THE QUEST FOR INSTITUTIONAL RECOGNITION - A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF SCHOLARLY PRODUCTIVITY AND ACADEMIC PRESTIGE AMONG SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENTS

Research on the science enterprise ordinarily assumes that any hierarc hy among academic departments reflects an egalitarian system based on merit. This assumption is predicated on the view that departmental pre stige is primarily a function of faculty scholarship. In this article, the association between prestige and scholarship is examined for the discipline of sociology using evaluative ratings from three national s tudies and objective data on publications. Scholarship is found to be far less important in determining prestige ratings than either the pas t reputations of departments or their affiliated universities. Publish ing is not necessarily a straightforward means of securing a departmen t's prestige. Instead past reputation reflective of an institutional c ontext, rather than scholarly productivity, appears to be the critical property bearing on how departments are viewed.