How Do Academic Elites March Through Departments? A Comparison of the Most Eminent Economists and Sociologists\u2019 Career Trajectories

Philipp Korom

doi:10.1007/s11024-020-09399-1

Abstract

This article compares the career trajectories and mobility patterns of Nobel Laureates in economics with those of highly cited sociologists to evaluate a theory advanced by Richard Whitley that postulates a nexus between the overall intellectual structure of a discipline and the composition of its elite. The theory predicts that the most eminent scholars in internally fragmented disciplines such as sociology will vary in their departmental affiliations and academic career paths, while disciplines such as economics with strong linkages between specialties and shared standards of excellence will be dominated by a more homogeneous elite. The comparison provides strong empirical evidence in favor of Whitley’s theory. The careers of the most eminent economists are closely tied to the top five departments of the discipline, whereas the career pathways to eminence in sociology are largely unpredictable.

Highlights

This article sets out to test selected propositions of a ‘theory of middle range’ (Merton [1949] 2007) put forward by Richard Whitley in his article “Umbrella and Polytheistic Scientific Disciplines and their Elites” (Whitley 1976). Whitley based his theory on two basic postulates: First, the ways in which specialties relate to disciplines produce different cognitive structures of individual disciplines
Sociologists have been interested in capitalism mainly for its social effects while economists have been drawn to the quest of discovering its key driving forces (Swedberg 2005)
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

Summary

Introduction

This article sets out to test selected propositions of a ‘theory of middle range’ (Merton [1949] 2007) put forward by Richard Whitley in his article “Umbrella and Polytheistic Scientific Disciplines and their Elites” (Whitley 1976). In no other discipline can one find the extraordinary volume of data and research on rankings (of journals, departments, and individuals) produced by economists (Fourcade et al 2015) Given this existing evidence, comparing sociology to economics to test some components of Whitley’s theory appears highly appropriate. I have consulted the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI, 1956-) included in the Web of Science Core Collection and conducted three steps: (1) Considering all available previous rosters of eminent sociologists (i.e., Cronin et al 1997), entries on key thinkers in major encyclopaedias (i.e., Wright 2015) and Google Scholar citation statistics, I compiled a list of 194 individuals with more than 1,000 citing articles in SSCI-indexed sociology journals (see Appendix A1 in the Online Supplementary Material). We can only assume that such information implies that Sims spent at least one semester at Yale (and not less time)

Results

Conclusions

Limitations and Future