The Significance of Racialized Networks in Contemporary American Sociology

Abstract

Research on inequality within disciplines in the academy have often focused on gender, rates of publication, geographic location, and other particularistic criteria; however, much fewer research has looked at race. Using sociology as a case study, this dissertation delineates the racialized nature of collaboration and research specialty areas in the field and theorizes on how this reproduces racialized sociological knowledge. In the first chapter I offer a brief introduction to the topic and discuss its relevance for sociology.Chapter 2 examines the link between race and the structure of collaboration networks. Collaboration is a beneficial way that scholars can share publishing expectations by working together to create and disseminate new scholarship. In sociology, one of the effects of greater collaboration in publishing is that the overall structure of discipline is becoming more cohesive and integrated. At the same time, work on race and publishing in sociology has uncovered differences between whites and people of color in their rates of coauthorship; however, it remains unclear how these differences are situated within the structure of the larger sociological field. Using data from a sample of U.S. black and Latinx sociologists (n = 171), I examine their collaboration networks to investigate differences in the rates of racial integration in the structure of the discipline. I find that both black and Latinx sociologists tend toward racial heterophily in their personal collaboration networks, opposite to what the homophily literature suggests. When these networks are situated within the larger sociological collaboration space, I find that the racial group with the greatest centrality depends on the measure used. I conclude by discussing these findings within the context of social capital and discuss what effects they might have on the career success of these sociologists. Chapter 3 examines the link between race and specialty areas in sociology. Research on the structure of knowledge in scientific fields have recently focused on the increasing rates of area specialization and collaboration across subfields. In sociology, whites and people of color are concentrated in different specialty areas, but there have been no quantitative studies which link race and the structure of the discipline’s subfield integration. When I compare the subfield spanning of a cohort of sociologists of color to the subfield spanning of the discipline as introduced by Leahey and Moody (2014), I find major differences between the networks, suggesting the discipline’s subfield network structure is not an accurate representation of the work of sociologists of color. I conclude by discussing how this skewed depiction of sociological subfield spanning may impact sociologists of color and the conception of the cohesiveness of sociological knowledge overall. Altogether this dissertation illustrates the need for network studies of sociology to consider the role of race and racism in its mappings. In the final chapter of this dissertation, I conclude with a discussion on the implications of the findings from this research for American sociology. Further, I offer several suggestions for future research on the topic of race and networks in sociology, in other disciplines, and in the academy more broadly.