglehart, Ellison, Eisenstadt,
Pierre Emile James S. Ronald F. Christopher Shmuel N.
G.
Merton, Merton, Becker, Kalmijn, Bellah, Lipset,
Robert K. Robert K. Howard S. Matthijs Robert N. Seymour M.
Durkheim, Diekmann, Duru-­Bellat, Mayer, Karl Finke, Roger Bollen,
Emile Andreas Marie Ulrich Kenneth A.
Blalock, Mayer, Dubet, Coleman, Roof, Wade Parsons,
Hubert M. Karl Francois James S. C. Talcott
Ulrich
Massey, Simmel, Merton, Müller, Greeley, Ragin,
Douglas S. Georg Robert K. Walter Andrew M. Charles C.
Hauser, Opp, Baudelot, Hakim, Iannaccone, Semyonov,
Robert M. Karl-­ Christian Catherine Laurence R. Moshe
Dieter
Portes, Coleman, Parsons, Shavit, Yossi Sherkat, Esping-­
Alejandro James S. Talcott Darren E. Andersen,
Gøsta
McAdam, Becker, Reynaud, Putnam, Yang, Smith David
Doug Gary S. Jean-­ Robert D. Fenggang H.
Daniel
Granovetter, Müller, Touraine, Blau, Peter Marti, Marx, Karl
Mark S. Walter Alain M. Gerardo
Meyer, John Beck, Lazega, Boudon, Durkheim, Tilly, Charles
W. Ulrich Emmanuel Raymond Emile

(continued)
 4 Identifying the Elite 99

Table 4.6 (continued)

ASR KZfSS RFSOC ESR SOCIRELI IJCS

Hannan, Blau, Peter Simmel, Sørensen, Hunter, Frank,
Michael T. M. Georg Aage B. James D. Andrew G.
Note: Authors are listed in descending order of references. ASR stands for
American Sociological Review, KZfSS for Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und
Sozialpsychologie, RFSOC for Revue française de sociologie, ESR for European
Sociological Review, SOCIREL for Sociology of Religion and IJCS for International
Journal of Comparative Sociology

This has to do with the very nature of eminence that fluctuates over
time. As we have seen, there are, for example, scholars whose eminence is
relatively short-lived (<40 years). Longitudinal citation studies capture
both the citation highs and lows of these scholars, which leads overall to
comparatively low citation counts. If one opts for enduring peer recogni-
tion as the core criterion of eminence, longitudinal citation data obvi-
ously should be preferred over cross-sectional data. The analyses in all
subsequent chapters draw equally on the eminence rankings of Studies
I and II.

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 5
Collective Biographies and Career
Pathways

From (Auto-)Biography to Prosopography

No different from other professional elites, sociologists tend to reflect on
their careers after retiring from employment; some even write lengthy life
accounts or cooperate with mostly younger colleagues interested in
exploring how educational experiences or encounters with other intel-
lectuals shaped their lives. (Auto-)biographies allow for gleaning insights
one cannot gain from such highly formalized biographical documents as
curricula vitae, which have become a key part of contemporary academic
life and tend to construct linear life stories (Miller and Morgan 1993). A
valuable lesson that one can take away from reading in-depth biographi-
cal reflections is, for example, that elite scholars have always had multiple
career options available to them.
A good example in this instance is the first formative career steps of the
U.S. sociologist George C. Homans (1910–1989), whose career was
marked by a lifelong affiliation with Harvard University—an Ivy League
institution known to have more students coming from families in the top

Parts of this chapter were previously published in Korom (2020).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 103
P. Korom, Star Sociologists, Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13938-3_5
104 P. Korom

1% of the income distribution than from the entire bottom half of the
socioeconomic structure (Chetty et al. 2020). Born to a family of wealthy
lawyers and attorneys, Homans majored in English at Harvard and was
invited to become one of the very few junior members of Harvard’s
Society of Fellows, which provided the most talented students with the
opportunity to continue their studies completely unencumbered by for-
mal degree requirements.
What is less well known is that Homans’ application to the society
initially had been turned down. Only after the publication of a mono-
graph on the economist Vilfredo Pareto, coauthored with Charles
P. Curtis (1891–1959), a senior fellow of the society, was Homans elected
to two terms as a junior fellow, which allowed him to conduct fully
funded research during the worst years of the Great Depression (Treviño
2006). Given Homans’ subsequent outstanding academic record, his
employment in the academic year 1945–1946 as a tenured associate pro-
fessor at Harvard appeared to be a logical career move within a merito-
cratic promotion system. As Homans openly confessed in his
autobiography, however, there were several elements in play that he had
no control over and that very likely influenced the selection committee’s
hiring decision:

I suppose I got by on the strength of my two published books, on Pareto

and on English villagers, and a few published articles. I may well have been
helped by the accidental death in the U.S. Army in Germany of my chief
contemporary rival at Harvard, Edward Y. (“Ted”) Hartshorne. And if
Robert Merton at Columbia had been willing to come, I should have sunk
without a trace. I did not consider myself the ablest person in the world
available for the post—though I did not count myself any slouch either—
but if others did, that was their affair (Homans 2013: 293).

Although luck is important to career decisions in other professional

fields as well, some agree with Max Weber that there is hardly any other
professional career on earth where chance plays such a significant role as
in science (Weber 1997: 132). There is no reason to assume that elite
careers in academia are less impacted by chance than those of average
 5 Collective Biographies and Career Pathways 105

professors because eminence involves both discovery (e.g., of hitherto

unknown social phenomena) and recognition, which both depend on
chance elements of their own (Turner and Chubin 1979). One need only
recall the successful reception of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity
(1999), which established his global reputation.
When Bauman started to theorize about contemporary societies, he
was deeply troubled by self-doubt and used to describe himself as a mere
recycler of other people’s thought (Wagner 2020: 342). Rather unexpect-
edly for him, the conceptual invention of liquid modernity turned into a
major theoretical approach applied to many “liquid” phenomena in vari-
ous fields by specialists from diverse branches of the social sciences. It is
likely that if Baumann had formulated his alternative to the concept of
postmodernity in a less linguistically innovative way, his work would not
have become known throughout the world.
Chance is not, however, the only element involved in elite careers.
What is supported by the (auto-)biographical literature of eminent scien-
tists as well as by cutting-edge research into creativity, is that professional
success depends to a considerable extent on the social context in which
scientists operate (Lebuda and Csikszentmihalyi 2019). Among other
things, they need mentors and an audience that judges their intellectual
contributions. They also need to acquire from colleagues tacit knowledge
on presentation and timing. The extent to which eminent sociologists
immerse themselves in the activities of their departments and faculties is
clear from their memoirs. A single example suffices here to illustrate what
it means to be surrounded by dedicated colleagues. Around the time
when the Sociology department at Columbia produced several outstand-
ing sociologists, including Peter Blau and James Coleman, Seymour
M. Lipset perceived the social ties between students to be extremely strong:

In fact, if students of my generation had any complaint it was that one was
too visible as a student, that the faculty knew exactly what you were doing
or not doing. One had a sense that if one decided not to take a seminar or
not to work with someone that this was an act which the individual con-
cerned would know about right away (Lipset 1970: 148).
106 P. Korom

To James Coleman, the social system of the department was not only
dominated by two professors—Robert K. Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld—
but also resembled a self-contained sociological microcosm:

[To] the graduate student, there was no discipline of sociology outside

Columbia. Instead we saw a self-confidence, a looking inward coupled
with inattention to the outside … the world of sociology was confined to
Columbia (Coleman 1990: 79).

Elite academic life, it appears, is crucially shaped by the inner life of

departments, which is known to vary hugely across universities. Joseph
Hermanowicz has suggested that departments not be differentiated based
on established classifiers such as faculty size, admission selectivity, or
tuition, but on cultural similarities and differences. This has led him to
distinguish between elites, pluralists, and communitarians in a “cultural
continuum of academic worlds” (Hermanowicz 2005: 50). Elite depart-
ments like that of Columbia are governed by an imperative that dictates
academic behavior, with scholars bound together by the shared belief that
individuals are only as good as their last work.
Middle-tier departments are more pluralist insofar as they expect
scholars to straddle research and teaching, while low-tier departments are
content to demand good departmental citizenship and are less demand-
ing of scientific excellence. In any event, anyone working in one of these
three types of institution has most likely experienced that failure to deliver
to expectations is socially sanctioned. In the worst case, a scholar is denied
tenure or promotion.
Departments do not, it would appear, randomly produce academic
elites: studies on the social backgrounds of professors reveal that they
come overwhelmingly from privileged families and thus tend to share a
common starting position (see, for example, Nakhaie and Brym 1999).
To find out whether the elite has a common profile and how it changed
over time, one needs, however, to adopt a collective biographical
approach often referred to as “prosopography” (Charle 2015). In proso-
pographical research, the portrait of the individual is only the intermedi-
ate aim while the ultimate purpose is to collect and analyze data on a
group of actors to find common characteristics (e.g., dominant career
 5 Collective Biographies and Career Pathways 107

trajectories) that transcend individual lives, which situates the approach

somewhere between biography and sociology.
Prosopography is viewed as a powerful tool to explain change in human
societies, particularly when it relates to politics. In the eyes of its expo-
nents, “the purpose of prosopography is to make sense of political action,
to help explain ideological or cultural change, to identify social reality,
and to describe and analyze with precision the structure of society and
the degree and the nature of the movements within it” (Stone 1971: 47).
Initially widely applied by political historians to analyze the social and
economic affiliations of political groupings or to uncover the deeper
interests lying beneath the rhetoric of politics, the research tool was
adopted by other specialties (e.g., science studies).
Most notably in sociology, Merton based his lengthy article,
“Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England”
(Merton 1938), on a careful analysis of about 6000 biographies con-
tained in the Dictionary of National Biography. This meticulous study
of collective traits of the founding members of the Royal Society
brought to light that most scientists were Puritans, which inspired
Merton to formulate the theoretical claim of a mutual dependence
based on the ethos of Puritanism and the ethos of science (Enebakk
2007). What makes the study emblematic for the field of prosopo-
graphical research is that the “merely personal” fades into the back-
ground, with the key objective being to understand not only a larger
group of scientists but also the emergence of science as a cognitive,
embedded collective enterprise. Similarly, the sections that follow will
describe the development of individuals in ways that allow one to
grasp not only the changing configurations of sociology’s elite but also
some peculiarities of the discipline itself.

Elites in Transition
Having identified members of the past and present prestige elite in soci-
ology, one can attempt to tackle the most central questions: What char-
acterizes the elite most? How has it changed over time? To construct a
collective portrait, I have relied on official curricula vitae posted on
108 P. Korom

personal homepages,1 the American National Biographies, biographical

entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the International Encyclopedia
of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, as well as on historical and current
editions of Marquis Who’s Who in the United States.
Other important sources were “biographical notes” contained in the
University of Chicago Library guides to the archival papers of eminent
sociologists, online biographies on the authors of 50 classics in sociology
(available in the Austrian Archive for the History of Sociology),2 “bio-
graphical memoirs” of scholars edited by the National Academy of
Sciences (e.g., Scott and Calhoun 2004), profiles of American Sociological
Association (ASA) presidents and obituaries in the ASA outlet Footnotes,
as well as biographies (e.g., Heer 2005) and autobiographies (e.g.,
Sassen 2005).
The variables coded are the occupational status of fathers; gender;
migrant status; country of birth; country of residence; main disciplinary
background; university from which the elite member received a PhD;
presidency of the ASA; Guggenheim Fellowship and fellowships at vari-
ous institutes for advanced study; and university affiliations (full profes-
sorships only).3 It is perhaps also helpful to concretely demonstrate how
biographical information was processed. The Spanish sociologist Manuel
Castells was chosen here for illustrative purposes.
Castells escaped Franco’s Spain to study in France, where, in 1967, he
obtained a PhD in sociology from the Université de Paris, having already
obtained a doctorate from the University of Madrid.4 Castells subse-
quently held the following positions: Assistant Professor, University of

1
It is necessary to bear in mind that CVs are often seen as a means of maximizing credibility (Dietz
et al. 2000). In my experience, elite scholars mostly view the CV simply as a historical record for
chronicling outputs and activities.
2
https://agso.uni-graz.at/.
3
To systematically verify presidencies and fellowships, official homepages/search engines of the
ASA and of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation were consulted. The Institute for Advanced
Studies at Princeton University, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at
Stanford University, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, the Institute for Advanced Study,
Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study list all past
and present fellows online.
4
Castells assigns greater importance to the PhD gained in France. His thesis, which described loca-
tion strategies on industrial firms in the Paris region, helped establish his career as one of the found-
ers of the New Urban Sociology.
 5 Collective Biographies and Career Pathways 109

Paris (1967–1969); Assistant Professor, University of Montreal

(1969–1970); Associate Professor, École des hautes études en sciences
sociales (EHESS) (1970–1979); Professor, University of California,
Berkeley (1979–2003); Professor, University of Southern California
(2003–). The succession of professorships through which Castells has
moved shows that he has spent most of his working life in the United States.
Academic institutions at which Castells worked full time as a full pro-
fessor (i.e., University of California, Berkeley; University of Southern
California) are included in the dataset while other universities which
hosted him as an associate or assistant professor are not (see discussion on
p. 115 and in footnote 7). Here, he is considered a migrant because he
was born and raised in Spain and moved to the United States. In the pres-
ent definition, being a migrant implies that someone relocated his entire
life permanently, which, for example, does not hold true for the Munich-
based Ulrich Beck, who was merely an inveterate traveler holding a visit-
ing post at the London School of Economics.
In an interview, Castells indicated that both of his parents were civil
servants with the Spanish Ministry of Finance and that his father was a
finance inspector (Castells and Ince 2003: 7). According to the Historical
International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO) (Leeuwen
et al. 2002), the code that fits best is “Auditor (1–10.20),” which belongs
to the minor group of “Accountants (1–1)” and the major group of “pro-
fessional, technical, and related workers (0/1).” HISCO integrates about
1000 occupational titles and is a highly differentiated international clas-
sification. Occupations are classified by economic sector and workplace
tasks. Workers in group 0/1, for example, conduct research and apply
scientific knowledge to the solution of a variety of technological, eco-
nomic, social, and industrial problems and perform other professional,
technical, artistic, and related functions in fields such as the physical and
natural sciences, engineering, law, and medicine.
To shed light on the main characteristics of sociology’s elite and on
how it changed between 1970s and 2010s, I drew on the eminence roster
of Study I in the previous chapter and applied simple cross-tabulation
(see Table 5.1). The overall picture that emerges is one of a U.S.-dominated
elite during the 1970s that became considerably more Europeanized by
the 2010s. It is worth mentioning, however, that about 20% of the 1970s
110 P. Korom

Table 5.1 Comparison of the characteristics of the elite in sociology in the 1970s
and 2010s. The statistics relate to scholars alive at the time of writing and those
who have died since 1950
1970s 2010s
Father’s occupation (HISCO major group)
Professional, technical, and related workers (0/1) 32.6 30.4
Administrative and managerial workers (2) 4.7 17.4
Clerical and related workers (3) 4.7 6.5
Sales workers (4) 20.9 17.4
Service workers (5) 2.3 2.2
Agricultural, animal husbandry, and forestry 9.3 4.3
workers (6)
Production and related workers (7/8/9) 11.6 15.2
No information available 14.0 6.5
Male 97.7 93.5
Migrant 16.3 21.7
Country of birth
Austria 4.7 4.3
Canada 2.3 2.2
Cuba 2.2
France 8.7
Germany 4.7 8.7
Netherlands 2.2
Poland 2.3 2.2
Russia 2.3
Spain 2.2
United Kingdom 2.3 8.7
United States 81.4 58.7
Country of residence
France 8.7
Germany 4.3
United Kingdom 2.3 10.9
United States 97.7 76.1
Main disciplinary background
Anthropology 18.6 2.2
Economics 2.3 2.2
Geography 2.2
Philosophy 6.5
Political science 4.7 2.2
Sociology 74.4 84.8
ASA President 46.5 26.1
Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship 35.7 41.3
Received PhD from …
Cambridge University 2.3 4.4
Columbia University 20.9 13.0

(continued)
 5 Collective Biographies and Career Pathways 111

Table 5.1 (continued)

1970s 2010s
Cornell University 4.3
École Normale Supérieure 4.3
Harvard University 20.9 13.0
University of California, Berkeley 6.5
University of Chicago 34.9 10.9
University of Wisconsin–Madison 4.3
Yale University 4.7 2.2
Other universities 16.3 41,4
Research Fellow at …
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral 41.9 45.7
Sciences, Stanford
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 4.7 17.4
Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin 2.3 6.5
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study 4.7 8.7
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study 8.7
Full professorships at …
Cambridge University 2.0
Columbia University 10.4 10.1
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales 1.0
Harvard University 10.4 4.0
Johns Hopkins University 1.3 5.1
London School of Economics 2.0
Oxford University 1.3 2.0
Princeton University 1.3 4.0
Stanford University 3.9 4.0
Universität Frankfurt 2.0
Université de Paris 2.0
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor 3.9 2.0
University of California, Berkeley 9.1 6.1
University of Chicago 14.3 8.1
University of Pennsylvania 1.3 3.0
University of Wisconsin–Madison 1.3
Yale University 5.2 2.0
Other universities 36.3 40.6
Number of full professorships per scholar
No professorship 2.3
1 professorship 46.5 37.5
2 professorships 30.2 25.0
3 professorships 11.6 12.5
4 professorships 9.3 25.0
Number of scholars considered 43 46
112 P. Korom

elite (e.g., Peter Blau, Reinhard Bendix, and Pitirim Sorokin) migrated
from Austria, Germany, and Russia to the United States. In the same
vein, the number of presidents of U.S.-dominated professional organiza-
tions (e.g., ASA) among the elite has decreased over time.
Although the top sociologists of the 1970s mostly received their PhDs
from Columbia, Harvard, or Chicago, such a unique breeding ground no
longer exists for contemporary leading scholars. One can observe that
during the 2010s the elite was substantially more scattered across various
universities. In general, international elite institutions, such as Cambridge
University or EHESS, host more elite members than do average academic
institutions.
Between the 1970s and 2010s the academic elite became more mobile,
with about one-quarter of elite members switching professorships up to
four times, which suggests, among other things, that scholars have
become more able to leave their posts and take their talents elsewhere
(perhaps for better remuneration or a reduction in administrative duties).
Looking at the disciplinary background, it emerges that even though
anthropologists frequently belonged to the elite during the 1970s, one
finds philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and Judith Butler joining
the top rank during the 2010s, which indicates the continued openness
of sociology to scholars from other disciplines.5
Across time, one can observe that elites benefit from sponsorship sys-
tems promoting academic excellence; the proportion of scholars consid-
ered here as the elite in 2010 who were awarded the prestigious
Guggenheim Foundation fellowship was as high as 40% (see Table 5.1).
Another career contingency is that academic elites tend to spend some
time at institutes for advanced study, where they are surrounded by
researchers rather than students and, therefore, are freed from the usual
faculty commitments. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences (CASBS) appears to be the most important intellectual hub.

5
Of course, this depends on the definitional approach adopted. Here, scholars are considered to be
members of the discipline if they have contributed to its core corpus, even if they are inclined not
to label themselves as sociologists.
 5 Collective Biographies and Career Pathways 113

Even though it is impossible to unambiguously determine the social

origin of individual elite members in every instance, in part because of
some missing data on paternal occupation, it nevertheless revealed that
their background is clearly more educated upper middle class (e.g., jurists
or university professors) than economic upper middle class (e.g., senior
managers). A substantial proportion of elite members, however, also had
fathers with commercial or blue-collar occupations. The proportion of
scholars with fathers in HISCO major groups 6–9 (i.e., agricultural and
industrial workers) has remained level at around 20%, which suggests
that the prestige elite in sociology continues to be open to scholars from
diverse backgrounds and that “social climbers” such as Seymour M. Lipset
and Pierre Bourdieu are by no means exceptions.
On a more general level, one can conclude that the changing elite con-
figuration mirrors major intradisciplinary developments. The 1970s
mark an interregnum in American sociology (Wiley 1985): The unitary
axis of Harvard–Columbia functionalists6 increasingly lost its hegemonic
status and was already somewhat outperformed by increasingly powerful
departments such as Berkeley that were open to diverse theoretical and
methodological approaches (Burawoy and VanAntwerpen 2001). Yet, it
was difficult to envision sociology’s future.
Only with time did it become apparent that sociology was about to
enter a new stage in its development, with a considerable array of theo-
retical orientations, albeit without any single one being recognized as
dominant. Correspondingly, while the elite structure identified during
the 1970s is still marked by the slowly fading influence of the three hege-
monic schools in sociology—Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard—the
elite characteristics observed during the 2010s demonstrate that sociol-
ogy has both shifted from its former axis and also that it has become
firmly institutionalized across the globe.

6
The term (structural) functionalism has become paradoxically used to describe Parsons’ system
theory as well as Merton’s many middle-range theories. Although not completely oblivious to the
individual, this strand of theorizing is mostly concerned with the “relationship between structures,
between institutions, and between structures and institutions” (Ritzer 1975: 159).
114 P. Korom

What is perhaps most astonishing is that the elite remained almost

entirely male-dominated during this period, with the proportion of
female scholars remaining below 5% between the 1970s and 2010s. One
can see from previous research that women were, for example, clearly
present in the pages of the prestigious American Journal of Sociology from
its earliest days (Grant et al. 2002). Apparently, leading female scholars
who produced internationally recognized sociology faced at least some
obstacles of recognition that prevented them from entering the prestige
elite. Whatever these factors may be, they appear to persist in sociology.

 lite Careers in Economics and Sociology—A

E
Comparison
To further understand what is special about sociology’s elite, a cross-­
disciplinary perspective promises to be another fruitful avenue of investiga-
tion. The focus here is on academic careers, comparing the trajectories of
sociologists and economists (see Chap. 3). Careers are conceptualized as
“successions of related jobs arranged in a hierarchy of prestige through
which persons move in an orderly sequence” (Wilensky 1961: 523).
Mobility is the constitutive element of careers, and especially so in the case
of academic careers, as movement between universities (and other research
institutions) is often considered a prerequisite for obtaining professorship.
To study career trajectories comprehensively, a three-strand model, as
introduced by Light et al. (1973), is adopted. These strands are the disci-
plinary, the institutional, and the external, with activities in one strand
having implications and consequences for all the others:

• Disciplinary strand: The first career decision is made within the disci-
pline. Students select their field of study before they choose teaching
as a career. It is reasonable to assume that students with a solid research
orientation opt for a distinguished PhD program. Besides the doctoral
degree, further advancement in the disciplinary strand (e.g., member-
ships in academies) is mostly dependent on publication success.
• Institutional strand: The primary link between the disciplinary and
institutional aspects of faculty careers is the prestige of the ­PhD-­granting
 5 Collective Biographies and Career Pathways 115

department, which is found to be more relevant for obtaining a top

position than is the level of productivity during the training itself (Han
2003). Here, only full professorships are considered, thereby excluding
other stages of a typical institutional career, such as becoming an asso-
ciate professor or taking on a chairmanship.
• External strand: Finally, postdoctoral academic careers involve many
external activities and appointments, such as visiting fellowships and
professorships lasting a minimum of one semester.

It is assumed that elite careers in sociology and economics differ in all

three strands given the distinct cognitive and social structures of both
disciplines. To begin with, it is likely that patterns diverge even at the
outset of careers. Although, in general, it has been found that the prestige
of PhD-granting institutions impacts prospects of academic profession-
als, the “prestige principle” is understood to structure economics more
than sociology (Han 2003). Regarding institutional careers, the normal
sequence of positions after receiving a doctorate is assistant professor,
associate professor, and full professor. The focus here, however, is on pro-
fessorships only.7 The intent is to explore which departments first hire
scholars who later become eminent scholars, and which departments
attract these scholars once they have gained tenure. What is analyzed are
essentially trajectories, which implies that appointments are not treated
as isolated from each other.
I expected to find that eminent economists advance predominantly
through elite departments, while eminent sociologists are affiliated with
a more diverse group of departments throughout their working life. This
difference was expected to result from the fact that sociology has—in
contrast to economics—no real core and is intellectually divided. Because
sociology is divided into poorly organized camps doing different things
in various ways in numerous places, one can reasonably assume that very
different institutional career paths to elite status exist.

7
The main reason for my narrow focus on professorships is that detailed information on assistant
and associate professorships is often not available. Elite scholars are often vague in their CVs about
when they moved from an assistant to an associate professorship (i.e. from an untenured to a ten-
ured position). The methodology applied here, sequence analysis, builds on rather specific temporal
information.
116 P. Korom

Finally, I will turn to career patterns that become visible in the external
strand of academic careers. Virtually all elite scholars leave their home
institution to pursue studies elsewhere. The ‘visiting fellow’ has, for
example, become a familiar figure at major universities, which implies
multiple institutional affiliations at the same time: to his home university,
from which he is on leave; to the foundation which gives him support;
and to the new institution with which he is temporarily affiliated (Mayntz
1960: 19). So-called institutes for advanced study (IAS) play an out-
standing role in the external strand of academic careers, at least when it
comes to star scholars. Regarding size and structure, it was CASBS in
Palo Alto rather than IAS Princeton that served as the prototype for most
subsequent institutes (Padberg 2020). Since its foundation, CASBS has
had neither a permanent scientific staff nor separate schools representing
different disciplines, including the humanities.
For the duration of an academic year 45 fellows are invited to Palo
Alto, a relatively small number compared to Princeton. The central char-
acteristic of all IAS is the absence of usual faculty commitments and the
possibility to focus exclusively on research. What makes an IAS distinct
from all other institutions of higher education is the rare combination of
institutional stability (permanent infrastructure and administrative staff)
with the flexibility of individualized project funding (temporarily limited
research stays). I assume that a discipline’s cognitive structure impacts
also the external careers of academic elites and thus expect economists to
circulate more frequently via visiting scholarships and professorships
between elite departments than sociologists.
Even though we sometimes tend to imagine elite careers as always fol-
lowing a straight institutional path towards eminence, we must bear in
mind that star scholars can easily take their talents elsewhere. Their
careers are, thus, especially prone to be ‘boundaryless’. The notion of
“boundaryless careers” (Arthur 1994) was introduced as a counterpart to
the traditional upward career within one organization that is clearly in
decline in academia as elsewhere. The concept implies that people pursu-
ing careers frequently move between organizations and are regularly eval-
uated by new peers.
It is, among other things, thus quite possible—and it can indeed be
observed—that eminent scholars like Manuel Castells move from an elite
department (University of California, Berkeley) to a less prestigious one
 5 Collective Biographies and Career Pathways 117

(University of Southern California) in order to, for example, reduce

teaching obligations. Observations like this suggest that both upward and
downward mobility across lifetime careers should be considered.
It is reasonable to conjecture that eminent sociologists will move sig-
nificantly more between elite and non-elite departments than eminent
economists. This pattern is likely to be found as there exist many compet-
ing standards of excellence in sociology which makes it difficult for selec-
tion committees at leading departments (and their advisers) to identify
the elite and in turn introduces randomness into the hiring process of
elite departments (Stinchcombe 1994).
Besides the order of career sequences, temporality appears a further cru-
cial aspect of occupational trajectories. Economics professors have more
flexibility to move between departments than sociology professors because
of their shared epistemological/academic standards. Empirically, one
should therefore expect to find that there are fewer years between professo-
rial appointments at different departments in economics than in sociology.
I compared the career trajectories of 79 economists who received
between 1969 and 2017 the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science
in Memory of Alfred Nobel, the ne plus ultra award of the discipline (for
the Foundation’s history, see Offer and Söderberg 2016) with those of 51
sociologists (see Appendix A1) who made it into the “eminence cube”
depicted in Fig. 4.3 (for a list of the economists see https://www.nobel-
prize.org/prizes/lists/all-prizes-in-economic-sciences/). There are, of
course, also other ways to construct two cohorts similar in age (and
nationality) that one can reasonably compare. To test the robustness of
results, I also experimented with choosing other representative sociolo-
gists. These additional analyses consistently revealed that different selec-
tion strategies do not change the overall picture that is presented here in
any substantial way.
The analysis was started with the most elementary question: What is
the family background? It was not possible to determine the father’s occu-
pation for 5.9% of all sociologists and 3.8% of all economists, so whether
the nexus between social origin and rise to eminence is greater in one or
the other discipline cannot be unambiguously established. Results
depicted in Fig. 5.1, however, suggest that a substantially larger propor-
tion of elite economists come from educated upper middle class families
than elite sociologists.
118 P. Korom

Fig. 5.1 Family backgrounds of elite economists and sociologists

Their fathers typically worked in legal, technical and medical profes-

sions or as university professors and high officials. About one-third were
raised by lower managers or tradesmen—professions categorized as
belonging to the economic lower middle class. In contrast, sociologists
come nearly equally from the educated upper middle classes and eco-
nomic lower middle classes. A substantial proportion (31.1%) also origi-
nated from the non-economic lower middle class (e.g., with fathers as
schoolteachers) or have “blue collar” origins.
Table 5.2 provides a general description of the eminent scholars’ pro-
files in the two disciplines. One can detect only minimal differences
between both disciplinary groups. The age structure is quite similar across
disciplines, and there is only one woman in each elite group. To investi-
gate national backgrounds, it is possible to differentiate between country
of birth and country of residence, the latter referring to the country in
which the scholar spent most of his academic life.8 In both disciplines,
more than half of the scholars were born in the United States, and most
of the remaining economists and sociologists were born into European
families. Results for countries of residence underscore the predominant
role of the United States.
When one looks into where the Nobel laureates received their PhDs,
MIT, Harvard, and Chicago have clear leading positions. A more fine-
grained analysis revealed that MIT is the most important “breeding

8
Only in the case of Friedrich Hayek does it appear impossible to unambiguously identify the
country of residence. In Table 5.2 Hayek therefore falls into the mixed category ‘UK/US’.
Table 5.2 Elite profiles in sociology and economics
Economics Sociology
Year of birth (average) 1928 1933
Male 78 50
Female 1 1
Country of birth
AU/CY/DE/FR/I/NL 11 AU/DE/FR/ES 12
British West Indies 1 Cuba 1
Canada 3 Denmark/Norway/Sweden 3
Finland/Norway/Sweden 6 Poland 1
Hungary/Russia 3 United Kingdom 3
India 1 United States 31
Israel 1
United Kingdom 8
United States 45
Country of residence
FR/DE/NL 5 France/Germany/Spain 8
Israel 1 Sweden 1
Norway/Sweden 4 United Kingdom 4
Russia 1 United States 38
United Kingdom 5
UK/US 1
United States 62
Received PhD from …a
Carnegie Mellon University 4 Columbia University 7
Columbia University 4 École Normale Supérieure 2
Harvard University 9 Harvard University 5
MIT 11 UC Berkeley 4
Princeton University 4 University of Cambridge 2
Stanford University 2 University of Chicago 9
University of Cambridge 3 University 4
of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Chicago 8 University of Paris 2
Other universities 30 Other universities 16
Professorships per scholarb
1 professorship 23 1 professorship 20
2 professorships 26 2 professorships 17
3 professorships 18 3 professorships 9
4 professorships 9 4 professorships 5
5 professorships 1 5 professorships 0
6 professorships 2 6 professorships 0
Years between PhD and first professorship
median 6.0 median 11.0
mean 6.66 mean 10.35

Total 79 51
AU: Austria; CY: Cyprus; DE: Germany; FR: France; ES: Spain; I: Italy; NL: Netherlands
a
The economists John Hicks, Leonid Hurwicz, James Meade, Richard Stone, and
the sociologist George C. Homans never received a PhD
b
John Nash (a mathematician) never held a professorship
120 P. Korom

ground” for younger economists. A significant number of older eminent

sociologists received their PhDs from Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard.
More recent superstars in sociology, such as Anthony Giddens or Pierre
Bourdieu, were also partially trained at European elite institutions (e.g.,
Cambridge, École Normale Supérieure) or at the University of California,
Berkeley. Generally, one can conclude that elite institutions play a similar
role in both disciplines regarding PhD training.
If one considers the number of professorships, similarities prevail over
differences once again. In both disciplines, most scholars either stay at the
department where they were promoted to full professorship or change
professorship location only once. Fewer scholars switch departments three
or more times. In economics, however, there are three Nobel laureates
who continued their academic desire to travel even after the fourth profes-
sorship. Another important finding gained from Table 5.2 is that the bulk
of all economists have transitioned to their first full professorship about 7
years after achieving their PhDs, whereas half of all sociologists have not
been promoted to the rank of professor even 11 years after their PhDs.
This difference in timing suggests that the quality of economists’
research is seen as meriting professorship at an earlier stage in their career.
In general, there is some evidence that economics faculty committee
reviewers use more standardized selection criteria for promotion to full
professorship than in sociology (e.g., publication in high-quality journals
such as American Economic Review). This transparency of research stan-
dards makes it easier for aspiring economists to advance earlier in their
careers because they can focus on one key requirement—writing “good”
papers (Fishe 1998).
To further illustrate the diversity of career trajectories, I relied on
departmental prestige rankings (see Appendix A2) and used a “decorated
parallel coordinate plot,” as introduced by Bürgin and Ritschard (2014).
In such a visual display, gray arrangement zones at the intersection of the
x-coordinates (full professorships at different departments) and the
y-coordinates (departmental rank groupings) permit tracking of distinct
progression patterns. Each line represents a unique ordered career pat-
tern, and the line color as well as the line width indicate the frequency of
the pattern. Patterns with a frequency below the minimum support of
5% are grayed out while all others are highlighted.
 5 Collective Biographies and Career Pathways 121

Looking at the colored lines in Fig. 5.2, one learns that three of the six
most frequent patterns lead to the top 5 (T5) departments (Chicago,
MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale). It is possible, for example, to derive that
a more commonly experienced pattern is to hold at the beginning of a
career two consecutive professorships at departments with ranks below
20 and then be appointed professor at a department with the highest
prestige (ranks 1–5). The careers of Ronald H. Coase, Arthur W. Lewis,
William F. Sharpe, and Alvin E. Roth are marked by such a specific career
trajectory. In-house careers also are quite widespread.
Peter A. Diamond, Eugene F. Fama, Milton Friedman, Lars P. Hansen,
Merton H. Miller, Paul Samuelson, and Robert M. Solow were all
appointed as full professors at one of the T5 departments and did not
switch locations. Another striking feature of the most common career
paths is that there are very few moves to lower-ranked departments,
which are in general rare and only characteristic of late career steps in the

Fig. 5.2 Career trajectories in terms of ranking of departmental prestige. Colored

lines indicate the most frequent career trajectories taken. For the institutional
ranking, see Appendix A2
122 P. Korom

trajectories (i.e., when elite scholars transition, for example, from their
fifth to their sixth professorship). In general, T5 departments play a pre-
eminent role in the careers of Nobel laureates: Of the 186 different full
professorships considered in the biographical database, 33.9% were held
at T5 departments. Of the 81 laureates considered, 42 held at least one
full professorship at one of the T5 departments.
The two plots in Fig. 5.2 are significantly different. For sociology, one
finds six frequent career trajectories, two of which are limited to less pres-
tigious universities with a rank of 21 or lower. Three dominant trajecto-
ries are associated with declining prestige ranks, and only one stands for
upward mobility into the most prestigious departments (ranks 1–5). In
addition, many eminent sociologists (e.g., Talcott Parsons) stayed in one
department only or switched departments that belong to the same low
prestige group (e.g., Howard S. Becker).
The results on the institutional strand so far suggest that some norms
in the organization of career trajectories differ across disciplines.
Economists follow more standardized career paths that lead to the very
top, while horizontal rather than vertical career progression seems typical
for sociologists. Arthur Stinchcombe (1994: 281) described the situation
in his assessment of the profession: “Personal performance is correlated
with prestige of department, but elite departments are by no means
homogeneous and some of the best people are in obscure places.”
The most likely explanation for why institutionalized pathways to emi-
nence appear to exist in only one of the two disciplines is not only to be
found in the more unitary and hierarchical structure of economics, but
even more specifically in the differing importance assigned to publication
in top journals, which is a central precondition for promotion in top
economics departments such as that of Harvard (Heckman and Moktan
2020). One of the crucial tasks a discipline must accomplish is to enable
leading universities to work out whom they should hire. Economics
solves this problem by heavy reliance on one central screening device—
“tier A publications.”
In contrast, for sociologists it is much more difficult to achieve agree-
ment on whether a candidate is elite or not. While having books on the
lists of prestigious publishers and articles appearing in top journals is also
key to obtaining entry to top departments, the nexus is not as established
 5 Collective Biographies and Career Pathways 123

as it is in economics. When one also considers that sociologists are more

likely to use incompatible standards to assess what is good work because
of the fragmentation of the discipline, it becomes more plausible to find
completely different patterns of career progression. To shed more detailed
light on mobility patterns, the degree of upward and downward mobility
is probed across various stages of life in Table 5.3. Considered are all pro-
fessorial moves between departments of various prestige rank for two age
groups. Upward or downward mobility is coded if departments differ by
more than five prestige ranks.
It becomes apparent that in the case of economics, career moves are
largely associated with upward mobility; most scholars change affiliation
to take up another professorship at one of the T5 departments. In the
case of economics professors above the age of 50, however, downward
mobility becomes more frequent. To understand these results, it is

Table 5.3 Career mobility within economics and sociology

Economics Sociology
Below age 50 or Below age 50 or
All of 50 older All of 50 older
Move up 31 25 6 14 8 6
Move down 21 8 13 17 6 11
Move within 5 51 35 16 19 12 7
ranks
Moves up
Into ranks 1–5 16 12 4 3 3 0
Into ranks 6–10 6 4 2 6 4 2
Into ranks 11–20 6 6 0 2 0 2
Into ranks 21–30 2 2 0 1 0 1
Into ranks 31–40 1 1 0 0 0 0
Into ranks 41–50 0 0 0 2 1 1
Moves down
Into ranks 6–10 1 0 1 1 0 1
Into ranks 11–20 4 2 2 1 1 0
Into ranks 21–30 7 2 5 4 2 2
Into ranks 31–40 0 0 0 2 1 1
Into ranks 41–50 1 1 0 1 0 1
Into ranks >50 8 3 5 8 2 6
Notes: For economics, ranks are taken from Amir and Knauff (2008), and for
sociology, from the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2016 edited by
Quacquarelli Symonds (see also Appendix A2)
124 P. Korom

important to recognize that the Federal Age Discrimination in

Employment Act of 1986 exempted postsecondary institutions from the
requirement to enforce mandatory retirement at age 70. Following a
review in the early 1990s, Congress then allowed the exemption to expire,
and mandatory retirement was finally eliminated completely in 1994.
Many Nobel laureates who remained employed into their 70s and even
80s switched to less prestigious faculties. The best illustrative case is the
Harvard-based economist Wassily Leontief, who joined New York
University at the age of 70.
In sociology one finds only somewhat similar mobility patterns. As in
economics, downward mobility predominates toward the end of sociolo-
gists’ occupational careers. There are, however, also striking differences
between both disciplines. In sociology, one finds a near balance between
upward and downward career moves before the age of 50. Moreover, the
share of scholars entering elite departments (ranks 1–5) is much lower in
sociology than in economics, even if one considers only the first half of
life. One thinks in this context of Immanuel Wallerstein, who was from
1976 until his retirement in 1999 professor of sociology at Binghamton
University, an institution that does not even make it into the top 50
PhD-granting departments of sociology (Burris 2004).
What is more, if one considers previous posts at Columbia University
and McGill University, then joining Binghamton suggests that Wallerstein
decelerated in his career. Nevertheless, Binghamton appeared to have
offered him a stimulating intellectual environment as well as plenty of
possibilities to realize his academic entrepreneurial acumen, which led, for
example, to the establishment of the Fernand Braudel Center. Later in
life, around 2000, Wallerstein also joined Yale University as a permanent
senior research fellow. Cases like that of Wallerstein clearly deviate from
the established career paths for economists. Standardized and explicitly
hierarchical elite careers are simply less frequent in sociology (Table 5.3).
Differences in career trajectories are not only to be found in the various
orders of stages, but also in their timing. I previously hypothesized that if
it is true that sociologists face more difficulties than economists when
trying to move between different departments, this would manifest itself
in longer average durations of different career stages. Figure 5.3 depicts
the median number of years spent in the first three professorships. It
 5 Collective Biographies and Career Pathways 125

Fig. 5.3 Years spent in a career position. The middle of the boxplot indicates the
median. The lower and upper hinges correspond to the first and third quartiles—
that is, the 25th and 75th percentiles. Outliers, or observations that are located
outside the hinges, are represented by points

becomes evident that economists spend more years in their first profes-
sorship, which can be mostly explained by the fact that they are appointed
professor comparatively early in life (see Table 5.1).
The substantially longer route to the first professorship in sociology
becomes evident in cases such as that of Anthony Giddens, who lectured at
the University of Leicester from 1961 onward before applying for another
lectureship at Cambridge in 1969. It was only in 1985 at age 47 that he was
promoted to full professorship. The pattern is reversed regarding the sec-
ond and third professorships. Economists move more quickly through
these career stages. Switching departments, it appears, is easier for them.
So far career movements within institutional hierarchies only have
been considered. Academic careers, however, also develop within net-
works. Universities are essentially hierarchical structures in which elites
move through lower positions (i.e., assistant professor, associate profes-
sor) to reach a final career plateau, from which there is nowhere to go
professionally within the same institution. Elite scholars, however, can
also entertain multiple affiliations by visiting other research institutions,
which are referred to as the external strand of academic careers. By doing
so, they establish networks between the home institution and other
126 P. Korom

visiting institutions. To obtain a global view of the relatively large visiting

networks in both disciplines, I considered all visiting professorships or
fellowships of all scholars that lasted at least one full academic term.
Figures 5.4 and 5.5 display discipline-specific visiting networks
between academic institutions. The networks contain arcs indicating the
flow of scholars and vertices that stand for the various departments or
research institutions. Displaying all vertices and all arcs makes it simply
impossible to see the forest for the trees. Therefore, to find structure, it
was decided to shrink all vertices (i.e., home/visiting institutions) belong-
ing to a certain prestige class to one single vertex. Put more concretely, I
shrank, for example, all U.S. departments belonging to the T5 to a new
vertex labeled “USA {ranks 1–5}.” Moreover, it was decided to count a
visit to a host institution only once per scholar.9
In the condensed network depicted in Fig. 5.4, most economists leave
second-tier U.S. departments (ranks 6–20) to either visit top-tier depart-
ments (ranks 1–5) or conduct studies at European institutions. Moreover,
there is a significant inflow to the top U.S. departments from Europe as
well as a high circulation between departments belonging to the T5. The
overall network structure suggests that the T5 (Chicago, MIT, Harvard,
Stanford, Yale) are the main magnets in the visiting network.
In sociology, the epicenter of the visiting network is, in contrast,
second-­tier U.S. departments and European departments (see Fig. 5.5).
A total of 26 scholars circulated between European departments, and
scholars temporarily leaving European departments stayed predomi-
nantly at non-elite U.S. departments. Like in economics, one of the elite’s
favorite working environments appears to be CASBS, where scholars are
freed from all faculty commitments and can focus exclusively on research.
The analysis of the external strand once more shows that the careers of the
most eminent economists are closely tied to the top five departments of
the discipline, whereas career mobility in sociology is multidirectional.

9
The sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, for example, visited the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study
in the Social Sciences twice during his time at UCLA, in 1992 and 1996. In the present analysis,
however, this results only in a simple link between University of California, Los Angeles and the
Swedish Collegium.
 5 Collective Biographies and Career Pathways 127

Fig. 5.4 Visiting relationships between research institutions in economics. The

size of the nodes represents the number of all incoming and outgoing scholars
and the thickness of the arcs depends on the number of scholars moving unidirec-
tionally from one node to another

Using prosopographical tools, this chapter has now comparatively

illustrated the disciplinary, institutional, and external strand of academic
careers of the elite in economics and sociology, and it has become evident
that there are more differences than similarities. Exploring these careers
from multiple angles reveals largely identical insights: Economists pursue
careers through a handful of elite channels, primarily by being hired by
one of the top departments of the discipline. By contrast, the careers of
sociologists share few features in common.
Up until the 1970s, reputational leaders such as Talcott Parsons and
Robert K. Merton were affiliated with the handful of departments
128 P. Korom

Fig. 5.5 Visiting relationships between research institutions in sociology

(Harvard, Columbia) that dominated the production of PhDs in

U.S. sociology and, in the case of Chicago, participated in the manage-
ment of major publication outlets. This concentration of elites in a few
departments, however, vanished. Elite sociologists such as Jürgen
Habermas (Frankfurt University), Immanuel Wallerstein (Binghamton
University), Niklas Luhmann (University of Bielefeld), or Manuel
Castells (University of Southern California), worked at departments that
may well have offered ideal working conditions at the time, but certainly
no longer have the largest rosters of highly qualified students or adminis-
trative control over critical resources. Moreover, sociologists’ careers are
characterized by multidirectional mobility that, to some extent, suggests
there are no predefined career pathways to elite status at all. To find such
clear-cut interdisciplinary differences is especially remarkable because it is
 5 Collective Biographies and Career Pathways 129

known that intradisciplinary variations also exist—that is, careers vary

according to the specialties pursued by scholars (Gläser 2001).
In conclusion, the comparison with economics shows that scholarly
output in sociology is only loosely coupled with institutions of higher
education. Similarly, the nexus between elite departments and scholarly
careers is comparatively weak. The randomness of many aspects of career
trajectories within the discipline becomes less puzzling if one recalls that
within sociology’s Tower of Babel evaluators of candidates for academic
positions have a difficult time judging whether someone is truly elite. As
Arthur Stinchcombe, an insider and commentator stated nearly three
decades ago:

It is in the nature of sociology at this time that in my father’s house there

are many mansions. This makes it hard to write to the Fellows of Harvard
College or the relevant committee at Columbia about whether someone is
really elite. It has happened to me that I have been asked to evaluate a can-
didate and could not answer because I did not know the work of any one
on the comparison list. This obviously meant that someone considered the
candidate to be distinguished on some criterion that I might be expected
to know something about, but also considered them to be distinguished on
a criterion that I did not in fact know anything about, on which the others
on the list were presumed to be elite (Stinchcombe 1994: 290).

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 6
The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence

Explaining (Fading) Eminence

The composition of the prestige elite in sociology, as the preceding chap-
ters have demonstrated, changes over time. In some ways, this finding is
not surprising because one can observe in very different societal spheres
circulation of elites as well as blossoming recognition for past achieve-
ments. Pareto summed it up succinctly: “History is a cemetery of aristoc-
racies” (Pareto 1935: §2053). What is more, the odds appear to be stacked
against lasting eminence, as sociology as a discipline is deeply marked by
paradigms that are heralded for a couple of years but then lose their grip
on the imaginations of working social scientists; this can be best demon-
strated by the paradigmatic cases of interaction process analysis (IPA) and
ethnomethodology. Both paradigms were at least for a short while
regarded as influential specializations within sociology.
IPA was introduced to sociology by Robert F. Bales (1916–2004), a
professor at Harvard, and focused on interpersonal interaction in small
groups. By abstracting from the actual content of group interactions and

Parts of this chapter have been previously published in Korom (2019).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 133
P. Korom, Star Sociologists, Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13938-3_6
134 P. Korom

classifying individual acts according to predetermined schemes, Bales

hoped to identify recurrent patterns and sequences in group behavior
that were theorized as the building blocks of larger social processes (Bales
1950). Bales’ insights, which were generated mostly from behind one-­
way mirror observations, commanded the attention of many sociologists
throughout the 1950s and 1960s and were widely recognized as “cutting
edge.” Later, however, with Bales’ retirement from Harvard in 1986, the
Balesian research program fell out of fashion with sociologists.
Ethnomethodology is inextricably linked with Harold Garfinkel
(1917–2011) and is concerned with the shared knowledge and reasoning
procedures that members of a society use in everyday life to create social
reality; in most of sociology this is simply accepted as a given. To research
self-organizing processes of social orders, Garfinkel conducted, inter alia,
“breaching experiments” (i.e., interruptions or irritations of interaction)
that helped to demonstrate the existence of underlying presumptions
that constitute social life (Garfinkel 1963). His ideas diffused widely and
were at least partially absorbed into the “core” of sociology. Although
today’s textbooks contain descriptions of ethnomethodology and some of
its core claims have been even absorbed into the fabric of sociological
theory, few continue to call themselves “ethnomethodologists.”
Of course, the life cycles of theoretical paradigms also determined the
fate of their spiriti recti, the eminence of which turned out to be short-­
lived. Neither Bales nor Garfinkel make it into the eminence rosters pre-
sented in Chap. 3. One could argue that the rise to and fall from eminence
of scholars mirror the very nature of scientific progress—a process in
which insignificant theories become weeded out and all that is important
stays in the current body of knowledge. Such a crude evolutionary under-
standing of progress in the social sciences, however, does not stand up to
scrutiny. In sociology, perceptions of the essential direction of growth in
social understanding are notoriously volatile (Rule 1997). The endemic
uncertainty and the significant disagreements among scholars on what
counts as a “step ahead” does not allow bringing order into chaos and to
separate the truly substantive contributions from all the others. How, for
example, is one to judge whether Bales or Garfinkel contributed more to
progress in sociology?
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 135

The intrinsic quality of ideas appears thus not to be the only decisive
factor for eminence because firm facts of scientific achievement in sociol-
ogy simply do not exist (Turner and Chubin 1979). The scarce studies
conducted so far into the conditions and processes underlying the con-
tinuous recognition of a given scholar reveal instead that various “social
factors” significantly account for (fading) eminence. So far, three main
social factors have been identified.1

Master–Apprentice Relationships

In his seminal work The Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins analyzes

long-term developments in intellectual communities of philosophers in
various places and at different times including ancient Greece, medieval
Christendom, and modern Europe through the early twentieth century
(Collins 2002). One basic insight of his relational analysis is that

…the more eminent the philosophers are by historical reputation, the

more links they have to other notable philosophers; they are both more
likely to be students of other notable thinkers and to take part in circles of
significant allies as well as confrontations with important rivals. Eminence
breeds eminence, and the denser the network in both vertical and horizontal
dimensions (up to certain limits), the better (Collins 2000: 163,
emphasis added)

Consequently, first-rate intellectual performance is not enough to rise

to eminence; vertical teacher–pupil relationships and horizontal links to
diverse intellectual communities also are important.
Other studies reaffirm the outstanding role of mentors for the rise to
eminence. Tol (2022), for example, reconstructs the (global) professor–
student network in economics using mostly (but not only) the Academic

1
Other factors that explain why social science scholars rise in reputation include the strategic
choices of intellectual predecessors (Camic 1992), the favorable political climate and national tradi-
tions (McLaughlin 1998), flows of translations that help garner a global dominance (Santoro et al.
2018), commemorative practices (Gill 2013), and packaging strategies for promoting intellectual
products in the marketplace (Clegg 1992).
136 P. Korom

Family Tree,2 a collaborative online tool for building an academic geneal-

ogy for various disciplines. In the network, which spans five generations,
all Nobel Prize winners turn out to belong to one single family tree. What
is more, new winners are often closely related to previous winners.

Elite Higher Education

Eminent scholars often work at prestigious departments that offer not

only better research opportunities but also access to important mediating
sources (e.g., prestigious publishers) for spreading their ideas (Frickel and
Gross 2005). Top departments are also large and well-financed enough to
establish specialized research centers that accrue third-party funding and
carry out high-quality research (Weeber 2006). Further, with proven
track records at prestigious institutions, high-status individuals are less
exposed to professional risks and thus encouraged to pursue research
agendas with long-term objectives that are more likely to accrue a global
reputation.
Evidence indeed suggests that scholars in high-status institutions are
especially likely to embrace high-risk, high-reward differentiation strate-
gies of publishing (Koppman and Leahey 2019). Finally, institutions of
elite higher education (e.g., Cambridge University and the University of
Chicago) not only recruit ambitious students but also nurture ambition.
Students are likely to gain a heightened self-confidence from association
with and approval by eminent figures in the field (Trow 1976: 360),
which might lead to the kind of intellectual aspiration that propels schol-
ars to discipline-wide eminence. As was shown in the previous chapter,
however, elite institutions of higher education are far more crucial for the
formation of elites in economics than in sociology.

Academic Tribes

It would appear that scholars’ rise to or fall from fame hinges crucially on
whether their ideas fit the needs and expectations of various “academic

2
See https://academictree.org.
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 137

tribes” whose members share common standards of what constitutes

good science. In her case study, Lamont (1987) showed that Derrida’s
work, which popularized deconstruction as a form of literary analysis,
helped the Yale Critics cohere into an influential school of thought within
U.S. English departments; this, in turn, led to a broad diffusion of
Derrida’s ideas through prestigious literary journals.
Developing a similar explanatory framework, McLaughlin (1998)
attributes the reputational decline of Erich Fromm to some extent to the
enormous hostility he faced within the broader Marxist tradition. More
generally, one can formulate that ideas have a “social life” (Santoro and
Sapiro 2017): Their success depends on their main multiplying carrier
groups that interpret, revisit, criticize, or apply the original ideas in their
research. The most brilliant idea will fall into oblivion if not continuously
adopted and carried on by various social actors.
Then again, are these three types of explanations really the best? If so,
then they should help one make sense of the two most outstanding cases
encountered so far—the “falling star” Seymour M. Lipset (1922–2006)
and the “rising star” Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). Lipset was among the
most important sociologists of his generation. His citation impact has
often been the source of much commentary. It has been, among other
things, posited that “no living political scientist or sociologist is more
frequently cited” (Diamond and Marks 1992: 3); and one of his mentors,
sociologist Robert K. Merton, reported that “of the nearly 3 million sci-
entific authors cited in the SCI3 … only 3 in 10,000 have had their work
drawn upon as often,” which would suggest Lipset to be “one of the truly
consequential social scientists of our time” (Merton 1992: x–xi).
Nevertheless, by the 2010s, the precipitate slide in Lipset’s reputation
had become clearly discernible (see Chap. 3). Pierre Bourdieu
(1930–2002), on the other hand, emerged as the key figure in contempo-
rary sociology and occupies a quasi-hegemonic status that can only be
compared to Parsons’ preeminent position during the 1960s. To under-
stand Bourdieu’s meteoric rise, I explore the reception of his work in the
country a sociologist needs to conquer to be recognized as world class—
the United States.

3
The Science Citation Index cited references found in journals from more than 150 scientific
disciplines.
138 P. Korom

In what follows, the reception of Lipset’s and Bourdieu’s oeuvre in the

sociological literature is reconstructed in some detail, which goes some
way towards qualifying the power of the explanatory “variables” previ-
ously discussed. In addition, novel approaches to explaining fading emi-
nence in sociology are considered.

L ipset and the Early Years of

Political Sociology
A note on the biography and the academic contexts in which Lipset
developed his many accomplishments appears necessary to understand
this versatile scholar. Lipset was born in New York City in 1922 into a
working-class family of East European Jewish immigrants. At Townsend
Harris High School, a preparatory school for City College, he became
involved in the youth group of the Socialist Party, the Young People’s
Socialist League (YPSL). At City College, the student Lipset regularly
engaged in lunchroom meetings dedicated to exploring Marx’s writings.
In the fall of 1943, Lipset started his studies at Columbia University.
Columbia was already a major center for graduate education in sociol-
ogy when Robert K. Merton arrived in 1941, and with Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s
appointment, it became the most influential base for PhD training. In
his brief memoir Steady Work, Lipset described Merton as the “most
important intellectual influence” (Lipset 1996: 7). Columbia sociology
combined the theorizing of Merton with the methodological expertise
of Lazarsfeld. Its “research laboratory” was the Bureau of Applied Social
Research (BASR). The many BASR large-­scale social research projects
provided students with research experience and made data available to
them. Further, the BASR became a fertile ground for a subdiscipline
that was then still in its infancy—political sociology (Glock and
Sills 1958).
Lipset received a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council
(SSRC) to study the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) of
Saskatchewan for his doctoral dissertation (1945–1946). He worked as a
lecturer at the University of Toronto (1946–1948), defended his
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 139

dissertation in spring 1948, and accepted an associate professorship posi-

tion at UC Berkeley (1948–1950), which enabled him to access—in col-
laboration with Reinhard Bendix—massive job history data gathered by
the Institute of Industrial Relations based in Oakland, California.
Merton invited Lipset back to Columbia with an associate professor
position (1950–1956), which resulted in a period of intense cognitive
interaction between the one-time student turned professor, Lipset, and
many talented students (including Martin Trow and James S. Coleman).
From the 1950s onward, he traveled frequently to Europe and other parts
of the world, becoming an intellectual known beyond the confines of the
United States (Velasco 2004: 588). In 1956, Lipset spent a year together
with his research assistant, Juan Linz, at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Palo Alto, working on a research proj-
ect about the social bases of political diversity. This cooperation led to a
coauthored manuscript that was never published but furnished the ground-
work for his monograph Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960).
Lipset continued his career as a full professor at UC Berkeley
(1956–1965), where he renewed his cooperation with Bendix. In 1965
he moved to Harvard University (1965–1975), mostly to free himself
from the time-consuming involvement in Berkeley academic politics.4 At
Harvard, he established an amicable relationship with Talcott Parsons. In
1975, he left Harvard and became a professor at Stanford University,
where he began to work at the Hoover Institution. Having reached man-
datory retirement age, Lipset continued to work as a Professor of Public
Policy at George Mason University (1992–2001).
Admittedly, this is a short description of a remarkable academic career.
Lipset is remembered by one of his students as “the most work-focused
and hardest working person I encountered in a variety of elite institu-
tions” (Marx 2006: 78). He collaborated with scholars, such as James
Coleman and David Riesman, who defy simple disciplinary classifica-
tion; he mentored younger colleagues who either became renowned soci-
ologists (e.g., Ann Swidler) or political scientists (e.g., Juan Linz); and he
4
Lipset first came to Harvard in 1965 as visiting professor. Some assume that he stayed at Harvard
because of a distaste for the student protests at Berkeley on which he conducted research. However,
the fact that he was already negotiating with Harvard prior to the revolt speaks for a broader moti-
vation for his decision to leave Berkeley (Schwartz 1992).
140 P. Korom

served as a professor of political science and sociology (for example, at

Stanford University). Thus, Lipset can be considered one of the true fig-
ureheads of the hybrid “political sociology.”
A central characteristic of Lipset the academic is his outstanding life-­
long productivity. Figure 6.1 delineates his career in print by using the
(weighted) number of published pages per year. Even though the trajec-
tory is curvilinear, reaching its peak in the early 1970s, it becomes clear
that Lipset published at least 1000 pages every 10 years between 1947
and 2001.
His first book, Agrarian Socialism (1950), emerged from his disserta-
tion and aimed to explain the rise to political power of the social

Fig. 6.1 Weighted page count for Lipset’s monographs, book contributions, and
journal articles 1947–2001. Considered are 23 books (including one research
report), 139 book contributions, and 103 journal articles—see appendix of Korom
2019. The page count was weighted simply by dividing for each item the pub-
lished pages by the number of authors. The average number of published pages
per year is 175 (dashed line). Circles stand for research stays of at least one year;
CASBS stands for the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 141

democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in the

Canadian province of Saskatchewan. The young leftist from New York
hoped to better understand why his own country had never produced a
serious socialist movement. Six years later, Lipset published, together
with Martin Trow and James Coleman, the landmark study Union
Democracy in which the International Typographical Union (ITU) was
found to be a significant exception to Robert Michels’ “iron law.”
In his last book, It Didn’t Happen Here (2000), in which he addresses
the question “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” Lipset
returns to the topic of “American exceptionalism” to which he had previ-
ously dedicated much of his research. Between Agrarian Socialism and It
Didn’t Happen Here, Lipset wrote another 20 books on different subjects,
ranging from student politics and social mobility to change and continu-
ity in the U.S. Jewish community. Some of the books, such as Political
Man or Revolution and Counterrevolution (1968), are collections of previ-
ously published journal articles or book chapters. Although monographs
make up approximately 5000 pages (if divided by the number of coau-
thors), book contributions amount to approximately 3000 pages. With
approximately 1400 pages of articles published in 53 different academic
journals, this publication genre contributes the least to the overall
page count.

L ipset: Remembered in Political Science,

Neglected in Sociology
Lipset’s work mostly revolved around political topics. His main publica-
tions facilitated the establishment of the subfield “political sociology”
(Janoski 2005), and he was the leading figure behind the foundation of
the international Research Committee on Political Sociology.5 That most
of his work stood at the crossroads between sociology and political sci-
ence reflects the fact that he was the first person to serve as president of

5
Lipset cofounded and chaired the joint Research Committee on Political Sociology of the
International Political Science Association (IPSA) and the International Sociological Association
(ISA) between 1960 and 1970.
142 P. Korom

the American Political Science Association and the American Sociological

Association. Lipset (1986) himself argued that the reason his book,
Political Man, is commonly ranked in rosters of the most-cited works in
the social sciences rests not only on its availability in many languages but
also on its interdisciplinary orientation.6
If one takes citations as an indicator of research impact, two distinct
legacies become apparent, as shown in Fig. 6.2. In sociology, Lipset’s
reception reached something of a zenith during the 1970s and then
declined continuously over half a century; in political science, more and
more scholars started to borrow ideas from Lipset after a decline in atten-
tion between 1975 and 1985. Even though Lipset received nearly equal
attention in both disciplines between 1970 and 1975, he is cited almost
twice as often in political science than in sociology since 2000.

Fig. 6.2 Articles, book reviews, proceedings papers and editorials citing Lipset’s
works in political science and sociology journals between 1955 and 2014. All cita-
tions were identified in the Web of Science (WoS) that provides an interface for
searching the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). The cited author search com-
bines 11 different variants of Lipset using the Boolean OR operator—for example,
LIPSET SEYMOUR, LIPSET SM, LIPSET S. The search was conducted in May 2018 and
was confined to the WoS categories “political science” and “sociology”

6
Political Man is reported to have sold more than 400,000 copies in 20 different languages
(Marks 2007).
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 143

These divergent reception trajectories potentially provide insights into

key factors that lead to enduring, rather than transitory, scholarly emi-
nence. To understand each trajectory, we proceed in three steps. First, it
is possible to empirically establish the major topics that run like red
threads through Lipset’s work and link every publication to one or several
of these topics. Second, one can quantify the attention paid in each dis-
cipline to selected publications and the collective work on a given topic
(e.g., American exceptionalism). Third, a longitudinal contextual citation
analysis is applied to determine which key ideas are borrowed from Lipset
by political scientists and sociologists at various points in time.
As Lipset “wrote [literally] about everything” (Lakin 2011: 337), the
wealth of his research contributions can hardly be overlooked. Scholars
have, however, identified the following major themes in his thought. For
Diamond and Marks there lies a single core theme to Lipset’s work: “the
conditions, problems, dynamics, values and institutions of democracy,
both in the United States and comparatively throughout the world”
(1992: 3). For Laslett (1983), there are two interconnected red threads:
ideas related to American exceptionalism, discussing how far, and in what
respects, the United States differs from other advanced industrial societ-
ies; the concern is to specify the conditions for a stable democracy. Velasco
(2004) adds to this list of topics the extreme right; Marx (2006) adds
Jewish identity and social mobility; Lakin (2011) adds authoritarianism
and working-class politics; and Fischer and Swidler (2016) add Canada,
the labour movement and social class. Lipset (1996) himself felt that the
politics of academics and intellectuals informed a major part of his
research agenda throughout much of the 1970s.
Thus, when asked to find the essentials in Lipset’s work, various schol-
ars offer different classification grids. To clarify more precisely which
topics dominate Lipset’s writings, an automatic text analysis was applied
to his works. I selected this method in order to establish which words
appeared in which publications, together with the frequency with which
they did so. Texts were treated effectively as unstructured “bags of words”,
while word order and relationships were ignored. What was determined
beforehand was the overall number of topics (N = 15), based on word
frequency.
144 P. Korom

Each of these topics was represented by a “dictionary”—that is, a list of

key words that were found to stand for certain topics (see the
Supplementary Material in Korom, 2019). Dictionaries were “calibrated”
by extracting the most frequent “meaningful” words from the most rep-
resentative texts.7 The simple assumption underlying this quantitative
methodology for identifying distinct research domains is that an author
uses diverse vocabulary when writing on only loosely related topics. To
give an example, the dictionary for the topic “student politics” listed the
following as the most frequent words: activism, communist, movement,
opposition, protest, radical, student, Vietnam, and youth.
To assign publications to topics, first 310 extremely common stop-­
words were deleted—words that are of little value for the analysis—from
all texts and then the percentage ratio of dictionary-based keywords to
total number of n-grams8 contained in each publication was calculated. If
the ratio was above 10%, the “match” was accepted. It was determined, for
example, that the dictionary term “student politics” covers about 10.7%
of all words contained in the book Rebellion in the University (Lipset 1972).
Figure 6.3 indicates the proportion of text assigned to a topic for a
given episode in Lipset’s career (e.g., 1966–1975, Harvard University).
The key point to take from the figure is that democracy was the only
research topic that Lipset continued to pursue throughout his profes-
sional life. It was also his primary research interest until moving to
Harvard, when it became increasingly replaced by growing research on
American exceptionalism. Social stratification research was only on
Lipset’s research agenda during the 1950s and 1960s. During the Harvard
period, his research revolved especially around the issues of student poli-
tics and the politics of academics. These interests, however, vanished after
a decade of intense research. While Lipset worked on the topic of agrar-
ian socialism at the very beginning of his career, he turned his attention
to class politics at the end of it.
To reconstruct the reception of Lipset in political science and sociol-
ogy, I also took cues from scientometrics. Having assigned Lipset’s books

7
Non-keyword terms that are substantively uninteresting (e.g., “and,” “to,” or “is”) were ignored.
8
In linguistics, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items. Examples of 2-grams are “13,” “to,”
or “as.”
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 145

Fig. 6.3 Lipset’s changing research agenda measured in (weighted) pages.

Considered are 18 books and 92 journal articles that are representative of Lipset’s
works; for the complete list, see Korom (2019). For each contribution pages were
counted and weighted by dividing published pages by the number of authors

and journal articles to one or more specific topics, I sought to establish

whether it was, for example, Lipset’s collected works on democracy or on
American exceptionalism that gained most peer recognition. For this
purpose, Fig. 6.4 displays the proportion of articles citing his works in
sociology and political science journals for each topic during two 30-year
periods (1956–1987; 1988–2018).
The overall picture that emerges is one of a degree of disciplinary over-
lap. Even if the versatile scholar Lipset published in many different fields,
the bulk of citations in both disciplines refer to his contributions on
democracy and American exceptionalism. Over time, the reception pat-
terns diverge strikingly. In political science, Lipset garners a substantially
growing number of citations for his work related to democracy and
American exceptionalism, whereas in sociology citations stagnate with
146 P. Korom

Fig. 6.4 Reception of Lipset in political science and sociology journals, 1956–1987,
1988–2018. The articles, each of which cite at least one of his works, are assigned
to topic categories. For example, because Political Man was assigned to the cate-
gory “democracy,” all identified articles citing it are attributed to that topic.
Figure based on data derived from the SSCI

one notable exception: Publications on social stratification, such as Class,

Status, and Power (Bendix and Lipset 1966), start to garner a rather aver-
age number of citations.
To validate the approach adopted, a second method was used that aims
to identify dominant topics covered in the reception of Lipset by analyz-
ing the full content of JSTOR9 archived journal articles mentioning
“Lipset” at least once. JSTOR provides up to ten “Topic Cards,” derived
for each article from a thesaurus, which are intended to provide back-
ground and content for the many subjects covered on JSTOR. Although

9
JSTOR is the most comprehensive electronic archive of scholarly journal articles, providing access
to more than 12 million academic journal articles in 75 disciplines (https://about.jstor.org/mission-
history/, accessed 27 December, 2022).
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 147

information on the JSTOR thesaurus is not available, the procedure

behind the assignment of topics is well documented: The application of a
topic is triggered if a term contained in the JSTOR thesaurus is present
at least three times in an article; the relevance is determined by how fre-
quently the term appears. To give an illustration: The journal article
“Some Social Requisites of Democracy” is assigned the following topics:
democracy, political parties, dictatorship, economic development, coun-
tries, social democracy, urbanization, communism, and Catholicism.10
Table 6.1 displays only the most frequent topics for two disciplines
and various time spans. It becomes apparent that the bulk of all articles
contain the following topics: democracy, political parties, liberalism, con-
servatism, and political attitudes. There are also discipline-specific topics.
During the period 1951 to 1987, most articles in sociology mentioning
Lipset discuss issues that relate either to social mobility or to social classes.
After 1987 topics such as “social mobility” or “working class” cease to be
ranked among the top 0.5% of keywords. In political science, voting
behavior, political campaigns, and changing political partisanship appear
to play a much greater role in Lipset’s reception. Altogether, the contex-
tual citation analysis corroborates findings from the dictionary-citation
approach.

 hy Has Lipset’s Eminence Faded

W
in Sociology?
In many ways, the near eclipse of Lipset’s eminence in sociology is puzzling,
even more so as the reception of his legacy appears to have increased in
political science. Lipset spent his whole academic life at distinguished uni-
versities (UC Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford), exemplifying the
elite professor who is content to let his published research record speak for
itself and who is constantly surrounded and inspired by other creative
minds. Lipset himself was convinced that scholars working in research-
oriented elite departments were more likely to advance a discipline and

10
It should be mentioned that topics can change over time as new concepts are regularly added to
the JSTOR thesaurus.
Table 6.1 Top JSTOR topics in articles mentioning Lipset, divided between political science and sociology
148

Political science Sociology

1947–1987 1988–2017 All years 1951–1987 1988–2017 All years
Top 0.1 % Political parties Democracy Democracy Political Democracy Political parties
parties
Voting Political parties Political parties Prestige Political parties Democracy
P. Korom

Democracy Liberalism Voting Communities Liberalism Conservatism

Liberalism Social theories Capitalism Liberalism
Political attitudes
Top 0.5 % Political attitudes Voting Political attitudes Conservatism Conservatism Social theories
Liberalism Authoritarianism Conservatism Political Political Capitalism
attitudes Attitudes
Conservatism Conservatism Economic Social Voting Communities
development structures
Political systems Political attitudes Political Social mobility Social theories Voting
partisanship
Communism Economic Authoritarianism Liberalism Communities Prestige
development
Political Political Political candidates Universities Men Social structures
partisanship partisanship
Political Political candidates Elites Capitalism Social Universities
candidates movements
Economic Countries Political systems Voting Modeling Working class
development
Public opinion Elites Public opinion Working class Social research Social mobility
Socialism Capitalism Communism Social Protestantism Social interaction
interaction
Modeling Capitalism Parents Universities Social research
Political campaigns Social classes Working class Modeling
Presidential Middle class Parents
elections
Socialism Social research Protestantism
Communities Modeling Social classes
Educational
attainment
Middle class
Men
Political protest
Social
movements
6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence
149
150 P. Korom

have long-lasting intellectual impact on their peers—a belief that shines

through in some passages of the Divided Academy (Ladd and Lipset 1975).
It appears, however, that an elite environment does not protect a scholar’s
reputation from falling into neglect.
Further, Lipset had certainly many close colleagues and students who
debated his work and circulated it within their social circles. One former
mentee, Gary T. Marx, observed that Lipset “must have gone through
reams of stationary continuing to write on their behalf over his lifetime”
(Marx 2006: 79). In a reversal, former students coedited a Festschrift
(Marks and Diamond 1992) or played a crucial role when it came to
nominate Lipset for the ASA’s Career of Distinguished Scholarship
Award, which he received in 2000. Many colleagues, such as Irving
L. Horowitz, held Lipset in great esteem and even while criticizing him
were quite convinced of his greatness and the lasting merits of his key
contributions (Horowitz 2003). Yet it would appear that being well inte-
grated and respected within a wide community of researchers did not
help to keep his work alive in sociology.
Another usual suspect that needs to be examined is the timelessness of
contributed ideas. Thinking of Lipset’s many contributions to, for exam-
ple, the study of American exceptionalism or the condition of democracy,
few reasons come to mind as to why sociologists should now pay less
attention to his ideas compared to 40 years ago. If one ponders the depth
and extent to which the United States can properly be said to differ from
other nations, Lipset’s ideas on what constitutes the American creed or on
the contradictions that form the “double-edged sword” of American
exceptionalism can still inform contemporary scholarship. Given Lipset’s
influence on past debates over the process of transition to democracy, his
work could, equally, be consulted today to understand whether estab-
lished democracy is in danger (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Indeed, politi-
cal science continues to acknowledge his contribution.
Finally, the reception of Lipset’s major books has never been narrowly
confined to the English-speaking world. Political Man, for example, has
been translated into more than 14 languages (Lipset 1986) and archived
letters to publishers prove Lipset’s keen interest in the distribution of his
books. Thus, in theory, Lipset’s work could have continued to resonate
with readers around the world. Obviously, one must seek other explana-
tions to solve the puzzle.
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 151

One point of departure is to think of the degree to which Lipset’s work

became canonized in sociology, a process that typically boosts a scholar’s
stature, mostly as a general thinker, by simplifying his or her work into
unified messages that are assumed to be hidden somewhere deep in the
text; these take priority over the critical and contextualized reading of
their work (Outhwaite 2009). Once canonized, an author’s work often
finds itself easily summarized with a few words or phrases, such as struc-
turation (Giddens), risk (Beck), liquidity (Bauman), habitus (Bourdieu),
and the canonized texts start to represent the work in much the same way
that the founding fathers, led by the triumvirate of Marx, Durkheim, and
Weber, have represented the discipline. Typically, students learn of can-
onized authors through secondary literature, short texts in readers or
introductory textbooks, which are known to initiate various commemo-
rative practices in a discipline like sociology (Gill 2013).
Has Lipset ever reached a canonical status in sociology? All analyses
conducted suggest that this is clearly not the case regarding one key knowl-
edge domain of sociology—namely, social stratification research. The
book Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Lipset and Bendix 1959)11 still
receives citations for what became to be called in the literature the “Lipset
and Zetterberg hypothesis” or “LZ-hypothesis”—a label that stands in
reality for three key arguments: High rates of social mobility are not a
precondition for, but a consequence of industrialization; once a certain
stage of industrialization has been attained, mobility rates will increase to
a new historic level (i.e., threshold effect); levels of mobility and equality
of opportunity do not necessarily co-vary. The LZ-hypothesis might still
inspire some sociological research, but scholars do not try to resuscitate a
“Lipsetian perspective” in analyzing the social world when citing this
work. All other contributions rarely stimulate today’s scholars researching
social class and mobility, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify
what the name Lipset has come to stand for in social stratification research.
Further, Lipset’s key contributions to democracy (e.g., Political Man)
have not been included in the sociological canon to the same extent as,
for example, Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) or

11
Lipset and Zetterberg contributed a revised chapter on theories of social mobility to the 1959
edited volume that they had first published as a research report in 1956.
152 P. Korom

Peter Blau and Otis D. Duncan’s The American Occupational Structure

(1967). Although there may be various factors at play as to why Political
Man never received much sociological commemoration, much suggests
that sociologists found the book too focused on political issues to become
a sociological classic, which is not without a certain irony, given that
Lipset wrote in the foreword that “the study of man in society cannot
fruitfully be compartmentalized according to substantive concerns”
(Lipset 1981: ix). In general, democracy research has gained a solid foot-
hold in political science whereas it plays a marginal role in sociology, and
this in turn has decisively impacted Lipset’s legacy in both disciplines.
The main insight gained from the analyses in this chapter is that a big
part of Lipset’s work was not only directed toward democracy throughout
his life but also that he received most recognition for his stirring myriad
of writings on democracy. Lipset the democracy researcher not only
occupies a central place in the political science literature but is also hon-
ored for his achievements in the form of, for example, the annual Seymour
Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World, which is dedicated to
the central questions he sought to address during his lifetime: What does
it take to make democracy work? How can citizens and leaders work to
protect democracy from the constant threats that it faces?
In contrast to this vivid commemoration in political science, the frag-
mentation of sociology appears to inhibit a broad reception of the democ-
racy researcher Lipset. He mutated from a central figure of sociology to
the figurehead of one of the many specialist sociologies—namely, politi-
cal sociology. Some of Lipset’s groundbreaking ideas—for example, the
relevance of socioeconomic cleavages for structuring party systems—
continue to resonate with many social scientists, but they have migrated
from sociology’s core to its periphery. In a fragmented discipline, how-
ever, prestige in a niche area cannot alone provide a scholar with elite
status. A potential explanation for Lipset’s decline is to be found in the
changed directions that the discipline of sociology took. Or, put more
generally, the case of Lipset demonstrates first and foremost the extent to
which the reputation and influence of an eminent scholar can depend on
purely contextual factors.
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 153

 ierre Bourdieu and U.S. Sociology:

P
A Diffusion Study
Bourdieu, born in 1930, was of the same generation as Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Similiar to these prominent scholars,
his entire career essentially unfolded within France’s higher educa-
tion system.
Shortly after being appointed assistant to the leading French intellec-
tual, Raymond Aron, Bourdieu took up teaching at the University of
Lille (1961–1964). He later became Director of Studies at École des
hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 1964, where he
edited, among other things, the journal Actes de La Recherche en Sciences
Sociales. In 1981, Bourdieu was elected to the prestigious Chair of
Sociology at the Collège de France and received the highest honor in
1993 from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS),
the Médaille d’Or (Grenfell 2012: 11–25).
The points of contact with U.S. sociology were few. Bourdieu crossed
the Atlantic for the first time in 1973 to spend almost one year at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. In the spring of
1988, a semester-long graduate seminar workshop at the University of
Chicago followed, and when receiving the Goffman Prize in 1996,
Bourdieu gave a series of lectures at UC Berkeley. Although his personal
contacts with U.S. sociology were limited, he befriended eminent social
scientists such as Erving Goffman and Clifford Geertz (Bourdieu 1996).
It is well known that Bourdieu took considerable interest in shaping the
reception of his work, asking former students, including Michèle Lamont
and Loïc Wacquant, to help diffuse his work in the United States (Lamont
2010). A collaboration with Wacquant resulted in the publication of “An
Invitation to Reflexive Sociology”, which made Bourdieu’s conceptual
canon easily accessible to an English-speaking audience (Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992).
154 P. Korom

These connections notwithstanding, it remains difficult to explain how

a scholar who represented a blank slate for most U.S. social scientists dur-
ing the 1970s went on to become one of the most cited scholars in
U.S. sociology. Such an outstanding reputational trajectory posits a puz-
zle that demands explanation. One is tempted to ask: “Why Bourdieu,
his tortuous style of writing notwithstanding? Why Bourdieu, his strong
Frenchness notwithstanding? Why Bourdieu, if certain prominent social
scientists (e.g., John Goldthorpe) have been and still are so dismissive
toward him and his work?” (Santoro 2011: 5).
The question “Why Bourdieu?” has already been tackled by several
researchers from various perspectives. Most notably, Gisèle Sapiro stud-
ied the international career of Bourdieu’s key publication La Distinction
(1979), which appeared in many translations and propelled him from the
position of a recognized specialist to that of a social theorist (Sapiro
2014). Marco Santoro and colleagues investigated the worldwide circula-
tion of Bourdieu’s ideas through book translations and scientific journals
(Santoro et al. 2018). Jeffrey J. Sallaz and Jane Zavisca provided evidence
on when and how Bourdieu’s ideas have been “put to use” in research
published in selected U.S. sociology journals (Sallaz and Zavisca 2007).
Furthermore, sociologists involved in the process of “diffusing Bourdieu”
have reflected on the various relationships that their U.S. colleagues cul-
tivated with Bourdieu’s work (Lamont 2010, 2012; Lizardo 2012).
The objective here is to further our understanding of the impact of
Bourdieu on U.S. sociology by adopting a new perspective that looks at
how citations diffuse. Diffusion studies focusing on citation behavior
trace where and when scholars adopt a key thinker’s ideas. More exactly,
and according to Katz (1999: 147), good diffusion studies address the
“spread of (1) an item, idea, or practice, (2) over time, and (3) to adopt-
ing units (individuals, groups, corporate units), embedded in (4) chan-
nels of communication, (5) social structures (networks, community,
class), and (6) social values, or culture”. The working hypothesis is that in
such a fragmented discipline as sociology thinkers only achieve eminence
if their ideas spread widely and become recognized in quite diverse
knowledge communities or academic tribes. I set out to test this hypoth-
esis by examining a single case only.
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 155

The study design is rather comprehensive because it jointly focuses on

aspects (1) to (5) that Elihu Katz perceived as essential. Before addressing
these issues separately, it appears, however, necessary to ask the most ele-
mentary question: When were Bourdieu’s contributions translated from
French so that they could easily reach a U.S. audience? (see also Santoro
et al. 2018). Here only a rough overview of key translations is provided:
After an inconsequential U.S. translation of Sociologie de l’Algérie (The
Algerians) in 1962, three important works were published within a short
period of time: Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977,
coauthored by Jean-Claude Passeron), Outline of a Theory of Practice
(1977), and The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to
Culture (1979).
The 1984 translation of La Distinction (Distinction: A Social Critique of
the Judgement of Taste) by the prestigious Harvard University Press turned
out to be a breakthrough into broader general recognition. This book also
contributed to the unification of the reception of Bourdieu’s work because
it brought together, among other things, many themes Bourdieu had
developed since the 1960s (Brubaker 1985). After Distinction, the aver-
age time lag for translating Bourdieu’s books into English decreased sig-
nificantly as his popularity increased (Sapiro 2014). Le sens pratique
(1980), in which Bourdieu consolidates his theoretical apparatus, is an
exception; it was published ten years later in 1990 as The Logic of Practice
by Stanford University Press.
Given these key translations, I opted to start my diffusion study in the
early 1970s. Further, I decided to focus on academic journals as these
would have functioned as important channels for spreading Bourdieu’s
ideas. Special issues, book reviews, and lengthy review essays on Bourdieu’s
works (e.g., Brubaker 1985; DiMaggio 1979), for example, may have
substantially accelerated his diffusion into U.S. sociology.

Channels of Diffusion

To illuminate the role played by journals as diffusion routes, the study

included articles published in 20 sociology journals between 1970 and
2010, written by scholars affiliated to a U.S. university (the convention
156 P. Korom

for counting a scholar as U.S.) and which cite Bourdieu at least once.
This produced a total of 1080 articles. It becomes evident that Bourdieu’s
work received little attention until the mid-1980s. He is cited by 10.7%
of all the articles published by Sociology of Education in 1984, 14.3% of
the articles in Theory and Society in 1985, and 22.2% of the articles in
Sociological Theory in 1986 (see Fig. 6.5).
In several other journals (e.g., Gender and Society), such frequent refer-
ences to Bourdieu do not appear throughout the four decades. From the
1990s onwards articles published in Poetics start to show a similar reliance
on Bourdieu’s ideas. In 1997, for example, more than half of all journal
articles published in Poetics, a journal that acquired “the (informal) man-
tle as the unofficial journal of cultural sociology in the United States”
around the same time (Lizardo 2012: 240), cite Bourdieu. The core jour-
nals of the discipline (American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological
Review) reach a citation rate of above 20% only in the years after 2000.
These findings suggest that specialty journals served first and foremost as
the channels of diffusion, especially during the early stages of the Bourdieu
reception. What is remarkable, however, is the rather broad diffusion
from the late 1990s onward across nearly all considered journals—albeit
on different levels (see Fig. 6.5).

Diffusing Publications and Concepts

Although it is difficult to reconstruct with any precision how and why an

author’s ideas succeed in the market of intellectual products, scientomet-
ric analysis makes it possible to trace the varying resonance of publica-
tions and various concepts contained therein over time. A closer inspection
of the dataset reveals clearly that translations of Bourdieu’s works are far
more frequently cited than the French originals. Table 6.2 treats transla-
tions and originals as one. It transpires that (translated) monographs are
the most cited, with a few exceptions (e.g., book chapters “The Forms of
Capital” and “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction”). The
monograph Distinction receives about 18% of all citations and by far
most of the attention.
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 157

Fig. 6.5 Proportion of articles citing Bourdieu (in %) in 20 sociology journals

between 1970 and 2010
158 P. Korom

A dynamic perspective further reveals not only skyrocketing citations

of Distinction since its publication in 1984, but also a stagnating impact
of Bourdieu’s most influential publication of the late 1970s and 1980s:
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. It is maybe not too far-
fetched to infer that Bourdieu entering a stage of discipline-wide

Table 6.2 Publications by Bourdieu (including books, book chapters and journal
articles) most frequently cited in journal articles (n =1080) by U.S. sociologists
Publication Referenced contribution (publishing house/
type journal) Published Cited %
Book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement 1984 576 17.6
of Taste (Harvard University Press)
La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement 1979
(Éditions de Minuit)
Book Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge 1977 300 9.2
University Press)
Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (Droz) 1972
Book Reproduction in Education, Society, and 1977 219 6.7
Culture (Sage)
La reproduction: Éléments pour une théorie du 1970
système d’enseignement (Éditions de Minuit)
Book The Logic of Practice (Stanford University Press) 1990 176 5.4
Le sens pratique (Éditions de Minuit) 1980
Book “The Forms of Capital” in: Handbook of Theory 1986 155 4.7
chapter and Research for the Sociology of Education
(Greenwood)
Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, 1983
soziales Kapital (Soziale Welt)
Book “Cultural Reproduction and Social 1977 138 4.2
chapter Reproduction” in: Power and Ideology in
Journal Education (Oxford University Press)
article “Reproduction culturelle et reproduction 1971
sociale” (Information sur les Sciences Sociales)
Book An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (University 1992 136 4.2
of Chicago Press)
Book Language and Symbolic Power (Harvard 1991 81 2.5
University Press)
Ce que parler veut dire: L’économie des 1982
échanges linguistiques (Fayard)
Book Homo Academicus (Stanford University Press) 1988 78 2.4
Homo Academicus (Éditions de Minuit) 1984
Book The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art 1993 70 2.1
and Literature (Columbia University Press)
Book The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the 2006 65 2.0
Literary Field (Stanford University Press)
Les règles de l’art: Genèse et structure du 1992
champ littéraire (Seuil)
(continued)
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 159

Table 6.2 (continued)

Publication Referenced contribution (publishing house/

type journal) Published Cited %
Book In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive 1990 51 1.6
Sociology (Stanford University Press)
Choses dites (Éditions de Minuit) 1987
Book The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of 1996 51 1.6
Power (Stanford University Press)
La noblesse d’état (Éditions de Minuit) 1989
Journal “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the 1975 45 1.4
article Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason”
(Social Science Information)
“La spécificité du champ scientifique et les 1975
conditions sociales du progrès de la raison”
(Sociologie et sociétés)
Journal “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The 1983 44 1.3
article Economic World Reversed” (Poetics)
Book “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The 1993
chapter Economic World Reversed” in: The Field of
Cultural Production: Essays on Art and
Literature (Columbia University Press)
Book The Inheritors: French Students and Their 1979 38 1.2
Relation to Culture (University of Chicago
Press)
Les héritiers: Les étudiants et la culture 1964
(Éditions de Minuit)
Book Masculine Domination (Stanford University 2001 35 1.1
Press)
La domination masculine (Seuil) 1998

reception is to be first and foremost attributed to the publication success

of the English translation of La Distinction, a breakthrough book compa-
rable to Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action (1937) and Merton’s Social
Theory and Social Structure (1949).
In their research on the reception of Bourdieu in the United States,
Sallaz and Zavisca (2007) established through content analysis of the
journals American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review,
Social Forces, and Social Problems for the period between 1980 and 2004
that “capital” (especially “cultural capital”) clearly dominated as a con-
cept. Here, this line of research is extended by applying automatized
analysis to a substantially larger text corpus. To explore citation contexts,
160 P. Korom

only the sentences that contain a citation of Bourdieu’s work are ana-
lyzed, as opposed to the full semantic content of the articles. To give an
illustration: In the journal article “Cultural Objects as Objects”
(McDonnell 2010), one finds in different parts of the article three sen-
tences that refer to Bourdieu’s work:
“In many ways, this research returns to Bourdieu’s (1984) interest in
how culture excludes but refocuses the attention around issues of materi-
ality.” “The centralizing of media production has the effect of limiting the
kinds of diversity present across the field of cultural production (Bourdieu
1993).” “Or dispositions as seen through Bourdieu (1977), tools as seen
through Swidler (1986), or schema as seen by Sewell (1992) or DiMaggio
(1997)”.
I converted sentences like these into a so-called “tidy text format,”
essentially consisting of a table with one “token” per row—a “token”
being a meaningful unit of text (e.g., a word). When excluding extremely
common “stop” words that are of little value for the analysis and neglect-
ing punctuation, a tidy text format of the preceding first extracted sen-
tence looks like this (if rows are separated by semicolon):

research; returns; Bourdieu; 1984; culture; excludes; refocuses; attention;

issues; materiality

To understand trends in the usage of the main Bourdieusian concepts,

such contexts of citations were analyzed further. Figure 6.6 confirms one
of the main findings of Sallaz and Zavisca (2007)—that is, capital is and
has been the most popular concept—whereby most interest centers on
cultural capital rather than social capital.
Another finding, however, is not consistent with their study. It is clear
that Bourdieu’s field concept has slowly but steadily worked its way into
U.S. sociology, especially between 2000 and 2010; and it was used much
more when citing Bourdieu than the concept of habitus or even class that
dominated in the late 1980s. The contention that the field concept, as a
site of theoretical innovation, has not played much of a role in recent
years, whereas the concept of habitus has given rise to many more studies
(Hilgers and Mangez 2015: 1), might not, therefore, be accurate.
Fig. 6.6 Usage of Bourdieu’s key concepts over time (1970–2010). Considered are
19 journals and 2215 citation contexts. Theory & Society is not included in the
analysis because of its citation format, which relies on endnotes that are not
conducive to automated content analysis
162 P. Korom

Synthesizing results on the reception of publications and concepts, it

becomes clear that Bourdieusian sociology entered U.S. sociology chiefly
through the translation of a single book—La Distinction—and revolved
around one key concept: “cultural capital.” Both appear to be heuristic
tools flexible enough to be stretched and applied by scholars to many
distinct research areas.

Social Structures Impacting Diffusion Processes

Some authors argue that high-status individuals played a crucial role in

the diffusion of Bourdieu in U.S. sociology. Santoro (2011: 8), for exam-
ple, attributes an important role to “publications [using Bourdieusian
concepts] produced by reputed scholars in leading departments – Paul
DiMaggio at Harvard and then Yale and Princeton, Craig Calhoun in
North Carolina and then NYU, Löic Wacquant at Chicago and then
Berkeley, Rogers Brubaker at UCLA.”
To ascertain whether the reception of Bourdieu occurred at various
times in different U.S. departments, it was necessary to differentiate
between authors from elite and non-elite departments. Relying on the
sole historical study of change and continuity in prestige of sociology
departments, based on hiring patterns of PhD students, 20 departments
were classified as “ elite” that ranked among the top 25 in at least two of
the following years: 1965, 1983, and 2007 (Weakliem et al. 2012).
Figure 6.7 shows that, especially regarding journals that contain the bulk
of all citing articles (American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological
Review, Poetics, Theory and Society), the citation-time patterns are not sig-
nificantly different across both groups. Thus, there is no evidence for
“trickle-down effects” in the diffusion. Citation behavior apparently did
not flow down the prestige hierarchy in sociology.

Carrier Groups

The carrier groups of Bourdieu’s ideas in the journal world appear prima
facie to be a variegated collection of individuals. Because many of the
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 163

Fig. 6.7 Articles citing Bourdieu published between 1970 and 2010. Each dot
stands for one of the 1080 articles, assigned to either elite or non-elite depart-
ments according to the affiliation of the first-named author. Lines indicate the
25%, 50%, and 75% quartiles. Elite departments are: Columbia, Cornell, Harvard,
Indiana, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Los
Angeles, Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas,
Wisconsin, Washington State, and Yale

authors are members of the American Sociological Association (ASA)—a

scholarly society that used to be dominated by a disciplinary elite but
turned into a professional association of organized subgroups in the
1950s (Simpson and Simpson 1994)—one can try to gain a more detailed
portrait. ASA section memberships can inform one about the specializa-
tions of the first-named authors because sections are essentially small
164 P. Korom

sociological associations that each host their panels at ASA annual meet-
ings and uphold their own communication networks.
Systematic investigations into ASA section membership (see Table 6.3)
of all first-named authors reveal that members of the Theory and Sociology
of Education section were predominant in the first two decades
(1970–1990). Between 2000 and 2010, cultural sociologists made up
12.5%; sociologists specializing in the areas of organizations, occupa-
tions, and work comprised 9.7%; and educational sociologists only 6.4%
of all ASA members that could be identified. The prime carrier group,
thus, changed within the four decades considered. It is no longer the
educational sociologists but rather the cultural sociologists who spear-
head the group of U.S. scholars using, in one way or another, Bourdieu’s
theoretical toolkit.12
This finding is an important piece in the puzzle about Bourdieu in
U.S. sociology because culture has been on the rise since the late 1980s,
continuing to the present day. As Tsang and Lamont (2018) point out,
the Culture section of the ASA, founded in 1988, became one of the larg-
est sections of the ASA by the mid-1990s. At this time, the leading jour-
nal, American Sociological Review, started to be coedited by a cultural
sociologist, Omar Lizardo, as were other high-profile publications such as
Contemporary Sociology (Michael Sauder) or Sociological Forum (Karen
Cerulo). The academic tribe’s growing impact has also led to a cultural
mutation of other sociology specialties like stratification research (“cul-
tural turn”). One can safely assume that Bourdieu would not have reached
the uppermost echelon of eminence had he not become the icon of cul-
tural sociologists, but stayed popular only among educational
sociologists.

12
That U.S. cultural sociologists were highly receptive to Bourdieu’s ideas became evident due to
the fact that his theoretical repertoire figured high in most books submitted to the ASA culture
section’s book competition (Lamont 2010).
Table 6.3 Memberships in ASA sections of first-named authors citing Bourdieu
Directory 1975 Directory 1980 Directory 2003
Publ. years: 1970–1990 Publ. years: 1970–1990 Publ. Years: 2000–2010
N = 188 N = 188 N = 417
First-named author ASA member: First-named author ASA member: First-named author ASA member:
yes 67 (35.6%) yes 96 (51.1%) yes 278 (66.7%)
no 121 (64.4%) no 92 (48.9%) no 139 (33.3%)
ASA sections ASA sections ASA sections
Freq. (%) Section Freq. (%) Section Freq. (%) Section
11 (10.0) Theory 10 (15.9) Soc. of Education 64 (12.5) Soc. of Culture
9 (8.2) Soc. of Education 9 (14.3) Theoretical Soc. 50 (9.7) Org., Occ., and
Work
9 (8.2) Strat./Mobility 8 (12.7) Marxist Soc. 34 (6.6) Comp./Hist. Soc.
8 (7.3) Social Psych. 6 (9.5) Population 33(6.4) Soc. of Education
6 (5.5) Methodology: 5 (7.9) Org. and Occ. 30 (5.8) Theory
Quant.
5 (4.5) Race/Ethn./ 4 (6.3) Methodology 26 (5.1) Eco. Soc.
Minority Rel.
4 (6.3) Soc. Psy.
Source: Three editions of the Biographical Directory of Members, edited by the American Sociological Association
Note: Names of ASA sections can change over time
6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence
165
166 P. Korom

 minence in Sociology—A Nested

E
Phenomenon Extending Across
Many Specialties
What one can learn from the case study on Bourdieu is that eminence in
sociology is a nested phenomenon (Walsh and Lehmann 2019). In the
sociological literature there does not exist one single Bourdieu, but many.
There is the Bourdieu that provides a model of culture that can be mea-
sured (one can have more or less cultural capital) and thereby adapted to
regression analysis; the Bourdieu that helps one recognize what separates
social collectivities; the Bourdieu one can use to approach scientific
knowledge production; and so on. Bourdieu’s work, therefore, diffuses
today through several channels throughout the discipline. Once a thinker
like Bourdieu starts to dominate not a few but many specialties within
sociology, he is likely to join the discipline’s elite.
Similarly, Lipset had “multiple lives” in sociology; it was not only the
democracy theorist Lipset but also the social stratification researcher
Lipset that entered sociology’s textbooks during the 1970s. Once the
reception narrowed, Lipset nearly disappeared from the roster of eminent
sociologists. Broad reception patterns imply that an author is not only
discussed within “elite sociology” but also within “mass sociology,” as the
case study of Bourdieu has clearly shown. U.S. educational sociologists
working in lower-tier departments were, as I have shown, among the first
to apply Bourdieu’s concepts (to the U.S. higher education system).
Besides the fact that eminence in such a fragmented discipline as soci-
ology builds on recognition in several specialized fields, influential carrier
groups appear key to the emergence and vanishing of eminence. While
the reception of Bourdieu began among educational sociologists, it was
the growing “tribe” of cultural sociologists that brought him from the
margins to the mainstream. Given its high standing within U.S. sociol-
ogy, this carrier group has been extremely successful in diffusing his ideas.
In contrast, political sociologists appear to have too little discipline-wide
influence to keep their founding fathers’ work remembered. Put another
way, whether scholars occupy a lasting place in the wider pantheon
depends not only on the intrinsic power of their ideas, but also on
 6 The Rise to and the Fall from Eminence 167

whether their key concepts are sufficiently flexible to be applied to a wide

array of research areas within sociology, as well as on whether intellectual
movements central to the discipline incorporate and maintain them.

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 7
Elites as Gatekeepers

The Case of Journal Reviewers

While members of the elite shape their discipline indirectly through their
writings, they can also exert direct influence. Some hold professorships at
the most prestigious universities or sit on important editorial boards,
which enables them to control important training facilities, the alloca-
tion of awards, or the means of “certifying” research through, for exam-
ple, their involvement in peer-review processes of academic journals. In
theorizing this specific role of scientists, the concept of gatekeeper appears
to offer the most promising avenue of inquiry.1
The term was first introduced to the social sciences by social psycholo-
gist Kurt Lewin (1890–1947), who developed a theoretical framework
(“field theory”) to explain social change in organizations:

Parts of this chapter have been previously published in Korom (2020).

1
As Zuckerman and Merton (1972: 316) elaborate, the status of a scientist involves not a single
role, but rather four principal roles: researcher, teacher, administrator, and gatekeeper. In their role
as gatekeepers, scientists “evaluate the promise and limitations of aspirants to new positions, thus
affecting both the mobility of individual scientists and, in the aggregate, the distribution of person-
nel throughout the system.”

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 171
P. Korom, Star Sociologists, Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13938-3_7
172 P. Korom

A university, for instance, might be quite strict in its admission policy and
might set up strong forces against the passing of weak candidates. Once a
student is admitted, however, the university frequently tries to do every-
thing in its power to help everyone along. … Gate sections are governed
either by impartial rules or by “gatekeepers.” In the latter case an individual
or group is “in power” for making the decision between “in” or “out”
(Lewin 1947: 145).

Scholars since Lewin have modified and adapted gatekeeping theory

and its terminology to various social contexts; the core assumptions,
however, have remained the same. At the theory’s core are decision-­
making processes (in organizations).
Positive and negative forces around a “gate” facilitate or constrain the
flow of information to decision makers (i.e., individuals vested with offi-
cial authority in organizations that make in/out decisions). “Gatekeepers”
allow or prevent information from passing through the “gate” and shape
information into “stories.” Whereas journalists act as gatekeepers by
selecting news on politicians that, once published, can influence their
chances of being reelected to office, academics use peer review to influ-
ence editorial decisions within the marketplace of ideas (Coser 1975).
Do elites have outstanding gatekeeping power in sociology? To tackle
this question, our attention now turns to reviewers for the prestigious
journals American Journal of Sociology (AJS) and American Sociological
Review (ASR). Publication in AJS or ASR is known to be crucial for career
advancement, at least within U.S. sociology. Former editor Andrew
Abbott reports that during his editorship (2000–2016) about 500 new
manuscripts were submitted each year to AJS. Given this number and the
diversity of submissions the editor and the five to six members of the sit-
ting editorial board did not read all manuscripts but delegated the evalu-
ation mostly to external reviewers. Abbott dispels the myth that an editor
is in a position to doom a paper on his own:

… [I]t’s not the Abbott Journal of Sociology, it’s the American Journal of
Sociology. What matters are 1. the views of the experts in the paper’s sub-
discipline, 2. the issues of bias that can arise in those views … and 3. the
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 173

responses of the Board as it attempts to channel the general sociological

reader (Abbott 2018: 32).

Since the 1970s both journals have published each year an

“Acknowledgments to Referees” section, in which they list and thank the
people who have assisted the editors by commenting on at least one man-
uscript. By merging all lists between 1970 and 20102 and harmonizing all
names (by resolving minor differences in spelling)3, it was possible to
provide a complete register of all reviewers, encompassing 6057 individu-
als for AJS and 7080 for ASR.
The register reveals those scholars whose involvement has been close
and ongoing, sometimes for many years. One reviewer, for example,
assisted the editorial board of AJS for 29 consecutive years, and that of
ASR for 33. To identify the reviewers who had had the most impact,
scholars were placed in order of the number of years (for each decade
between 1970 and 2010) in which they had contributed a review. I then
selected the “top 1%,” individuals who had been mentioned in at least
eight acknowledgments per decade. The “top 1%” was further subdivided
into those with fewer or more than 1000 citations in SSCI-indexed jour-
nal articles, a criterion selected to provide a roster of the most frequently
referenced authors in sociology journals and a potential indicator of
elite status.
Figure 7.1 shows that while more and more scholars are asked continu-
ally for their expert judgments, the number of elite members contacted
either diminishes (as in the case of AJS) or stays constant over time (as in
the case of ASR). Thus, the relative gatekeeping power of (U.S.) elite
scholars (e.g., Randall Collins) becomes less decisive as the total number
of rather “average” scholars regularly contacted increases drastically. One
might speculate on what exactly drives this “democratization” of the “top
1%” in peer reviewing. The evidence suggests that the differentiation of
sociology into increasingly narrow specialties has required a new editorial

2
No data on AJS reviewers was available for the year 1973.
3
Often a harmonization of names was required as there were inconsistencies in the spelling of fore-
and surnames and in the inclusion of initials of middle names.
174 P. Korom

Fig. 7.1 Representation of the elite among the top 1% of all AJS and ASR
reviewers

strategy. Technical papers dealing with specialized fields of knowledge

need to be reviewed by knowledgeable peers working in the same field. As
they constitute an increasing proportion of submissions, elite expertise
that is more broadly oriented becomes less valuable.
These results, however, must be interpreted with caution. Editors may
weight reviews differently, and it is conceivable that Randall Collins’
judgment, for example, would figure in the decision more than that of
non-eminent sociologists. If eminent scholars can indeed critically influ-
ence an editor’s decisions on which manuscript to promote or reject, then
it becomes difficult to uphold the claim of democratized peer review.
Given the weak data at one’s disposal, a definitive answer to the question
as to whether or not elites hold greater gatekeeping power remains elusive.
In general, it is not particularly surprising that gatekeeping processes
in science have remained under-researched. Owing to privacy issues, the
deliberations of peer review panels (Lamont 2009) and of selection
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 175

committees in academic hiring often remain confidential, and it is not

unusual for restrictions to be placed on accessing archived materials that
allow the reconstruction of gatekeeping decisions (Hamann and Beljean
2019). The evidence suggests that Robert K. Merton (1910–2003, here-
after RKM), one of the most influential sociologists of his time, had a
keen awareness that only access to the private knowledge of scholars
could provide a window into this aspect of the world of the (social) sci-
ences, which remains largely unknown (Santoro 2017: 3). Consequently,
he decided to arrange for his meticulously archived correspondence with
hundreds of key scholars and former students to be made publicly acces-
sible after his death (Dubois 2014). The material is unique because it
provides an unobstructed look inside the secret gardens of academia. This
gift to posterity allows us to gain deeper insights into the kind of power
that elite scientists can exercise.
Merton’s papers, archived at Columbia University, contain approxi-
mately 1460 letters of recommendation written between 1938 and 2002.4
As shown in Fig. 7.2, RKM was an avid writer of such letters, which were
sent to selection committees at a number of academic institutions
throughout his professional career. The figure also reveals that for much
of that time he worked in a single department and that his books and
articles received the most attention during the 1960s.
What follows makes use of all archived recommendations not only to
shed light on RKM the scientist, but also to gain at least a glimpse into
the gatekeeping power of U.S. sociology’s elite during and shortly after
the peak of its “golden age” (see Chap. 3).

4
This study is based solely on archive material contained in boxes 103–117 of the “Robert
K. Merton Papers, 1928–2003,” archived in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Columbia
University. As letters of recommendation can be found in other boxes as well, it is likely that the
total exceeds 1460.
176 P. Korom

Fig. 7.2 Trajectories of RKM’s recommendations and article citations. The former
include 1460 recommendations contained in boxes 103–117 of the his papers,
while citations of his articles (N = 644) in the flagship journals American
Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology were identified using the
Social Sciences Citation Index (1956–present). The chronological segments in the
figure refer to the various stages of RKM’s career at Columbia University

 he Case of RKM—An Eminent Scholar

T
Crisscrossing Social Circles
When the White House announced in 1994 that RKM would be the first
sociologist to receive, from U.S. President Bill Clinton, the National
Medal of Science, which is the nation’s highest scientific honor, he is
reported to have perceived the award as proper recognition of his work:
“I am deeply moved by this matchless honor, the more so for the peer
recognition it gives the sociology of science” (Merton 1994). In many
ways, a rather “improbable life trajectory” (Fleck 2015) had led him to
finally reach the pinnacle of scientific achievement.
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 177

RKM was born Meyer R. Schkolnick, “almost at the bottom of the

social structure,” in the slums of South Philadelphia to working class
Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (Hunt 1961). Awarded a schol-
arship to attend Philadelphia’s Temple University, he was recruited as a
research assistant by the sociologist George E. Simpson (1904–1988). In
1931, at the age of 21, RKM won yet another fellowship that took him to
Harvard to complete his graduate work in sociology. The eminent soci-
ologist Pitirim E. Sorokin (1889–1968), rather than the university, was
the lodestone that drew him to Harvard (Merton 1997: 286). By his sec-
ond year there, Sorokin and Merton had already published together. His
highly regarded publication “Puritanism, Pietism, and Science” (Merton
1936) became the young author’s seventh predoctoral published scholarly
article, which prompts one to think of him as a prodigy (Sica 2017).
A freshly minted PhD, RKM was appointed as an instructor at Harvard
in 1936—a temporary appointment in bleak economic times. He later
recalled writing nearly 100 letters to colleagues inquiring about jobs, and
Tulane University in New Orleans was the only one that offered him a
faculty position (Holton 2004: 509). In 1942 he accepted an appoint-
ment as assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University—the
“Florence” of the sociological renaissance after the Second World War
(Coser and Nisbet 1975: 6)—where he spent the remainder of his aca-
demic career (see Fig. 7.2).
RKM was to become arguably the most outstanding polymath work-
ing in such diverse fields as the history of social thought, the sociology of
science and deviance, and empirical methods. His intellectual impact
extended well beyond the social sciences, and the many professional rec-
ognitions he received for research achievements, ranging from approxi-
mately 30 honorary degrees to the National Medal of Science, suggest
that he could have won the Nobel Prize if it had existed for sociology.
To fully understand RKM’s role in (U.S.) sociology some further con-
textual information is needed that, while mentioned in most biographi-
cal accounts, is rarely explained in detail. Like most other of sociology’s
masterminds, he did not work in isolation but was at the very center of
various social circles that he crisscrossed. The following four circles appear
to have been especially important.
178 P. Korom

• Department of Sociology at Columbia University: RKM taught for more

than 40 years at Columbia University (see Fig. 7.2), one of the major
centers for graduate education in U.S. sociology. Students remember
RKM as “a mesmerizing teacher, a magician in front of would-be pres-
tidigitators” (Cole 2004: 38). His courses, such as the legendary Soc.
215 (“The Analysis of Social Structure”) or Soc. 213–214 (“Social
Theory Applied to Social Research”) that even attracted non-­
sociologists (including stockbrokers from Wall Street) were a source of
inspiration to many. In an interview RKM stated: “As I think back on
the papers I’ve published over the years, the ones that engaged me the
most deeply derived from the lectures I developed for courses” (Persell
1984: 363). By developing and honing, often spontaneously, his ideas
in the classroom, RKM let students participate in his discoveries, epit-
omizing the role of the scholar scientist, and “by his example gave
substance and purpose to the sociological calling” (Gieryn 2004: 859).
These interactions helped to forge close, and sometimes life-long,
bonds between the teacher and his many students.5 RKM’s students at
Columbia who became leading sociologists include Peter Blau, Alvin
Gouldner, Lewis and Rose Coser, James S. Coleman, Suzanne Keller,
Seymour M. Lipset, Philip Selznick, and Viviana Zelizer.
• The Bureau of Applied Social Research: When the Viennese-born Paul
Lazarsfeld came to Columbia in 1940, the Office of Radio Research
moved with him and was quickly renamed the Bureau of Applied Social
Research (BASR)—the future “research laboratory” of the Department
of Sociology. The Bureau garnered resources from corporate and foun-
dation sponsors who called on sociologists for “applied” research. At the
BASR, RKM and Lazarsfeld cooperated closely on various research
projects, with the former serving as the Bureau’s Associate Director
between 1941 and 1971 (Lazarsfeld 1975). Due in no small measure to
the passage of the GI Bill in 1944, successive cohorts of mature and
talented students helped bring intellectual excitement to the Bureau in
the late 1940s and 1950s (Merton 1997: 292). The BASR projects typi-
5
The closeness of these teacher–student relationships is revealed in dedications. RKM’s book con-
tribution “Opportunity Structure: The Emergence, Diffusion, and Differentiation of a Sociological
Concept, 1930s–1950s” is, for example, dedicated to “James S. Coleman, my onetime student,
longtime colleague, enduring friend and teacher.”
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 179

cally involved graduate students and non-tenured, (mostly) neophyte

social scientists working in an enthusiastic environment. RKM helped
these junior colleagues learn the trade and closely supervised what they
wrote (Fox 2011: 103). Former research assistants and research associ-
ates at the BASR include Richard Alba, David Elesh, Eva Etzioni-
Halevy, Barney Glaser, Mary J. Huntington, Patricia Kendall, Charles
Kadushin, and Hanan Selvin.
• Editing as an Almost Life-Long Passion: Columbia University alumnus
David Caplovitz estimates that “Merton has spent from a third to a
half of his professional life reading and commenting on the work of
others” (1977: 146). RKM himself stated that as soon as sociology
became his vocation, editing became his avocation, which becomes
evident from the self-reported fact that he contributed editorially to
around 250 books and 2000 articles over the course of 60 years
(Merton 1997: 293). It is easy to imagine that he might have been a
professional editor had he not been an academic: RKM was known for
going over manuscripts line by line, writing detailed and voluminous
memos, explaining flaws and suggesting means of correcting them. For
almost three decades he worked as a consulting editor for Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, which published works by noted sociologists such as
Lewis Coser and Arthur Stinchcombe. He found editing rewarding
because it both enabled him to stay in touch with his former students
and build new relationships with those whom he described as
“colleagues-at-a-distance.”
• Russell Sage and Other Scholarly Associations: If RKM traveled abroad for
professional reasons, it was only for very short periods. He exerted
mostly local influence by serving, inter alia, as president of the American
Sociological Association (1957); a trustee of the Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1953–1975); a Resident Scholar of
the Russell Sage Foundation (1979–1999); or by sitting on the boards
of the Social Science Research Council (1968–1970), the American
Academy of Sciences (1969–1971), the National Academy of Sciences
(1971–1978), and Barnard College (1978–1986). RKM’s affiliations
with these and other research institutions enabled him not only to act
as a gatekeeper, offering expert advice to local decision makers, but also
connected him to academics from various backgrounds. While working
180 P. Korom

at the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF), he came to know, for example,

the anthropologist Philippe Bourgeois and the medical sociologist
Howard Freeman. During stays at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), he became better acquainted with
the philosopher Yehuda Elkana, the political theorist Yaron Ezrahi, the
Polish sociologist Adam Podgorecki, and the science historian
Arnold Thackray.

These intellectual circles also served as support or friendship networks,

providing their members with contacts and opportunities job seekers
might not otherwise have heard about. RKM notably assisted his former
students and colleagues in various ways, ranging from offering academic
advice and (unpaid) editorial work to writing letters of recommendation.
Another characteristic worth pointing out is RKM’s extraordinary
attention to language. Achieving clarity, precision, and unambiguous
meaning of sociological concepts characterized his intellectual style and
seems to have been “an almost obsessive preoccupation” (Sztompka 1986:
98). It is not an exaggeration to claim that no other wordsmith in the
social sciences coined more sociological key concepts (“Mertonisms”) qua
linguistic innovation, from “the Matthew effect” to “serendipity pattern.”
Linguistic elegance also characterizes Merton’s letters of recommenda-
tion, which is illustrated by a juxtaposition of an excerpt from a standard
recommendation printed in Lewis (1998: 88) with one by Merton that
comments on the same job candidate’s qualities:

He is normally extroverted and prefers to form close friendships with a few

rather than casual friendships with many. As a graduate student he gave
little attention to personal grooming, whereas on social occasions his
appearance was prepossessing. He has a good sense of humor which is often
masked by his usually serious manner.
I find him an engaging person. He is modest without being timid; con-
genial without being given to backslapping. He is an earnest person who
does not permit his seriousness of purpose to become solemnity. I should
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 181

think that he would fit in very well indeed in a liberal arts college (box 107,
folder: “G-General, 1936–1996, 6–7”).6

This example of RKM’s characteristically spare and straightforward

prose, artful and spiced with wit, deviates from the dry language found in
most letters of recommendation and leaves a long-lasting impression. His
powers of observation (based on his acquaintanceship with many scholars)
and linguistic elegance made him eminently suitable for writing effective
letters of recommendation.

 KM as Gate-Opener—Analysis of 1460
R
Recommendation Letters
All letters by RKM address an academic institution with a job opening, a
call for fellowships, or an ongoing nomination process for awards/mem-
berships, and are specifically written in favor of or against one or several
potential job candidates.7 Because RKM almost always devoted equal
space to each candidate, I decided that letters that recommend more than
one scholar should be entered multiple times into the register of all rec-
ommendations. Table 7.1 provides an overview of the register that con-
tains in total 1460 recommendations in favor of 560 scholars.
Approximately 65% are recommendations for academic positions
(assistant, associate, full professor) or administrative positions (e.g., dean
or departmental chairmanship) at U.S. universities. A quarter of the let-
ters are in support of applications for fellowships (e.g., Guggenheim,
SSRC, CASBS) or for visiting scholarships/professorships at universities.
The remaining 10% are recommendations for job positions at universi-
ties outside of the United States, for honorary degrees and awards (e.g.,

6
When quoting directly from a source, I will always indicate the box as well as the folder that holds
the cited letter so the reader can find the referenced archival material.
7
Disregarded were all other letters such as recommendation requests written by other persons (e.g.,
RKM’s former students) that are contained in boxes 103–117. Also excluded were letters that did
not fully correspond to the format of recommendations, such as student assessments and some
recommendations for student grants or loans, that are uniform in format but contain very lit-
tle text.
182 P. Korom

Table 7.1 Register of recommendations (N = 1460)

Recommendations for … Freq. Percent
Academic and administrative positions at U.S. 942 64.5
universities
Fellowships and visiting professorships/ 365 25.0
scholarships
Academic and administrative positions at 103 7.1
non-U.S. universities
Honorary degrees/prestigious awards 35 2.4
Membership in honorific societies 15 1.0
Total 1460 100.0

American Sociological Association Career of Distinguished Scholarship),

or for memberships in honorific societies (e.g., American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society).
The 942 recommendations for academic posts at U.S. universities and
colleges that are mostly one or two pages long can be best categorized
using a classification scheme with three criteria:

1. Departmental prestige groupings: As already indicated, RKM wrote the

recommendations for applications submitted to a variety of academic
institutions. As the bulk of the job openings were in sociology, it seems
appropriate to classify the various letter recipients according to pres-
tige rank groupings developed for U.S. sociology. Such rankings that
are constructed from hiring patterns provide a good deal of continuity
across institutions. The rankings used here were constructed by
Weakliem et al. (2012) for the year 1965.
2. Relationship types: There were clearly different degrees of closeness
between the mentor RKM and his mentees. In many letters RKM
wrote about how long and in what capacity he knew an applicant. The
following are examples for such text passages:
I came to know Nikos Passas some fifteen years ago through his work on
anomie and deviant behavior and have since kept in quite close touch with
his further research and writing (box 113, folder “Passas, Nikos,
1989–1995”).
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 183

Full disclosure requires me to report that Harriet [Zuckerman] and I first

came upon Jon Cole back in the 1960s when, as an undergraduate at
Columbia College, he applied for admission to our graduate seminar in the
sociology of science (box 105, folder “Cole, Jonathan, 1968–1995”).
I regard myself as a close friend (though one still capable, I trust, of fairly
detached judgement of his work and capacities). For the last nine years or
so, he [Herbert Hyman] has been a colleague in the same department at
Columbia (box 109, folder “HO-End, 1937–1992”).
3. Letter types: Recommendation letters have at least four different types
of “back-stories”: (a) RKM heard of an opening and proposed a quali-
fied candidate on his own initiative; (b) a colleague at Columbia
passed on a recommendation request; (c) an employing institution
contacted RKM directly asking for his opinion on a job candidate
(who indicated RKM as a reference); (d) the applicant contacted
RKM asking him to write a recommendation letter and send it to the
potential employing institution.

To refer to these three different relationship types illustrated in the

extracts above, RKM frequently used the following labels: “colleague-at-
a-distance” (for Passas), “former student” (for Cole), and “immediate col-
league” (for Hyman). I adopted the same terminology and classified
scholars whom RKM never or only occasionally met in person as “col-
leagues-at-a-distance.” “Former students” might only have attended a
single RKM course or have been his teaching assistants; this category thus
has the most heterogeneity in relationship closeness. “Immediate col-
leagues” either shared with RKM (temporarily) the same working spaces
or worked closely with him over several years. The label “immediate col-
league” therefore stands—in contrast to “colleague-at-a-distance”—for
significant relationship closeness. Further, it was decided to classify
­students-turned-immediate colleagues (e.g., Peter M. Blau and Seymour
M. Lipset) as students.
Even though the archived material suggests that the last two variants
were the two most frequent ones, it is impossible to differentiate unam-
biguously between the various scenarios based on the text material
184 P. Korom

collected.8 The only distinction that can be inductively established is

between letters that give textual cues that RKM responded to incoming
letters from the employing institution (“response letters”) and letters that
do not contain such cues (“letters”). Typical clues were coded and might
contain the following phrases: “This is a much belated response to your
request…,” “I am glad to tell you what I can about …,” “your letter
reached me….”
Figure 7.3 cross-tabulates all three classification criteria. What imme-
diately catches the eye is that the bulk of all recommendations were in
favor of former students and concerned job openings at non-elite
U.S. universities and colleges. More letters were sent to middling

Fig. 7.3 Mentor–mentee relationships in the 942 recommendations made by

RKM to U.S. universities and colleges. Prestige categories adopted from Weakliem
et al. (2012). Top 10 departments: Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, Michigan,
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Berkeley, Princeton, N Carolina, Yale. Top 20 departments:
preceding list plus Penn, Ohio State, UCLA, Washington, Cornell, Northwestern,
Iowa, Illinois–Urbana, Stanford, NYU

8
The following text passage, for example, could be interpreted as depicting letter type (a) or (d): “I
have just learned that you are chairing the Faculty Recruitment Committee there just as I, in turn,
am chairing the Placement Committee here. In that capacity, you might have noticed that I sent an
unsolicited letter a while ago strongly supporting the application of one of our recent graduates,
Steven R. Cohen” (box 105, folder “Cohen, Steven, 1981–1983.”)
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 185

New York-based departments rather than to the top 10 departments of

the discipline (including Columbia University). It further transpired that
RKM wrote slightly more recommendations for colleagues-at-a-distance
than for immediate colleagues. Interestingly, letters outnumber response
letters, which suggests that former students and colleagues typically con-
tacted RKM directly, rather than simply providing his name as a refer-
ence on application letters.
Going through the list of 560 applicants for whom RKM gave detailed
evaluations, one can find at first glance considerable diversity. The list
includes, as one might expect, RKM’s former teaching and research assis-
tants (e.g., Rosa Haritos, Suzanne Keller), close collaborators (e.g.,
Patricia Kendall, Harriet Zuckerman), and friends (e.g., Lewis A. Coser,
Alvin W. Gouldner) who pursued academic careers in sociology. However,
there are also scholars who achieved renown in other disciplines, includ-
ing the historian of science Arnold Thackray, the political scientist Yaron
Ezrahi, and the anthropologist Herbert Passin.
Although the majority of applicants were from the United States, RKM
assisted scholars who studied or taught there but who subsequently worked
outside the country, including sociologists Wolf Lepenies and Anthony
Giddens, and philosopher of science Yehuda Elkana. Furthermore, while
some remained relatively obscure, one does find two Nobel Prize win-
ners: the psychologist-turned-economist Daniel Kahneman and the
writer Saul Bellow). Finally, there are individuals who completed a PhD
but decided that academic life was not for them.
A systematic analysis, however, reveals many commonalities between
recommendees (see Table 7.2).9 Even if the population is far from uni-
form regarding academic specializations, sociologists are clearly domi-
nant. About 40% went through the Columbia PhD program; the core
group among all mentees thus consists of Columbia sociologists. Half of
the other mentees received their PhD from other top-tier departments

9
The main biographical sources consulted were the biographical dictionary American Men and
Women of Science (McKeen Cattell 1973), as well as its supplements and official curricula vitae.
Other sources include Marquis Who Is Who in America; obituaries published in the members’ news-
letter “Footnotes” of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and in the New York Times; the
ASA Biographical Directory; short CVs published on the digital platform LinkedIn; author biogra-
phies accompanying monographs or (JSTOR-archived) journal articles; and, most importantly, the
Columbia Libraries Catalog (CLIO) that contains doctoral dissertations.
186 P. Korom

Table 7.2 Profiles of mentees recommended by RKM

Biographical information Freq. (in %)
Data availability
Some reliable biographical information available 504 (90.0%)
No reliable biographical information available   56 (10.0%)
Data source
U.S. Men and Women of Science and Supplement 146 (26.1%)
Official CV 110 (19.6%)
Other sources 248 (44.3%)
Missing   56 (10.0%)
Gender
Female 131 (23.4%)
Country of birth
United States 348 (61.1%)
European countries   79 (14.1%)
Israel   10 (1.8%)
Canada    7 (1.2%)
Russia    6 (1.1%)
Other countries   15 (2.7%)
Missing   95 (17.0%)
Discipline
Sociology 376 (67.1%)
Psychiatry/psychology   23 (4.1%)
History   21 (3.8%)
Political science   16 (2.9%)
Philosophy   10 (1.8%)
Other disciplines   27 (4.8%)
Missing   87 (15.5%)
PhD from …
Columbia 226 (40.4%)
Harvard   48 (8.6%)
Chicago   28 (5.0%)
UC Berkeley   13 (2.3%)
Yale   12 (2.1%)
Wisconsin–Madison    7 (1.3%)
Stanford    7 (1.3%)
Other PhD-granting universities 143 (25.5%)
Missing   76 (13.6%)
PhD year
Min. 1922
Mean 1963
Max. 2009
(continued)
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 187

Table 7.2 (continued)

Biographical information Freq. (in %)
Mentor–mentee relationship
Weak or strong involvement with the BASRa 115 (20.5%)
Coauthor/coeditor   22 (3.9%)
Research/teaching assistant to RKMb   15 (2.7%)
First full professorship from …c
Other departments 198 (35.4%)
Top 10 U.S. departments in sociology   84 (15.0%)
Other departments in New York   56 (10.0%)
No full professorship   43 (7.7%)
Top 20 U.S. departments in sociology   38 (6.8%)
Missing 141 (25.2%)
560 (100%)
a
Involvement with the BASR is indicated by mentions of a person’s name in the
“Bureau of Applied Social Research Records, 1944–1976” (Columbia University,
Rare Book & Manuscript Library Collections)
b
A person is “coded” as a research or teaching assistant of RKM only if mentioned
as such in recommendation letters
c
Same classification as in Fig. 7.3

(e.g., Harvard), and the other half from rather average departments.
Perhaps the most striking result is that about 20% were associated in vari-
ous ways with the BASR. To give some examples: After completing her
PhD at Harvard, the eminent medical sociologist Renée Fox joined a
medical education project at the Bureau; quantitative sociologist Richard
Alba was employed by the Bureau as a computer programmer; and
Cynthia F. Epstein investigated success stories of black professional
women at the BASR.
Going through the 2065 pages of text material, one notices there are
only a few fixed expressions that RKM used repeatedly. In one phrase
extensively used to conclude letters, he referred to himself as a “tough
codger” who expresses praise most reluctantly. Even more frequently he
described himself as a “curmudgeon” with high standards:

By way of context, a word about what is for me an enthusiastic endorse-

ment. During a long lifetime of teaching, I’ve evidently acquired notoriety
as a curmudgeon (in the strict sense of being difficult if not impossible to
satisfy). But, as you see, I do make an effort to recognize scholarly merit
(box 113, folder “Poros, Maritsa, 1999–2000”).
188 P. Korom

Given this self-description, it seems appropriate to investigate how

critically RKM assessed job applicants in his letters. To do so, I consid-
ered different types of reservations expressed. Table 7.3 differentiates, on
one hand, between straight rejections of candidates perceived to be
unqualified, research that is (heavily) criticized; letters in which candi-
dates are judged to be middling rather than outstanding; and letters that
mention limitations of a candidate. On the other hand, there were letters
in which RKM makes clear that he cannot give a well-­grounded opinion
given some of his own limitations. Finally, letters were coded in which
RKM abstained completely from giving an evaluation because of his
insufficient knowledge of the candidate.
The table indicates that in most cases RKM transmitted a completely
positive impression of the applicant to the evaluators. Whether phrases
(e.g., “I can tell you next to nothing of her capabilities as a teacher”) had
the potential to raise doubts for the evaluators (because they convey the
writer’s uncertainty about the applicant) is impossible to know. In

Table 7.3 Types of reservation and hedging expressed by RKM in his

recommendations
Number of In percent of
Types of reservation letters all letters (%)
No first-hand knowledge of teaching 147 10.1
Not knowing him/her closely 58 4.0
Not kept up with his work; seen little of her/him 56 3.8
in recent years
Not competent to judge him/her as a specialist 38 2.6
He/she is not … [top-notch]; he/she is rather … 29 2.0
[reliable] than … [brilliant]
His/her limitation/weakness is … 27 1.8
No first-hand knowledge of administrative 25 1.7
abilities
Cannot be of help; must abstain from giving any 22 1.5
opinion
Cannot recommend; he/she does not qualify; do 12 0.8
not support the nomination of …
The research statement is … [sketchy, 11 0.8
unintelligible mishmash]
425 29.1
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 189

general, one can summarize that the (archived) letters of recommenda-

tion are overwhelmingly couched in laudatory terms.
Although we cannot know which requests RKM received from various
departments that were interested in filling a vacancy, it is likely that he
was asked to evaluate a candidate’s “qualifications for teaching, research,
and participation as a colleague,” which was the usual formula Lionel
S. Lewis encountered in his analysis of 180 letters of recommendation
written by sociologists during the late 1960s (Lewis 1998: 51).
Partially building on Lewis’s seminal study, and to systematically ana-
lyze recommendations for the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, Tsay et al.
(2003) developed a differentiated classification scheme that allows one to
assess types of classification criteria used to exercise gatekeeping discre-
tion. This scheme was adopted with only minor modifications. For exam-
ple, the category “physical description” was completely dropped, as RKM
never described someone as “attractive,” “virile,” “well dressed,” and so
on. It is important to note that words/phrases and not sentences were
used as coding units. As an example, the sentence “He is a man of the
highest integrity, with a real zest for inquiry and an obvious capacity for
relati[ng] himself to others” received three separate codes: “academic/
intellectual integrity” (moral character), “intellectual curiosity/drive/
enthusiasm/zest” (intellectual desire), and “at ease socially” (social
competence).
A systematic analysis of all RKM’s recommendations written in favor
of students reveals that he commented frequently on the academic or
analytical abilities of his (former) students and less often on their techni-
cal skills and personality traits. Interestingly, his references to personality
and social competence vary according to the student’s gender. When
RKM was asked to assess the capacities of men, he tended to give more
space to personal maturity or affability (e.g., “pleasant,” “friendly,”
“quiet,” modest”) and the ability to handle social interactions (e.g.,
“cooperative,” “congenial,” “likeable,” “a nice guy to have around”). The
most plausible explanation for this finding is that RKM felt that depart-
ments were more anxious about recruiting men who could disrupt social
relationships and upset the status quo, while in the case of females such
concerns seemed to be less prevalent.
190 P. Korom

More generally, RKM felt it was necessary—like most writers of rec-

ommendations in sociology around the same time (Lewis 1998: xii)—to
comment on academic and extra-academic qualities (see Fig. 7.4).
Although the selection committee made the final decision, recommenda-
tions may have had a significant influence on the opinion-forming pro-
cesses. The only possible way of ascertaining whether RKM’s
recommendations made a difference is to match all available information
on academic careers with data that can be gained from the analysis of
recommendation letters. To make transparent exactly how a rough indi-
cator of “recommendation success” was developed, I provide one illustra-
tive example that is especially difficult to process because the letter of

Fig. 7.4 Evaluation criteria used in RKM’s recommendations for students.

Considered are 942 recommendations written in favor of (former) students.
Categories were dichotomously coded (1 = category applies) and aggregated at
the level of master categories—that is, general academic ability. The values indi-
cate, in percentage points, the relative share of each master category. Calculations
were conducted separately for male and female students
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 191

recommendation does not, unusually, contain any information on the

vacant position.
In a letter dated December 9, 1947, RKM recommended his former
student Seymour M. Lipset to E. W. Strong of UC Berkeley without
mentioning the post for which Lipset applied (box 110, folder “L-General,
1939–1999, 4–5”). It was decided to code “success” (=1) for the category
“associate professorship” because of the proximity in time between the
recommendation and Lipset taking up an associate professorship at
Berkeley. More generally, I decided to apply this logic whenever (1) the
vacant position was not indicated in the letters, and (2) recommenda-
tions preceded the job taken by one or two years.
Coding became more complicated when RKM recommended the
same person to several institutions using only slightly modified letters. To
use an analogy, this can be compared to someone shooting several arrows
at the same time hoping that at least one will hit the target. “Success”
would then be defined as just one of the many recommendations leading
to an appointment. Thus, it was decided to consider jointly all recom-
mendations for a scholar given in the same year and to code “failure” (=0)
only if all letters turned out to be unsuccessful.
Table 7.4 presents the success rates for different types of job categories.
Obviously, success differs significantly between two kinds of appoint-
ments: promotions within an organization (closed personnel system) and
job postings that are open to outsiders (open personnel system). In cases
of (internal) promotions to associate or full professorships, the success
rate lies between 90 and 100%, which suggests that nearly all scholars

Table 7.4 Success rates for candidates recommended by RKM

No. of scholars Success rate
Application for (n) (%)
Assistant professorship 52 42.3
Associate professorship 42 57.1
Full professorship 73 42.5
Promotion to associate professor 35 97.2
Promotion to full professor 45 86.7
CASBS fellowship 40 15
Guggenheim fellowship 29 34.5
IAS fellowship 10 30.0
192 P. Korom

asking RKM for a recommendation had achieved an outstanding record

that qualified them for promotion.
In contrast, RKM’s support for external candidates is marked by sub-
stantially lower chances of appointment. The rates are lower for assistant
and full professorships than for associate professorships, which can be
explained, at least in part, by the difficulties of entering the marketplace
directly after receiving a PhD and the scarcity of full professorships. The
general take-away is that about 40% of all scholars supported by RKM
succeeded in acquiring the academic job. Interestingly, the success rate is
the lowest for fellowships. The reasons for this are far from obvious. All
three considered fellowships are, however, prestigious and known for a
rather rigorous selection process. Furthermore, there was a larger applicant
pool to choose from for (one-year) fellowships than for faculty positions.
It is important to note that “success” is based on recurrent efforts by
RKM to assist his mentees in establishing themselves professionally,
which becomes apparent through the sheer number of recommendations
per scholar. To give a few examples: RKM recommended Gary A. Abraham
20 times, Stephen Cole 16 times, and Henry Etzkowitz 10 times.
There is also another possible explanation for why RKM placing a “seal
of approval” on job applications may have been very likely beneficial to
the advancement of careers—namely, the compelling prose style of affir-
mation artfully employed by RKM. The bulk of the letters are full of
enthusiasm for promising scholarship. Only in very few letters does RKM
express reservations. Rhetoric was in general a very important resource to
RKM (Simonson 2010: 215), and in his letters of recommendation he
brought the “art of persuasion” as close to perfection as an art form can be.
To convince members of selection committees of the suitability of can-
didates’ qualifications, he often employed three rhetorical strategies—
ethos, logos, and pathos—described in On Rhetoric (Aristotle 2007): First,
he enhanced his already well-established credibility and trustworthiness
(ethos). Second, he increased the persuasive power of his letters by allow-
ing the reader to easily follow his logic (logos). Third, he aimed at keeping
readers in a certain frame of mind by putting himself in the shoes of the
committee members or by aiming to infect others with his excitement
(pathos).
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 193

In his letters RKM bolsters his credibility by detailing his depth of

knowledge of the job candidate. In some cases, the reader becomes easily
convinced that RKM is the best available person to provide information:

First, full disclosure: My opinion of Tom is based on a good deal of direct

experience. I have known him since he began his graduate work at
Columbia back in the early 70s and we have since worked together in vari-
ous scholarly capacities (box 108, folder “Gieryn, Thomas, 1974–1996”).

In other cases, RKM shows personal humility when pointing to his

own limitations regarding the selected candidate’s qualifications, which
makes his overall judgment of the candidate even more credible (because
the reader tends to suspect that RKM is deeply knowledgeable about all
other qualifications):

This particular investigation deals with matters directly germane to the

Juvenile and Family Court so that, in all truth, I am not in a posi­tion to say
anything about her competence in this respect. However, I do know her as
a person of utmost integrity and impressive intellect (box 109, folder
“J-General, 1940–1942, 1958–1992, 1–2”).

Further, RKM provides “proof ” for his judgments and clearly struc-
tures his assessment. What is striking is how RKM frames this “proof ”:

It is indicative that his classical book, CONSTRUCTING SOCIAL

THEORIES, is being reprinted twenty years after its first appearance (box
115, folder “Smith R.C.-Stinchcombe”).

His substantial monograph Interviewing in Social Research is by general

assent the most thoroughgoing analysis of interviewing procedures avail-
able in the field (box 109, folder “HO-End, 1937–1992).

All this as well as his recent monograph on the sociology of inflation and
recession—MAKING ENDS MEET—has resulted in his being nationally
identified as the sociological authority on the subject of the low-income
consumer (box 105, folder “CA-CM, 1946–1990, 2–3”).
194 P. Korom

One of his early works, The Sociology of Conflict, is by all odds the best
monograph on the subject in any language accessible to me. It has had an
immense influence in the years since it was first published (box 105, folder
“COS-End, 1948–1992”).

These comments not only have a clear positive tone, but also present
the recommended scholar as belonging to the best. The very concept of
academic excellence presumes a well-defined hierarchy, and RKM posi-
tions his protégés indirectly at the very top.
Finally, RKM refers to the institution’s search for qualified new mem-
bers and effectively conveys a sense of understanding the depart-
ment’s needs:

I should think that Ms. Moseley might be of particular interest to you in

connection with your strong program in comparative sociology at Brown.
I hope that it all works out (box 111, folder “M-General, 1945–1996”).

It so happens that we have two young sociologists who would, I think,

meet your needs admirably. The Department here at Columbia strongly
supports both men as candidates for the post. … If there is any further
information which I may be able to provide, please let me know (box 114,
folder “SA-SE, 1946–1992“).

RKM not only identifies with the members of selection committees

and makes a case for how the candidate aligns with their interests, but
also may have influenced the letters’ readers with his enthusiasm about
the candidate:

It is not often that one can continuously applaud a scholar’s contributions

to humanistic learning over a span of several decades. But that is inevitably
the case with the scholarly work of David Joravsky (box 109, folder
“Joravsky, David, 1972–1990”).

It is with enthusiasm that I answer your letter of inquiry about Arthur

L. Stinchcombe. For some time, he has seemed to me to be the outstanding
sociologist of his years in the country (box 115, folder “Smith
R.C.-Stinchcombe”).
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 195

The balanced mix of ethos, logos, and pathos combined with elegant
prose that is often marked by vitality make up the typical Mertonian
recommendation style. Put somewhat exaggeratedly: a writer as compel-
ling as RKM who could make anybody seem worth hiring is very likely
to have been an effective writer of recommendations who could open
doors for other scholars.

Elite Power in Sociology?

The concept of power is sociologically amorphous, but often it is under-
stood as “power-over.” Max Weber famously defined power-over as
being the probability that one actor within a social relationship is in the
position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the
basis on which this probability rests (Weber 1968: 152). This notion
implies that there are powerful, if not all-powerful elites and powerless
subalterns. Are the members of sociology’s elite really vested with power
over their peers?
There is little doubt that many eminent sociologists accrue significant
institutional power. They do not, however, have free rein to decide, for
example, which candidates should be promoted, or which journal article
should be rejected. In his autobiography Wanderlust in Academia the
Berkeley sociologist and former director of the CASBS, Neil Smelser,
allows the reader to look “behind the scenes” of the establishment in
the social sciences (Smelser 2004). Smelser was among the most influ-
ential U.S. sociologists of his generation, evident from his nickname,
“Mr. Social Science”, and his roles as editor-in-chief of the authorita-
tive International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2001),
editor of the American Sociological Review (1962–1965) and chairman
of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Selection Committee
(1996–2012).
In Wanderlust Smelser reflects on these and other gatekeeping activi-
ties. With regard to the ASR editorship he informs the reader that while
he had, in general, to cooperate closely with external reviewers as well as
with editorial board members, he did have some room left for editorial
196 P. Korom

maneuvering (“taking a few bets on publishing articles known to be con-

troversial”). Thinking back on his chairmanship of the Selection
Committee he remembers “vigorous disagreements and heated conflicts
between committee members,” which he settled by adopting a “non-­
pushy authoritarian” style—for example, by “proclaiming consensus
when there really wasn’t consensus.”
All this suggests that while Smelser certainly exercised the role of an
important gatekeeper, his power was limited by the fact that most deci-
sions had to be coordinated with peers with formal or informal veto
rights. Moreover, Smelser himself was convinced that such a thing as a
sociological or social-science establishment in power terms did not exist
as “things are too fragmented and decentralized to permit that character-
ization” (Smelser 2004: 90, 217–19).
Together with the observation that the role of elite scholars in the
review processes of leading journals of the discipline is, at least in quanti-
tative terms, diminishing over time, one must tentatively conclude that
to speak of elite power in sociology is at best somewhat misleading. This
is because even the most influential gatekeepers cannot conceal their
decisions from peers with whom they must regularly interact and whose
judgments they need to take into consideration. That having been said,
elite members can have a lasting impact on the discipline, not only
through their scholarship or through their role as institution builders—
think of Albion Small and the founding of the American Journal of
Sociology—but also through their advisory roles.
The analysis of RKM’s professional engagements suggests thinking of
him not only, or primarily as a “gatekeeper,” but rather as a “gate-opener”
who keeps watch at the door but looks for ways to let people in, rather
than locking them out. Thereby he is using his own reputation to open
routes to success for others in his circle. Then again, was RKM, owing to
his scientific authority, really a more effective gate-opener than the many
other non-eminent professors in U.S. sociology pushing their mentees?
The answer is obvious: No one knows exactly. A definite conclusion
can only be drawn if letters of less renowned professors of the time are
systematically researched as well. What can be said with at least some
certainty is that without RKM’s dedication to fostering the careers of col-
leagues and former students, the faculty composition of U.S. sociology
 7 Elites as Gatekeepers 197

would have looked very different. Are more contemporary elite members
less influential when it comes to helping colleagues and students find
jobs? Yet again, one cannot know. The existing material that can be con-
sulted to verify or falsify personal views is unfortunately limited to the
correspondence of scholars of the past (e.g., RKM, Talcott Parsons or
Seymour M. Lipset). This material, however, gives indisputable evidence
of the importance of master–apprentice relationships in the job search—
a form of “soft” power that is clearly distinct from the sort of domination
sociologists often have on their minds when writing about power.

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Appendices

Appendix A1: Ranking of sociologists

considered to be comparable in stature to
economists awarded the Nobel Prize
No. Scholar No. Scholar
1 Bourdieu, Pierre 19 Becker, Gary
2 Goffman, Erving 20 Massey, Douglas
3 Parsons, Talcott 21 Becker, Howard S.
4 Giddens, Anthony 22 Putnam, Robert D.
5 Merton, Robert K. 23 Goldthorpe, John
6 Foucault, Michel 24 Collins, Randall
7 Blau, Peter M. 25 DiMaggio, Paul
8 Strauss, Anselm 26 Castells, Manuel
9 Coleman, James S. 27 Bell, Daniel
10 Berger, Peter 28 Bauman, Zygmunt
11 Duncan, Otis 29 Hochschild, Arlie
12 Habermas, Jürgen 30 Gouldner, Alvin
13 Granovetter, Mark 31 Inglehart, Ronald F.
14 Portes, Alejandro 32 Latour, Bruno
15 Mills, C. Wright 33 McAdam, Douglas
16 Tilly, Charles 34 Allison, Paul
17 Lipset, Seymour M. 35 Wacquant, Loïc
18 Beck, Ulrich 36 Garfinkel, Harold
(continued)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 219
P. Korom, Star Sociologists, Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences,
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220 Appendices

(continued)
No. Scholar No. Scholar
37 Meyer, John 45 Esping-Andersen, Gøsta
38 Smelser, Neil 46 Erikson, Robert
39 Wallerstein, Immanuel 47 Wright, Erik O.
40 Luhmann, Niklas 48 Burawoy, Michael
41 Powell, Walter 49 Abbott, Andrew
42 Urry, John 50 Boudon, Raymond
43 Alexander, Jeffrey 51 Elster, Jon
44 Lazarsfeld, Paul
Information on all Nobel Laureates can be found here: https://www.nobelprize.
org/prizes/lists/all-prizes-in-economic-sciences

Appendix A2: Department Rankings

Economics Sociology
Rank University Rank University
Top 5 Top 5
1 MIT 1 Harvard
2 Harvard 2 UC Berkeley
3 Stanford 3 Oxford
4 Princeton 4 Cambridge
5 Chicago 5 Chicago
Top 6–10 Top 6–10 a
6 Yale 6 Stanford
7 UC Berkeley 7 UC Los Angeles
8 Oxford 8 Yale
9 Minnesota 9 Columbia
10 Northwestern 10 LSE
Top 11–20 Top 11–20
11 LSE 11 Toronto
12 Pennsylvania 12 Princeton
13 Carnegie Mellon 13 ANU Canberra
14 Rochester 14 Michigan
15 UC Los Angeles 15 McGill
16 Wisconsin 16 National University,
Singapore
17 Michigan 16 British Columbia
18 Duke 18 Wisconsin

(continued)
 Appendices 221

(continued)
Economics Sociology
19 Cambridge 19 MIT
20 Columbia 20 Melbourne
Top 21–30 Top 21–30
21 CalTech 21 Manchester
22 UC San Diego 22 Peking
23 Penn State 23 New York
24 Maryland 24 Cornell
25 Johns Hopkins 25 Sydney
26 Brown 26 Duke
27 University College London 27 Edinburgh
28 New York 27 Pennsylvania
29 Toulouse 29 Monash
30 Stockholm School of Economics 30 Chinese University Hong
Kong
Top 31–40 Top 31–40
31 Purdue 31 Warwick
32 Cornell 31 Texas at Austin
33 Virginia 33 Amsterdam
34 Boston 34 New South Wales
35 The Hebrew University 35 Freie Universität Berlin
36 Illinois–Urbana 36 Johns Hopkins
37 Brussels/ECARES 37 Hong Kong
38 Queen’s University, Ontario 38 North Carolina
39 Aarhus 39 Leiden
40 Pittsburg 40 Illinois–Urbana
Top 41–50 Top 41–50
41 EHESS, Paris 41 UC Santa Barbara
42 Pompeu Gabra 42 Humboldt Universität
Berlin
43 Iowa 42 UC San Diego
44 SUNY–Stony Brook 44 UNAM, Mexico
45 Western Ontario 45 Northwestern
46 British Columbia 46 Otago
47 Paris I 47 Copenhagen
48 ANU Canberra 48 Trinity College, Dublin
49 Louvain/CORE 49 Lancaster
50 Toronto 50 Sciences Po
Notes. For economics, rankings are taken from Amir and Knauff (2008), and
for sociology, from the QS World University Rankings edited by Quacquarelli
Symonds (2016)
a
Five elite institutions (i.e., École des Mines, Collège de France, EHESS, Max-Planck-­
Institute for Research into Conditions of Living, and the European University
Institute) that were not included in QS Ranking were assigned to the status
group “top 6–10” for sociology
222 Appendices

References
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Worldwide on the Basis of PhD Placement. The Review of Economics and
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Quacquarelli Symonds. 2016. QS World University Rankings. https://www.
topuniversities.com/university-rankings-articles/world-university-rankings/
qs-world-university-rankings-subject-2016-out-now
 Index1

A American Economic Review, 57, 120

Abbott, Andrew, 40, 75, 172, American Journal of Sociology (AJS),
173, 208 18, 42, 53, 57, 70, 114, 156,
Academies, 23, 28, 67, 70, 88, 159, 162, 172–174, 173n2,
114, 150 176, 196
Academy of Arts and Sciences, 182 American Men of Science (AMS), 22
American Academy of criticism, 23
Sciences, 179 star system, 24
French Academy of American Political Science
Sciences, 69, 87 Association (APSA), 142
National Academy of Sciences, American Psychological Association
22, 69, 108, 179 (APA), 94
Royal Swedish Academy of American Sociological Association
Sciences, 4, 27 (ASA), 108, 185n9
Agrégation de l’enseignement formerly: Society, 41, 43, 47n7
supérieur, 54 president, 43, 57, 94, 108,
Alexander, Jeffrey, 14, 52, 126n9, 208 141, 179
American Economic Association Section on Sociology of
(AEA), 40, 94 Culture, 164n12

1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 223
P. Korom, Star Sociologists, Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13938-3
224 Index

American Sociological Review (ASR), Bendix, Reinhard, 112, 139, 146, 151
18, 29, 41, 42, 47n7, 53, 57, Berger, Peter, 96, 212
70, 97, 99, 156, 162, 164, Berkeley, University of California,
172–174, 176, 195, 205 109, 116, 139, 153, 163
Anthropology, 3, 75, 202, 213 Biographical data, 22
Archival material, 24, 181n6 Biography, collective, 8, 103–129
Aristotle Blau, Peter M., 50, 73, 105, 112,
On Rhetoric, 192 152, 178, 183, 206
Aron, Raymond, 1, 153 The American Occupational
Awards, 2, 4, 5, 28, 30, 31, 67–70, Structure, 152
88, 89, 117, 150, 171, Blossfeld, Hans-Peter, 97
181, 202 Boltanski, Luc, 204
APA Award for Distinguished Boring, Edwin G., 24, 28
Scientific Contributions, 94 Boudon, Raymond, 30
European Amalfi Prize for Bourdieu, Pierre, 1, 3, 7, 30, 32, 73,
Sociology and Social 75, 78, 82, 84, 120, 137, 138,
Sciences, 68 151, 153–166, 208,
Fields Medal, 69 210–212, 212n3
Holberg Prize, 68 capital, 166, 211, 212
Médaille d´Or, 153 La Distinction, 155, 162
National Medal of Science, Reproduction in Education, Society
176, 177 and Culture, 155, 158
Princess of Asturias Award, 68 British Journal of Sociology (BJS), 71
W.E.B. DuBois Career of Burawoy, Michael, 113, 210
Distinguished Scholarship Bureau of Applied Social Research
Award, 94 (BASR), 48, 138, 178–179,
187, 207
Burgess, Ernest W., 19, 42, 43
B Butler, Judith, 112
Bales, Robert F., 133, 134, 206
Barber, Bernard, 49
Bauman, Zygmunt, 85, 105, 151, C
208, 210 Cambridge University, 22, 112, 136
Liquid Modernity, 105, 210 Canada, 54, 143, 203
Beck, Ulrich, 109, 151, 208, 210 Career, 22, 44, 54, 57, 65, 103–129,
Becker, Gary, 55 144, 153, 154, 172, 175, 192,
Becker, Howard S., 18, 85, 122 196, 201
Belgium, 54 academic, 6, 7, 58, 114–116, 125,
Bellah, Robert N., 49, 50, 208 127, 139, 177, 185, 190
 Index 225

data, 65 Collins, Randall, 51, 135, 173, 174,

mobility, 114, 117, 122–124, 207, 208
126, 128 The Sociology of Philosophies, 135
trajectory, 107, 114, 120–122, Columbia University, 15, 18, 22, 39,
124, 140 41, 45–51, 104–106, 112,
Castells, Manuel, 73, 108, 109, 116, 113, 120, 124, 128, 129, 138,
128, 208 139, 147, 163, 175–179,
Cattell, James McKeen, 15, 22–24, 183–185, 193, 194, 206
24n9, 185n9 Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Celebrity, 66 175n4, 176, 187
Center for Advanced Study in the Sociology Department, 105, 178
Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), Competition, 5, 15, 18, 164n12,
108n3, 112, 139, 202, 205
140, 179–181 Comte, Auguste, 205
Chicago, University of, 12, 17–19, Connell, Raewyn, 85, 204
42, 43, 45, 46, 50, 108, Content analysis, 159, 161
109, 113, 118, 120, 121, 126, Coser, Lewis, 17, 47n7, 48, 172,
128, 136, 153, 162, 163, 177–179, 185
184, 206 Crane, Diana, 56, 77
School of Sociology, 42, 47, 49 Cultural sociology, 6, 79, 156
Citation/citations, 5, 6, 27, 29–32, Curtis, Charles P., 104
41, 53, 56, 56n10, 57, 65,
67–70, 72n6, 75, 77, 78, 85,
90–94, 96, 97, 137, 142, D
145–147, 151, 154, 156, Darwin, Charles, 21
158–162, 173, 176, 208, Davis, Kingsley, 73, 75, 205–207
210, 213 Declaration of Principles of
ceremonial type, 26 Academic Freedom and
correlates of, 28, 31, 69, 88 Tenure, 16
longitudinal analysis, 99, 143 Derrida, Jacques, 137, 209
methodological type, 26, 29 Dictionary of National
ranking device, 31 Biography, 107
Cole, Jonathan, 26, 50, 65, 178, Diffusion, 7, 15, 82, 86, 137,
183, 210 153–165, 208, 211, 213
Cole, Stephen, 26, 50, 55, 65, 70, carrier groups, 166
192, 210 channels of, 155–157
Coleman, James S., 3, 50, 73, 105, patterns, 8, 210
106, 139, 141, 178, 178n5, DiMaggio, Paul, 75, 85, 155, 160,
206, 210 162, 208
226 Index

Discipline/disciplines, 2–8, 12, 13, Elite, 2–4, 6, 21, 31, 32, 45–47, 51,
15, 18–22, 26, 28, 29, 39–58, 58, 68–87, 103–129, 136,
65–68, 70, 77, 78, 82, 85, 90, 139, 147, 150, 152, 162, 163,
92–96, 106, 107, 112n5, 166, 171–197
114–118, 120, 122–124, 126, prestige, 1, 1n1, 5, 7, 8, 65–68,
127, 129, 133, 136, 137n3, 73, 78, 84, 107, 113, 114,
138, 142, 143, 145, 147, 151, 133, 201–214
158, 167, 172, 185, Ellwood, Charles A., 19
196, 201–214 Sociology and Modern Social
core of, 2, 31, 51, 55, 70, Problems, 19
96, 156 Eminence, 6–8, 21, 24–32, 50–52,
discipline-elite nexus, 201–208 65–68, 70–88, 90, 92–94, 96,
fragmentation of, 152, 154, 97, 99, 105, 109, 116, 122,
166, 210 202, 210, 213, 214
intellectual structure of, 7 fall from, 133–167
low-consensus, 5 half-life of, 4
openness of, 2, 5, 75, 112 rise to, 4, 117, 133–167, 209
social science, 31, 39, 40, 42, Encyclopedia Britannica, 93,
55–58, 75, 213 96, 108
what is, 39–44, 67 Eponyms, 93, 94, 96
See also Specialties Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, 85
Duke, James B., 12 Ethnomethodology, 133, 134
Duncan, Otis D., 73, 97, 152, 206 European Journal of Sociology
Durkheim, Émile, 18, 40, 51, 73, (EJS), 71
151, 203 European Sociological Review
L’Année sociologique, 18 (ESR), 99
Les règles de la méthode Excellence, 3, 4, 28, 30, 31, 49, 54,
sociologique, 40 112, 117, 194, 206
breeds excellence, 206

E
École des hautes études en F
sciences sociales (EHESS), Fellowship, 108, 108n3, 115, 126,
109, 153 138, 177, 181, 192
Eisenstadt, Shmuel, 3, 211 See also Guggenheim Foundation
Elias, Norbert, 209 Foucault, Michel, 73, 75,
Über den Prozess der 88, 96, 208
Zivilisation, 209 Fox, Renée C., 48n8, 49, 51, 179, 187
Eliot, Charles W., 13 France, 53, 54, 108n4, 153, 203, 204
 Index 227

Friedman, Milton, 96, 121 H

Fromm, Erich, 137, 209 Habermas, Jürgen, 73, 112, 128, 208
Fulbright program, 53 Habilitation, 54
Functionalism, 113n6, 204–206 Harper, William R., 13, 42
Harvard University, 12, 13, 15, 18,
45–50, 55, 103, 104, 112,
G 113, 118, 120–123, 126, 128,
Galton, Francis, 21, 22, 22n8 129, 133, 134, 139, 144, 147,
Garfield, Eugene, 26n10, 28, 155, 162, 177, 187, 206
69, 75 Department of Social
Garfinkel, Harold, 49, 134 Relations, 48, 49
Gatekeeper, 7, 171–176, 171n1, Society of Fellows, 104
179, 196 Hermanowicz, Joseph C., 106
gate-opener, 7, 181–196 Higher education, 12–14, 116, 129,
Generation, 43, 49–51, 67, 70, 73, 136, 153, 166
96, 105, 136, 137, 207, 208 Hirschi, Travis, 78
Genius, 21 Historical International Classification
Germany, 13–15, 54, 65, 104, 112, of Occupations (HISCO),
203, 204 109, 113
Berlin, University of, 14, 14n2 Hochschild, Arlie R., 85, 88
Giddens, Anthony, 30, 73, 85, 120, Hollingshead, August B., 17
125, 151, 185, 202, 208 “Climbing the Academic
Giddings, Franklin H., 16, Ladder,” 17
40, 41, 47 Homans, George C., 103, 104,
Gilman, Daniel C., 13 206, 207
Goffman, Erving, 73, 96, 153, Hughes, Everett C., 47, 50, 206
208, 211 Humboldt, Wilhelm, 13, 14, 14n2
Goldthorpe, John, 84, 154 Lehr-und Lernfreiheit, 13
Google Scholar, 30, 92–94, memorandum, 13, 14
92n12, 96
Gouldner, Alvin, 50, 52, 88, 178,
185, 205–207, 209 I
Granovetter, Mark, 211, 212, 212n2 Ideas, 5–8, 12–14, 17, 21, 22, 25,
embeddedness, 211, 212n2 40, 44, 45, 49, 50, 56, 58, 67,
Greenspan, Alan, 96 70, 73, 77, 78, 82, 85, 88, 93,
Guggenheim Foundation, 134–137, 142, 143, 150, 152,
108n3, 195 154–156, 162, 164n12, 166,
fellowship, 108, 112 172, 178, 203, 207–210,
Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 40 212, 214
228 Index

Ideas (cont.) Lazarsfeld, Paul F., 48, 49, 51, 73,

originality of, 8, 137 138, 178, 206, 207
transferability of, 211 Leontief, Wassily, 124
Institutionalization, 5, 50 Lewin, Kurt, 171, 172
International Encyclopedia of Lieber, Francis, 39
the Social (and Behavioral) Lindbeck, Assar, 27, 28n11
Sciences, 75, 108, 195 Linz, Juan, 139
Ivy League, 103 Lipset, Seymour, M., 6, 32, 47, 50,
51, 73, 77, 105, 137–152,
166, 178, 183, 191, 197,
J 206, 209–211
Johns Hopkins, 12, 13, 15, Class, Status, and Power, 146
18, 163 democracy research, 152
Journal/journals, 7, 19n5, 20, 22, Divided Academy, 150
28, 41, 47n7, 52–54, 56n10, lecture series, 138, 152
58, 67, 70–87, 92, 94, 96, Lipset-Zetterberg hypothesis, 151
122, 137, 137n3, 140–142, Political Man, 141, 142, 142n6,
147, 153, 158–162, 164, 146, 150–152, 209, 211
171–175, 195, 196, 201, 205, political sociology, 6, 140, 141,
206, 212 141n5, 152
citation, 5, 29, 156 Social Mobility in Industrial
sample analysed, 70 Society, 151
in sociology, 18, 19, 57, 70, 79, “Some Social Requisites of
82, 83, 85, 97–99, 120, 145, Democracy,” 147
146, 154–157, 173 London School of Economics
JSTOR, 19, 19n5, 146–149, 146n9, and Political Science
147n10, 185n9 (LSE), 109
Luhmann, Niklas, 78, 97, 128, 204
Lynd, Helen M., 19
K Middletown, 19, 20
Katz, Elihu, 154, 155 Lynd, Robert S., 19
Krugman, Paul, 96

M
L Market, 3, 20, 41, 43, 55, 58, 90,
Lamont, Michèle, 53, 137, 153, 156, 201
154, 164, 164n12, academic, 19
174, 209 labor, 7, 97
Latour, Bruno, 208 Marquis Who's Who, 108
 Index 229

Marshall, Alfred, 39 N
Marx, Karl, 51, 74, 85, 138, 151 Networks, 20, 50, 51, 125, 126,
Massey, Douglas, 208 135, 136, 154, 164, 180, 207,
Mead, George H., 17 210, 212, 212n2
Mind, Self, and Society, 17 Nobel, Alfred, 3, 27
Merton, Robert K., 1, 7, 15, 15n3, Nobel Prize, 4, 21, 27, 28, 68, 69,
21, 32, 48–51, 73, 75, 77, 78, 94, 96, 136, 177, 185
85, 88, 93, 96, 104, 106, 107, forecast, 28
113n6, 127, 137–139, 171n1, selection procedure, 28
175–197, 205–207, 211
editing, 179
mentees, 48 O
“Puritanism, Pietism, and Occupation, 109, 124, 164
Science,” 177 father’s, 108, 113, 117
recommendation success See also Profession
rate, 190 Ogburn, William F., 47, 49
“Science, Technology and Society
in Seventeenth-Century
England,” 107 P
Social Theory and Social Structure, Paradigm, 5, 45n6, 46, 47, 50, 54,
85, 159, 211 78, 133, 134, 204, 211
Methodology, 5, 6, 20, 25, 26, 29, Pareto, Vilfredo, 66, 66n1, 104, 133
40, 43n4, 48, 51, 57, Park, Robert E., 19, 42, 43, 47,
67–70, 88–99, 113, 115n7, 49, 50, 206
138, 144, 203, 205, 211, Introduction to the Science of
212, 214 Sociology, 19, 43
qualitative vs. quantitative, Parsons, Talcott, 5, 19, 48–51, 48n8,
31, 49, 56 55, 73, 75, 77, 84, 85, 96,
quantification of research, 30 113n6, 122, 127, 197,
Migration, 208, 213 202, 205–209
Mills, C. Wright, 1, 88, 206, AGIL scheme, 50
207, 209 The Structure of Social
Mobility, 114, 117, 122–124, 126, Action, 19, 159
128, 141, 143, 147, Peer/peers, 4–6, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23,
151, 171n1 24, 27, 40n1, 58, 65–69, 75,
researchers, 151 87, 88, 90, 99, 116, 145, 150,
social, 141, 143, 147, 151 171–174, 176, 195, 196, 201,
Myrdal, Gunnar, 203 202, 211, 214
An American Dilemma, 203 attention, 2, 67
230 Index

Peer (cont.) Recognition, scholarly, 32, 68–70, 213

judgment, 21 Recommendation letter, 7, 181–195
Poetics (journal), 79, 156, 162 Recruitment, 54
Prestige, 1, 1n1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 27, endogamous, 54
28n11, 31, 45, 51, 53, 65–69, Revolution, 13, 41
73, 78, 84, 87, 92, 94, 107, academic, 13
113–115, 120–123, 126, 133, formalist, 41
152, 162, 182, 184, 201–214 marginalist, 41
economy, 202 Riesman, David, 13, 139
Princeton Ritzer, George, 88, 93, 113n6
Institute for Advanced Study, 116 Rivalry between scholars, 41
University, 108n3, 116, 153, 162, Rockefeller, John D., 12, 20, 20n7
163, 184 Institute for Social and Religious
Profession, 20, 49, 122 Research (ISSR), 20
publishing, 7, 18, 136, 196 Rockefeller Foundation, 53
teaching, 13, 15–18, 23, 45, 54, Rose, Arnold M., 203
106, 114, 117, 153, 171n1, Ross, Edward A., 41
183, 185, 187, 189 Russell Sage Foundation (RSF),
tenure, 57 179, 180
See also Occupation
Professorship, 6, 39, 108, 109, 112,
114–116, 115n7, 119–126, S
139, 171, 181, 191, 192 SAGE Handbook of Sociology, 72
promotion to, 31, 120 Samuelson, Paul A., 96, 121
Prosopography, 103–107 Science, 4–6, 11n1, 13, 14, 21–24,
See also Biography, collective 27, 29, 31, 39–43, 45, 45n6,
Psychology, 21, 22, 24–26, 29, 46, 48, 50–53, 55–58, 56n10,
90–94, 205, 214 65–67, 69, 71, 72, 75, 104,
Publication genre, 20, 141 105, 107, 109, 134, 135n1,
Putnam, Robert, 85, 211 137, 140–147, 150, 152, 171,
174–177, 180, 183, 185, 195,
201, 204, 207, 209–211
R hard, 2n2, 3
Randomness, 117, 129 soft, 2, 2n2, 3
Reception, 7, 8, 23, 84, 85, 96, 105, Scientific ethos, 53
137, 138, 142, 144–147, 150, Scientific progress, 134
152, 153, 155, 156, 159, 162, Scientometrics, 144, 210, 213
166, 208–210, 213 h-index, 93, 94, 96
trajectory, 143 Second World War, 45, 48, 177, 203
 Index 231

Shiller, Robert J., 3 of science, 50, 176, 177, 183

Sills, David L., 72, 75, 93, 96, textbook, 6, 75, 166
138, 206 what is?, 43
Simmel, Georg, 17, 40 Sorokin, Pitirim, 112, 177, 206,
Zur Soziologie der Familie, 40 207, 209
Small, Albion, 18, 42, 42n3, 196 Specialties, 5, 6, 8, 52, 56, 58, 67,
Smelser, Neil, 48, 49, 51, 195, 196 77, 78, 84, 85, 97, 107, 129,
Social background, 106 164, 166, 173, 210, 211
Social Forces (SF), 18, 70, 159 Spencer, Herbert, 11, 25, 39, 74
Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), The Study of Sociology, 11, 39
26n10, 28, 29, 56, 56n10, 79, Stiglitz, Joseph, 96
79n8, 142, 173, 176 Stinchcombe, Arthur, 31, 56, 117,
Social Science Quotations (SSQ), 129, 179, 193, 194
93, 94, 96 Stouffer, Samuel A., 51
Social Science Research Council Style, intellectual, 180
(SSRC), 138, 179, 181 Sumner, William G., 11, 42n3
Social stratification, 17, 144, 146, Survey research, 57, 58, 204–206
151, 166, 210 Sweden, 28n11, 203
Sociology/sociologies, 2–8, 18–21,
29–32, 39–58, 65–70, 72, 73,
75, 77–79, 82, 84, 85, 87, T
90–94, 96–99, 106–110, Tappan, Henry, 13
112–129, 133–135, 137–158, Textbook, 5, 6, 11, 18, 19, 23, 29,
160, 162, 164, 166–167, 172, 43, 47, 70–72, 75, 88–96,
173, 175–179, 182, 183, 185, 134, 151, 166
190–197, 202–214 citations, 29, 70, 88–96
American, 7, 113, 203 as genre, 70
distintegration, 5, 6 Introduction to the Science of
divides within, 6, 209 Sociology, 19, 43
fragmented/fragmentation, 2, 3, Sociology and Modern Social
5, 31, 52, 58, 77, 123, 152, Problems, 19
154, 166, 204, 205, 210, 213 Theory, 3, 21, 28n11, 43n4, 48, 49,
golden age of, 45, 47, 175, 206 51, 52, 55, 77, 93, 96, 97,
history of, 49, 66, 203 113n6, 134, 150, 164, 172,
institutionalization of, 48 205, 207, 208, 210–212
mass vs. elite, 51, 166 Thomas, William I., 42
pluralism in, 52–55 Tilly, Charles, 73, 85, 88, 208
schools of thought within, 5, 45, Tiryakian, Edward A., 45, 46, 49, 207
49, 52, 207 Top 1%, 103, 173, 174
232 Index

Tower of Babel, 58, 129 W

Translation, 14, 85, 135n1, Wacquant, Loïc, 153, 162
154–156, 159, 162, 209 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 40, 124,
128, 208
Watson, Robert I., 24, 28
U Weber, Max, 51, 73, 84, 104, 151,
Universalism, 15, 15n3 195, 203
University, 17–19, 22, 42, 47, 48, Whitley, Richard, 7, 56, 203
52, 103, 108, 109, 112, 113, The Intellectual and Social
116–118, 124, 125, 126n9, Organization of
128, 136–140, 144, 153, the Sciences, 56
155, 176–179, 185, 187,
203, 206
reform, 15 Y
research, 5, 11–16 Yale University, 11, 12, 15,
42n3, 52, 121, 124, 126,
137, 162
V
Veblen, Thorstein, 12
The Higher Learning in America, 12 Z
Vidich, Arthur J., 46 Zuckerman, Harriet, 1n1, 3, 87,
Volcker, Paul, 96 171n1, 183, 185