The Quest for Institutional Recognition: A Longitudinal Analysis of Scholarly Productivity and Academic Prestige among Sociology Departments

Abstract

Research on the science enterprise ordinarily assumes that any hierarchy among academic departments reflects an egalitarian system based on merit. This assumption is predicated on the view that departmental prestige is primarily a function of faculty scholarship. In this article, the association between prestige and scholarship is examined for the discipline of sociology using evaluative ratings from three national studies and objective data on publications. Scholarship is found to be far less important in determining prestige ratings than either the past reputations of departments or their affiliated universities. Publishing is not necessarily a straightforward means of securing a department's prestige. Instead, past reputation reflective of an institutional context, rather than scholarly productivity, appears to be the critical property bearing on how departments are viewed.