Knowledge transfer, academic capital and public intellectuals: A comparative study of social sciences, 1950-1990

Contemporary debates about the public intellectuals and public sociologists have been dominated by historical narratives of decline and renewal as well as polemics for or against academic forms of knowledge production (Buroway 1994; Collini 2006; Jacoby 1987; McLaughlin and Townsley 2011). While there is a substantial empirically oriented as well critical literature on scholarly reputations and citation analysis (Clemens, Powell and McIlwaine 1995), scholarship on the relationship between academic and “public” forms of reputation has lacked the empirical focus pioneered in the Bourdieu (1988) tradition. This paper will take a historical entry point into research on the complex relationship between academic and “public” forms of reputation and reputational trajectories by looking at the academic and public reception of a systematically selected sample of high-status academics from the 1950s in American sociology, political science, anthropology and economics over a span of four decades. We selected a cohort of highly cited scholars in these fields based on citation counts in the period 1956-65 in the Social Science Citation Index. Our research design allows us to compare the citation patterns and popular reception of scholars who write to largely restricted peer-reviewed audiences (both disciplinary and cross-disciplinary) with those who engage broad public audiences. We will examine the patterns in the reception of these academics within and across disciplines, as well as in the public sphere. We will present data on citation counts, trace patterns of influence across disciplines, and look at the relationship between status within the respective academic fields and efforts to bridge social scientific knowledge into the public sphere through elite intellectual journals, popular media, and commercial press books. We will make the case for a systematic use of social science measurements and the comparative method when thinking about knowledge transfer, and forms of capital in scholarly and public intellectual work.