"This chapter introduces our holistic view of knowledge production in sociology and political science. Enlarging our view beyond the individualistic publication pipeline metaphor, we press the conception of academics as citizens of a knowledge polity with rights and responsibilities. Knowledge production does not just mean research, but encompasses teaching, reviewing, blogging, commenting, and other activities, which signal its communal nature. We then advance an explanation for knowledge production that situates academics in institutional and social contexts - including the family - while maintaining individual agency. We search for inequalities by gender and racial/ethnic identification, but are careful to consider the changing compositions of political science and sociology (both are diversifying steadily) and different situations (e.g., faculty rank) when making comparisons. The chapter describes our PASS study, which sampled academic departments and surveyed 1,700 faculty in 2017. Respondent reports were linked with data on lifetime publications, Twitter activity and other data"--
Drawing on surveys of diverse social science faculty, three acclaimed scholars develop a rich and sometimes surprising portrait of who produces research, teaches students, and contributes to the business of higher education - and how, when, and why.
In The Knowledge Polity, Paul A. Djupe, Amy Erica Smith, and Anand Edward Sokhey envision academics as members of a polity where the primary output is knowledge and citizenship comes with rights and responsibilities. Leveraging the 2017 Professional Activity in the Social Sciences (PASS) Study, they
develop a theoretically and empirically rich account of who produces knowledge, and how. The data enable an unparalleled understanding of the nature and sources of inequalities by gender and racial or ethnic identification in the disciplines of sociology and political science in the US. To explain
those inequalities, the authors consider academics as embedded in institutional and social contexts-including their home lives-and carefully consider their personalities and changing compositions of the academic workforce. A comprehensive and wide-ranging analysis, this book documents patterns that
have long been shrouded in anecdote and enables scholars from across the social and behavioral sciences to make empirically-grounded decisions about their individual and collective futures.
