Classifying Universities and Their Departments: A Social World Perspective

The prevailing ways of classifying higher education institutions rely upon structural characteristics. In this article, a cultural means of institutional classification is introduced by adopting a perspective that conceptualizes universities and their departments as "social worlds." In the analysis, the social world perspective is grounded by how faculty members conceive of career success and failure in the contexts of their departmental environments. Based on interviews with professors about their careers, a delimited set of social worlds is postulated to compose a cultural system of classifying American academe.