Getting Sociology Right: A Half-Century of Reflections

11. Looking Back at Twenty-Five Years of Sociology and the Annual Review of Sociology (1999)

235 In accepting the assignment for this essay I did not realize how complex it would turn out to be. If I had been given two or three times the space allotted, it would not have sufficed. Accordingly, I have had to be schematic in preparing my remarks. I will limit my comments to six topics: • An autobiographical note, as it relates to the Annual Review of Sociology (hereafter ARS) • A brief overview of trends in sociological theory and research in the past quarter century • Some descriptive data about the ARS • The theme of unity and diversity of sociology • The dynamics of “reflecting” the discipline in the ARS • Some concrete examples of “reflecting” 11 Looking Back at Twenty-Five Years of Sociology and the Annual Review of Sociology (1999) From Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 1–18. 236 s o m e r e c e n t r e f l e c t i o n s a biographical and parental note There is a role in academia—partly created by oneself, partly assigned— that might be called “representing the discipline.” It takes several forms: (a) writing about the status of the field, including its trends and problems; (b) acting in a “canonical” capacity, such as editor of a publication of one’s professional association; and (c) serving in an organization whose work affects the world of knowledge and research. Although one does not always directly represent one’s discipline in this role—in fact, there is a taboo on being too partisan—it is not possible to avoid being identified as speaking for one’s field to some degree. This representative role has both symbolic and political dimensions, both stemming from the fact that it is oneself and not someone else doing the representing. By a variety of circumstances I have found myself in representative roles to an unusual degree. I became editor-in-chief of the American Sociological Review at a young age in 1962. Over a thirty-year period I have written or edited four texts representing general sociology (Smelser 1967a, 1973; Smelser 1981, 1984, 1988b, 1991, 1995; Smelser 1988a; Smelser 1994). On several “official” occasions—special sessions at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association and a special conference of the American Academy of Political and Social Science—I have been asked to comment on the nature and scope of sociology and its relations to the other social sciences (Smelser 1967b, 1969). I compiled and edited a volume on citation patterns in the behavioral and social sciences (Smelser 1987). I served as chair of the Sociology Panel for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (BASS) Survey, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences in the 1960s (Smelser and Davis 1969) and as a member and chair of a special committee of the Commission on the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (National Research Council) on the past, present, and future of the social sciences in the 1980s (Adams, Smelser, and Treiman 1982; Smelser and Gerstein 1986; Gerstein et al. 1988; Luce, Smelser, and Gerstein 1989). Over the years I have served on the governing boards of the Social Science Research Council, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Russell Sage Foundation. And now I am the coeditor (with Paul Baltes, Max Planck Institute on Human Development, l o o k i n g b a c k a t t w e n t y - f i v e y e a r s 237 Berlin) of the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, a twenty-four-volume compilation to be published by Elsevier Science in 2001. This penchant for representing also appeared in the genesis and early history of the ARS. It was the Sociology Panel of the BASS Survey, which I cochaired, that called for the creation of an annual review of sociology, explaining that “the objective of this publication would be to review findings and trends from the various fields of sociology on an annual basis” (Smelser and Davis 1969, 168). The recommendation was not controversial . The ASA Council echoed it in 1972, a time when I was serving on the Council as vice president elect. The ASA approached Annual Reviews, Inc., of Palo Alto, California, publisher of most other such reviews, and after a feasibility study the first editorial committee was appointed...