How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

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setting, they usually recognize the style in play. They know whether the setting
calls for participants to act like upstanding citizens or iconoclasts. They know
some settings call for joking irreverence, while others demand high-minded
seriousness. Settings usually sustain a group style; different settings do this
differently.”



  1. My thinking on this subject is influenced by recent writings on the
    place of the self in evaluation and objectivity, especially the work of Daston
    and Galison (2007) and Shapin (1994).

  2. In science studies and economic sociology, these effects are described
    as “performative effects.” As Michel Callon writes (1998, 30), the economy “is
    embedded not in society but in economics,” because economics brings the
    market into being and creates the phenomena it describes. Thus the discipline
    creates the rational actor it posits. Donald MacKenzie and Yuval Millo have
    refined this approach by analyzing performativity as a “stabilizing” self-fulfill-
    ing prophecy that results from conflictual and embedded processes; see Mac-
    Kenzie and Millo (2003).

  3. For a critique of the classical dichotomy between the cognitive and the
    social, see Longino (2002). A concern for how the social corrupts the cogni-
    tive is typical of the institutional approach to peer review developed by Rob-
    ert K. Merton, Jonathan Cole and Stephen Cole, Harriet Zuckerman, and oth-
    ers—see, for example, Cole and Cole (1981); Cole, Rubin, and Cole (1978);
    and Zuckerman and Merton (1971). Others, such as Mulkay (1976), have
    been concerned with the noncognitive aspects of evaluation. For their part,
    Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour have analyzed how criteria of evaluation
    reflect social embeddedness; see Bourdieu (1988) and Latour (1987). My cri-
    tique of the literature on peer review is developed more fully in Chapters 4
    and 5.

  4. See Jenkins (1996), a study of social identity as a pragmatic individ-
    ual achievement that considers both group identification and social categori-
    zation.

  5. Hochschild (1979).

  6. See Stevens, Armstrong, and Arum (2008) for a probing analysis of the
    current state of the literature on American higher education.

  7. Kanter (1977) uses the concept of homophily to refer to recruiters who
    “seek to reproduce themselves in their own image”; see also Rivera (2009).
    Homophily often affects the candidate pool when informal networks are used
    for recruitment and job searches, which results in more men being hired; see


Notes to Pages 7–8 / 261
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