Rhetorics and Reproduction: Field Change in U.S. Sociology 1980-2015

• In Event: 4350 - Computational Sociology (Co-sponsored with Mathematical Sociology)

Abstract

How do intellectual fields change? We contend that fields are composed of incumbents who continually appeal to shifting research preferences of new recruits so as to renew and sustain salient positions and engrossment. In so doing, the field changes the “sermons” of its “religion” but reproduces “priests” from the same programs. We develop this argument by studying the field of sociology. To trace semantic position-takings and field reproduction empirically, we concentrate on two crucial points in each scholar’s career: her entry via earning a doctorate, and her ascent to becoming a doctoral advisor. In particular, we gather comprehensive data of over 80,000 sociology dissertations at U.S. universities and those graduates’ pursuant academic careers. Utilizing structural topic models, we infer semantic positions students take in their theses and follow them as aggregate research trends. Our findings reveal that research related to the cultural turn and qualitative methods is rising in student popularity, while survey-related methods are declining. Further, logistic regressions show that the research topics students select significantly influence a graduate’s chances of becoming an advisor in sociology – net of structural conditions (e.g. gender, race, performance). At elite institutions, structural and semantic positions have more pronounced effects. Academic power caters to certain semantic positions while selecting persons with essentially the same forms of endogenously valued capital that fit elite notions (e.g., ethnicity, performance). In such a fashion, institutional elites reproduce their position in the intellectual field, but new recruits define what their “religion” is all about.

Authors

• Raphael Heiko Heiberger, University of Bremen

• Sebastian Munoz-Najar Galvez, Stanford University

• Daniel A. McFarland, Stanford University