Mitchell L. Stevens

A Sociology of Quantification

One of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena, yet sociologists generally have paid little attention to the spread of quantification or the significance of new regimes of measurement. Our article addresses this oversight by analyzing quantification – the production and communication of numbers – as a general sociological phenomenon. Drawing on scholarship across the social sciences in Europe and North America as well as humanistic inquiry, we articulate five sociological dimensions of quantification and call for an ethics of numbers.

Football as a Status System in U.S. Higher Education

Sociologists have focused almost exclusively on academic aspects of status in higher education, despite the prominence of nonacademic activities, specifically athletics, in U.S. colleges and universities. We use the case of football to investigate whether intercollegiate sports influence the distribution of status in U.S. higher education. Analyzing data on conference affiliations and other organizational characteristics of 287 schools over time, we find evidence of an athletic status system. Our work expands understanding of status in U.S. higher education, enriches prior explanations for the prominence of football, and generates tractable insights about the ongoing evolution of the intercollegiate conference system.

The Evaluation MachineInside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping, by PosseltJulie R.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 250 pp.

Evaluation has been receiving a lot of sociology of late—enough to support multiple critical reviews of its own (Lamont 2012; Zuckerman 2012). The attention is warranted. Growing stratification in virtually all systems of opportunity allocation, including labor and marriage and credential markets, has encouraged students of inequality to be freshly attentive to the mechanisms people and organizations use to adjudicate worth. At the same time, the digitization of information and the mechanization of its analysis render many projects of evaluation ever more distributed, complex, and difficult to transparently understand. Many have trained their gaze on evaluation in the academic world. The production of monographs on selective college admissions is sufficiently steady as to be considered a genre (e.g., Karabel 2005; Soares 2007; Zimdars 2016). Studies of institutional rankings (Espeland and Sauder 2016) and academic peer review (Lamont 2009) expand recognition of how universities and those who make careers within them contribute to nested systems of measurement, judgment, and reward. Now comes Inside Graduate Admissions, Julie R. Posselt’s investigation of a process central to the reproduction of academic personnel. Carefully designed, capaciously theorized, and beautifully written, Posselt’s contribution spurs me, in its honor, to risk the metaphor of this essay’s title. But I first offer an overview of the remarkable study itself. If ever you are tasked with the business of evaluating doctoral applicants, consider it a professional obligation to read this book. It is a mirror on academic gatekeeping undistorted by the gatekeepers’ own wishful thinking. Its evidentiary core encompasses 86 interviews with 62 faculty members in ten academic programs, situated in three top U.S. research universities. Its data also include firsthand observations of admissions committee deliberations in six of the programs, additional interviews with graduate students, and careful use of available national-level data. Posselt wisely sampled disciplines representing a range of epistemological traditions: humanistic fields (classics, philosophy), hard-science ones (astrophysics, biology, physics), and several in between (economics, linguistics, political science, sociology). Despite the variety of schools and scholarly traditions in her sample, Posselt found remarkable consistency in the formal organization of applicant review. Even in our digital age, selecting potential academic offspring remains a low-tech endeavor. Evaluators first make coarse sorts on the basis of a few data points (test scores, GPA) and then spend more time in connoisseur-like consideration of a small portion of applicants who make baseline cuts (with some important exceptions per below). This more qualitative discernment of worthiness is where the importance of cultural and social capital is amenable to Posselt’s direct observation. Homophily is pervasive, even lauded, as faculty reviewers talk explicitly about seeing younger versions of themselves in particular application files. Here is one of the few places where Posselt sees systematic variation in assessment of worth among disciplines: faculty in some fields lent special value to applicants demonstrating social mobility (astrophysics, biology, political science, sociology); those in other fields lent favor to those judged edgy or cool (astrophysics, classics, linguistics, political science). Across all fields, degrees from highly selective undergraduate programs Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping, by Julie R. Posselt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 250 pp.

35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780674088696.

35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780674088696. Review Essays 403