So, a few days ago, for quite different purposes, I listed the 6 people who had been elected to top ASA posts last year and the 6 people who were nominated for the three top posts this year. Today I got my December 2005 American Sociological Review (the flagship journal of the ASA). Being the last issue of the year, it contains the list thanking the 800 or so people who have engaged in the otherwise-thankless-task of reviewing at least one article for ASR in the past year. I wondered how well the two lists overlapped. The results:
[no] Judith D. Auerbach, American Foundation for AIDS Research
[yes] Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania
[no] N. Jay Demerath III, University of Massachusetts
[no] Bonnie Thornton Dill, University of Maryland
[no] Evelyn Nakano Glenn, University of California-Berkeley
[yes] Arne L. Kalleberg, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
[yes] Michele Lamont, Harvard University
[no] Douglas McAdam, Stanford University
[yes] Victor Nee, Cornell University
[no] Frances Fox Piven, City University of New York
[no] Gay Seidman, University of Wisconsin-Madison
[yes] Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
I must admit, I would have expected that at least half the people sociology put into top leadership positions would have been active-in-the-past-year reviewers for sociology's top journal. What to make of this not being the case, however, I don't know.
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3 comments:
Therefore, ASR is not sociology's top journal. QED.
What to make of it? Is it really that mysterious? For one, this sort of service is very much a young person's game, while being nominated for ASA office is not.
For another, how about a growing gap between the practitioners of "basic" sociological research (read ASR) and the organization tasked with representing sociologists (read ASA)? A quick JSTOR search reveals that just two of your seven "nos" have ever published in ASR (while all five of the "yess" have). Yes, having published in ASR gets you on their "list," but you get the point.
Anon: I don't have some real opinion on "what to make of it," to be honest. I didn't look the information up with some agenda, but since the result surprised me I thought I might as well post it. It's an interesting observation with the JSTOR results. I'm not sure I agree with your premise about the relative age distribution of reviewers, at least in sociology--it's an empirical question, though, but one whose answer I wouldn't regard as a foregone conclusion.
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