Who's to Say: Dissent, Disagreement, and Professional Uncertainty in Book Reviewing

• In Event: 029 - Regular Session. Sociology of Knowledge

Abstract

Although a growing number of studies attend to the ways these
separate logics may clash, combine, or otherwise coexist, less attention has been
paid to actors’ phenomenological understanding of occupying social roles and
contexts where a plurality of performance criteria overlap. When there are
multiple evaluative principles guiding action, individuals can feel insecure because
there is no singular criterion for gauging their competency or assessing their value
in a given social context, such as a job setting. In this chapter I explore the
subjective experience of professional doubt and insecurity, which arises in
situations where there are multiple principles for performance, and I use book
critics in the contemporary fiction market as my case study. Data come from indepth
interviews with book critics (n=30) from major American newspapers (e.g.,
The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, etc.) during
which I ask critics to reflect on instances when they wrote positive reviews,
negative reviews, the criteria for their judgments, and how they made sense of
differences of opinion that inevitably arose amongst their fellow critics.

Author

• Phillipa K Chong, McMaster University