Academic Super-Elites in Sociology and Economics

Like politics and the economy, an elite dominates the social sciences. The super elite consists of scholars who usually receive the most outstanding academic awards and whose work is globally the most influential. How do social scientists become members of the super-elite? Do the academic profiles of super-elites in sociology and economics differ? What is the impact of super-elites on wider society? These are some central questions that are addressed by this project. The guiding hypothesis is that while economists can enter elite ranks by focusing on a single line of research, top sociologists typically make diverse contributions to the different subareas of their discipline. The methods applied include citation and network analysis to identify super-elites and investigate how peers utilize their work, among others. Biographies, personal correspondence as well as interviews are used to gain insights into typical career paths and establish the influence of top scholars on academia. Newspaper articles and obituaries are studied to better understand the role of star sociologists and economists as public intellectuals or advisers to people in power. The project promises new insights into the social organization and reward systems in the social sciences, the significance of top sociologists and economists to wider society and the peculiarities of two disciplines that are often regarded as being in competition.

The project revolved around six key questions/topics: Who is the elite? In the framework of the research project an innovative citation method for the identification of elites was developed, which builds on two measures of dispersion: The dispersion of citations across different academic journals that stand for different national sociologies and specialities; the dispersion of citations across different genres of literature (text books, handbooks, encyclopedias, journals) which represent in their entirety the discipline. Applying this method, one can assign between 50 and 70 individuals to the elite in sociology. Elite careers: One of the major insights is that the academic careers of elites in sociology are marked by few communalities, which especially becomes apparent when compared with the academic careers of all Nobel Laureates in economics who pursue careers through the same 'institutional elite channels' (Chicago, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford). Much suggests that elite careers are, at least to some extent, determined by the disciplines intellectual structure that is unitary in economics and fractious in sociology. The half-life of eminence: With few exceptions (e.g. Robert K. Merton), the average 'half-life' of eminence is shorter than half a century - a finding that was established based on an analysis of leading textbooks in three disciplines. Elite power: It was found, on the one hand, that the importance of elites in peer review processes of major sociology journals is decreasing over time ('democratization' of peer review). On the other hand, the exploration of archival material revealed that the outstanding sociologist Robert K. Merton promoted successfully the careers of hundreds of students by writing recommendation letters: Every second of his student/colleague got the job he or she was applying for, which suggests that elites may act due to their outstanding status as important 'gate opener'. Comet-like rises to eminence and merciless declines: In a further case study on the rise of the French sociologists to stardom in American sociology, it could be demonstrated that brilliant ideas and publication success are not the only explanations for eminence. Ideas must fall as well on fertile ground - the sociology of culture, which had been on the rise in the US since the mid-1970s - and be circulated by powerful scholars which act as opinion leaders. There is a large variety of declines in eminence. One frequently encounters, however, a rather gradual decline over decades as in the case of Talcott Parsons or a rapid one as in the case of Seymour Lipset. The underlying reason of the rapidly growing neglect of Lipset in the sociological literature was mainly that democracy research could not gain the same strong foothold in sociology than in political science. A disciplinary development that sealed the fate of the Lipset.