A Sociological Study of Scholarly Writing and Publishing: How Academics Produce and Share Their Research (review)

By its title alone, Dawne Clarke's A Sociological Study of Scholarly Writing and Publishing: How Academics Produce and Share Their Research seems full of potential. It looks and reads, however, like a dissertation (which was, in fact, its origin); and it does not ultimately detail the 'how' of its subtitle.¹ In its progression toward its goal—an exploration of scholarly writing 'as a social process from the perspective of the actors themselves' (32)—the book takes a wide, encompassing view, with discussions of the history and mechanisms of academic publishing (chapter 1), historical and contemporary university contexts (chapter 3), and perceptions of faculty affiliations and identities (chapter 4) along the way. (Approximating standard social-science dissertation form, the book presents a brief discussion of methodology in chapter 2.) The author's epiphany, revealed in the final of seven chapters, could have been situated more effectively at the outset, thus rationalizing why the broad, contextual focus of the earlier chapters appears, at times, to be rather incidental to the mental and physical tasks of writing for scholarly publication, issues finally broached in chapters 5 and 6. But therein lies the main point: Clarke finds, ultimately, that scholarly writing does not 'take place in isolation, but rather within social contexts' (104). This sound, though rather obvious, conclusion is well supported by her data. This conclusion, moreover, is the 'golden seed' of the dissertation that could have been 'coaxed into flower' as this book.² Indeed, an articulated structure stemming from instead of leading to that important observation would have made this monograph seem less like a dissertation (in this case, a narrative chronicle of the dissertator's journey toward enlightenment) and more like a book.

Clarke, an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, clearly situates her study within a sociological purview. She invokes neither the sizeable literature on faculty and faculty work life nor the literature on writing studies. For example, she cites just one minor contribution by Robert Boice, the most obvious scholar to have trod similar territory at the juncture of faculty and writing.³ Citations to extant literature on writing as a 'social practice' (the focus of chapter 6 and an underlying premise of the entire work) are in short supply. Instead, Howard Becker lends a comforting presence to the work, and fellow sociologist C. Wright Mills makes a cameo near the end. Perhaps Clarke's open approach—and by that I mean that she had not been preconditioned to see the world through the lens of, say, theorists of writing studies—endowed her study with a certain level of unsuspecting genuineness. That her findings resonate with studies that have analysed the same phenomena from different perspectives suggests that both Clarke and those who have come before her may in fact be on to something that is truly reflective of reality.

In her study Clarke conducted in-depth interviews with twenty faculty members in the humanities and social sciences from eleven Atlantic Canadian faculties. Quotations from faculty members are a highlight of the work as they expose the challenges to functioning in workplaces that have undergone significant externally imposed changes within the past generation. These changes—including those in funding, in the culture of research, and in student expectations—have had 'significant influence on how people [academics] perceive their work and workplace' (35). Their work, of course, includes both internally and externally motivated scholarly writing.

Clarke found that talking with most scholars about their writing was quite a challenge because, in writing, 'so much [is] at stake' (87). 'Asking the scholars to talk about their written work,' she concludes, 'evidently exposed the core of who they are as academics' (88). Knowing that this book was derived from the author's dissertation, I was...