Inventing the Credential Society in Cold-War America

• In Event: National, Transnational and International Histories of Sociology and Social Thought

Abstract

Educational sociology presents the rise of credentialism as a central process of modernity: the accretion of a world in which academic coursework and certifications are preponderant and official arbitors of knowledge, human capacity, and status honor. This theorization elides credentialism's implication in the world-making ambitions of academics, universities, and their patrons in the decades immediately following WW II. I seek to recover this context by recognizing credentialism’s signal theorists (Talcott Parsons, Randall Collins, John Meyer, the status-attainment sociologists in the Wisconsin tradition, and their counterparts in human-capital economics), their university employers, and their federal-government patrons as actors in a diffuse project of Cold War state-building that established the marketized provision of postsecondary schooling as the keystone of a distintively American economic and civic order. Recovering this history enables us to recognize credentialism as a historical outcome: hardly an inevitable or necessarily permanent feature of modern times.

Author

• Mitchell L. Stevens, Stanford University