Abstract
The present work represents an extrapolation of W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, on behalf of the development of sociological theory. The article focuses on careers and institutions in higher education. The curriculum vitae serves as the novel human document by which to investigate both social and personal change. Academic careers are studied by virtue of their objective and subjective dimensions. Objectively, the institution of education is revealed through the shifting expectations that govern work in academia in specific historical times (indicated by the cohort in which academics earned their Ph.D.s) and in specific socially bound places (indicated by the type of university in which academics work). Major social change in education is likely to spell personal change for the way in which people subjectively experience the contemporary academic career. The data come from U.S.-based academics; parallel transformational changes are observable globally. The global change discussed in the work centres on the diffusion and institutionalization of the research role. The sources and consequences of this change are problematic. Akin to Thomas and Znaniecki’s larger analytic aims, patterns of change are used inductively to formulate theory: the paper culminates by postulating a theory of increasing tendencies in the way knowledge is produced in higher education institutions throughout the world.
Highlights
Academic careers are studied by virtue of their objective and subjective dimensions
The institution of education is revealed through the shifting expectations that govern work in academia
The curriculum vitae serves as the novel human document by which to investigate both social and personal change
Summary
The discussion that follows is motivated by the following question: What can a CV tell us about social change? There is some variation in the composition of CVs, usually in terms of length, across national systems of higher education. The idea that social phenomena have both objective and subjective dimensions was central to how Thomas and Znaniecki conceptualized The Polish Peasant. The division produces questions about how subjects relate to objects By this construction Thomas and Znaniecki intended to give coequal weight to an interplay between individual attitudes and objective cultural values as a means by which to understand social life. For Thomas and Znaniecki, the objective and subjective sides of social life are treated as both interactive and separable. Time and place are the social dimensions taken by Thomas and Znaniecki, and other Chicago sociologists of the period, to be central to the study of social process which, by turn, accesses social and personal change. The curriculum vitae as ‘life document’ lends itself as a prime means by which to examine the interplay between social and personal change as revealed by objective and subjective realities
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