Diversity in sociology: Problem or solution?

Diversity in Sociology: Problem or Solution?

ROGER CIARK

Some of sociology's recent internal critics (e.g., Turner and Turner, 1990; Halliday and Janowitz, 1992; Collins, 1986; Gans, 1990; Crane and Small, 1992) suggest that the discipline's diversity of theoretical, methodological and substantive foci leave it in a weakened position for achieving individual and collective ends. Other sociologists (e.g., D'Antonio, 1992; Roos and Jones, 1993; Stacey and Thorne, 1985) argue that substantive diversity has made the discipline attractive to a greater variety of previ- ously underrepresented groups, particularly women, groups that have, in turn, contributed to sociology's substantive diversity. This paper reports on a content analysis of 2,016 articles from North American sociology journals in 1936, 1956, 1976, and 1996 as well as from chemistry, anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology journals in 1996. The analysis focused on a number of, often contradictory, hypotheses drawn from the competing views of sociology's diversity with respect to its substantive concerns and its gender composition. It finds, for instance, that there is more substantive diversity in today's sociology journal articles than there was earlier, at least when diversity is measured in terms of fields that are reputed to be attractive to women. This may not be surprising, since more women are writing sociology journal articles than ever before. Moreover, the substantive diversity seems to be related to more, not less, funding of sociological research.

It is, of course, a trite remark--one made more frequently by sociologists than by their gibing critics---that sociology has not yet come to the development which commands from its adherents wholehearted agreement as to lhe objectives to be aimed at, the field to be limited, and the methods to be used. Gladys B~son, 1936

The he t e rogene i ty of a p p r o a c h e s that Gladys Bryson c la imed was dis turbing at least part of the sociological c o m m u n i t y of 1936 seems to be n o less vex ing for m a n y Amer ican sociologists today. Recent commenta r i e s like S tephen and Jo n a th an Turner ' s (1990) The Imposs ib le Sc ience , Ter rence Hal l iday and Morris Janowi tz ' s (1992) col lect ion, Socio logy a n d Its Publ ics , and Herbe r t Gans 's (1990) collect ion, Socio logy in A m e r i c a , have each s o u n d e d a genera l ly plaintive no te abou t the discipline 's internal diversity. The Turners , for instance, b lame the diversity, a m o n g o the r things, for making soc io logy "the imposs ib le science"; Te r rence Hall iday (1992) b lames it for the discipline's "fragile professional ism"; and Gans, echo ing

Address correspondence to: Roger Clark, Sociology Department Rhode Island College, Provi- dence, RI 02908; E-mail: [email protected].

22 The American Sociologist / Fall 1999

Randall Collins (1986), sees it as a source of the discipline's "doldrums." Nor- mally, w h e n diversity takes the fall, it's not given a terribly human face. Diversity of theoretical perspectives, substantive concerns and methodological approaches has been the concern of the aforementioned commentaries. Diversity of this sort has been blamed not only for sociology's inability to attain "its" larger goals, like an adequate scientific status or a professionalism, but for "its" inability to obtain important resources (e.g., funding, students, personnel).

But what if we were t o tl T to give sociology's current diversity human faces? And what if, upon examining those faces, we found that the faces were them- selves more diverse? Woukl this be a cause for alarm or celebration? And what if the increasing diversity of sociology's faces were also found to entail increasing diversity in the voicev that are being heard as well as the substantive areas being explored? Would this be cause for alarm or celebration? Would such a proliferation of faces, voices and substantive interests, in its own right, constitute an augmentation or a diminution of the discipline's resources? And is the correlation be tween diversity and the discipline's ability to attract fiscal resources really as dismal as some of our own best internal critics would have us believe? If it's not, should our dominant mood be one of anxious nostalgia or eager anticipation?

D i m e n s i o n s o f Diversity

The debate about the virtues of diversity in sociology hinges, in no small part, on what are perceived as the most critical dimensions of diversity and diversification in the discipline. Those who are most troubled by diversity are most likely to be talking about something that may be called "substantive diversity" while those who are most pleased are likely to be referring to something that may be called "human diversity."

Substantive Diversity

When the critics of sociology's diversity speak, they are generally referring to diversity (and diversification) of theoretical perspectives, areas of substantive interest, and occasionally of methodological practice. When it comes to theoretical perspective, obselwers like Stephen and Jonathan Turner (1990) are almost surely referring to conventional divisions, among and within, say functional, conflict, exchange and interactionist theorizing. The fifth edition of Jonathan Turner's The Structure of Sociol(4gical Theol. in 1991, for instance, contained thirty-two chap- ters, as compared to seventeen in the first edition in 1974. Turner had added one major kind of theorizing (structural) to his original list of four and thirteen dis- crete subdivisions to his original list of nine. Turner's categories, however, may seem a gesture towards simplicity compared to those of social theorists like Charles Lemert (1993), who have embraced recent multicultural and post-modernist theoretical developments.

The concern about diversity encompasses a concern about proliferating substantive interests as well. One indication of this proliferation is that ASA section memberships have grown and diversified be tween 1970 and 1997. ~ While there were only eight active sections in 1970, there were thirty-eight in 1997. Moreover, the largest section, Sex and Gender (with a membership of 1,180), did not exist in

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1970; the fifth largest, Race, Gender and Class (with 827), did not even exist in 1995.

Occasionally the concern about diversity touches on methodology as well. Crane and Small (1992), for instance, see sociologists' use of expensive data collection procedures, like surveys, interviews and observations, rather than the kinds of available data used by their thriftier counterparts in economics, as a threat to the discipline's financial future (229).

H u m a n Diversi ty

Those who would praise sociology's diversity are more likely to refer to its demographic or human diversity and diversification. Not that the substantive and human diversity are unrelated. Stacey and Thorne (1985: 301-302) and Roos and Jones (1993: 415-416), for instance, attribute a good deal of sociology's ability to attract female graduate students to its capacity to accommodate substantive interests of women. The growth in the percentage of sociology graduate students, and indeed of sociology Ph.D.s, who are women, is probably the most dramatic way in which the human face of sociology has changed in the last two decades. In 1971, the percentage of doctorates in sociology awarded to women was 19.6 percent; in 1991, the percentage was 49.6 percent (Roos and Jones, 1993: 402).

Similar change occurred in psychology (where women received 62 percent of Ph.D.s in 1991 [Pion et al., 1996: 509]), but not in economics and political science (where women received only 20 percent and 27 percent, respectively, of the 1991 Ph.D.s). z Change has occurred in the physical sciences as well, bringing the percentage of Ph.D. recipients who are women from 6 percent in 1971 to 18 percent in 1991, but the potential for gender diversity in research, that is for female as well as male authors, was clearly much greater in sociology and psychology, by the early 1990s, than it was in economics, political science or, say, chemistry.

Gender diversification at the Ph.D. level has not been associated with an absolute growth in the population at that level, with an equivalent increase in human diversity at the professional level, or with changes in the "voice" of the discipline. There was actually an overall decline in the number of Ph.D.s given in sociology, from 734 in 1976 to 466 in 1991 (Roos and Jones, 1993: 402), suggesting that, while there was absolute growth in the numbers of women "entering" the profession, the bulk of the increasing visibility of w o m e n was due to an absolute decline in the numbers of men entering the profession. There was an increase in the percentage of sociologists employed full time at universities and colleges who were women, from 23.6 percent in 1974 to 26.6 percent in 1985 (Roos and Jones, 1993: 404), but this increase is hardly commensurate with the increase in the percentage of Ph.D.s who were female and does not yet bring women 's representation in sociology up to the standard set in psychology, where about one-third of the the full-time faculty are women (Pion et al., 1996: 509). Still, compared to economics, where only about 10 percnet of full-time faculty were women in 1991 (Ray, 1995: 85), and the physical sciences, where only 11.3 percent of the employed labor force were women in 1992 (National Center for Edu- cation Statistics, 1995: 234), gender diversity in sociology is notable.

Another aspect of American sociology's increasing human diversity has been its greater inclusion of people from other nations, reflected in the fact that be-


tween 1977 and 1987 the percentage of sociology Ph.D.s with foreign back- grounds grew from 13 to 19 percent (D'Antonio, 1992: 107). The percentage of sociology Ph.D.s w h o were minorities also increased from about 9.5 percent in 1977 to 11.9 percent in 1988 (D'Antonio, 1992: 109), though this increase was by no means as dramatic or consistent as that of women.

Other recent demographic changes in sociology are more difficult to docu- ment. Some, such as change in religious affiliation, are not currently measured in the discipline; some, such as age or ethnic/racial composition, have been sub- jects of recent data collections, but are not currently amenable to longitudinal analysis (personal cor respondence with ASA). One can infer that the discipline has indeed "aged," however, by looking at the distribution of full-time faculty by rank. Thus, while in 1982 about 28 percent of such faculty in public institutions and 26 percent in private ones were full professors, in 1997 the comparable figures were 41 percent and 37 percent (personal correspondence with ASA).

Diversity as Problem or Solution

Let's look briefly at some of the problems and solutions that have been associated with the various dimensions of sociology's diversity and diversification, re- calling that the documentable dimensions of diversification (in substance and gender) have all been correlated with one another in the last twenty years or so. The Turners' (1990) "institutional analysis" of the history of American sociology focuses on the effects of various funding sources on sociology's evolution, but their analysis of recent history also examines the possibility that sociology's recent internal diversification may be responsible for its inability to attract institutional support. They speak, for instance, of a "golden era" in the sixties and early seventies w h e n undergraduate and graduate students f locked to sociology courses and programs, the federal government was funding sociological research at unheard of levels, and, perhaps best of all, there was a clearcut "mainstream" in both sociological theory (largely Parsonian) and methods (largely Lazarsfeldian). It's pretty clear that it's the mainstream's disintegration, the emergence of diversity in theory, substance, and method, that disturbs the Turners about the after- math of the golden era.

Other than loss of revenue, it's not so clear why diversification is so disturbing. The book ' s title The Impossible Science contains a tantalizing, though imperfect, clue. Jonathan (1990: 8), in particular, admits a desire that sociology could estab- lish itself as a proper science, but nowhere, it has been observed (Demerath, 1994), do the Turners say what they mean by "science." This wou ld not be so bad if the authors did not hint that what they mean is tautologically related to what they see as sociology's major problem: the absence of a mainstream b o d y of theory, methods and, perhaps particularly, substance. To quote from their final sentences:

Sociology will, of course, continue to exist in some form--most likely as a collection of loosely integrated topics and subfields. But the hopes . . . for a scientific sociology are increasingly remote and unconstraining on individual students and sociologists as they make their careers. �9 . And so, while sociology may always exist, and perhaps prosper . . . , it will remain the impossible science (1990: 197).

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However the Turners would define "science," and whether or not it is tautologically related to the absence of a mainstream, it is clear that they think the absence of a mainstream undermines sociologists' chances to make choices about what they study because of diminishing resource bases. There is just not a large enough public audience "out there," nor enough interested funding institutions, to make such choices feasible. Again, I quote from their last paragraph:

The choices of individuals in the face of the constraints of their immediate environment are decisive. For unless new audiences and, hence, new resource bases can be found, these constraints will seem so severe as to eliminate sociology as a realm in which individuals make choices (1990: 197).

Something like the absence of a coherent mainstream also troubles Halliday and several of the other contributors to Halliday and Janowitz's (1992) collection. Most disturbed, perhaps, are Crane and Small (1992: 229), whose provocative "American Sociology Since the Seventies: The Emerging Identity Crisis in the Discipline" uses co-citation analysis to track the changing map of sociology's specialties and finds that the discipline is "losing a clearcut identity." They find that, especially compared to economics, sociology is experiencing the "virtual disappearance of core areas" and an "increasing embeddedness in the literatures of other disciplines, including economics" (230). The resulting "lack of identity" has had many deleterious effects, according to Crane and Small, including the declining ability of the discipline to attract students at the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. levels, even while economics, presumably among other disciplines, continues to do so. Again, the funding crisis of the seventies and eighties is implicated by Crane and Small, who observe that this crisis has been much more serious for sociology than for economics, especially because of sociologists' resistance to using cheap data sources like available governmental data (229).

None of the internal critics of sociology's diversity in its substantive areas is absolutely adamant that the costs of this diversity outweigh its benefits. The Turners (1990: 195), for instance, see possible benefits in terms of sociology's ability to attract undergraduates interested in particular problem areas like crime, juvenile delinquency and family problems, and Crane and Small (1992: 232) see sociology's reliance on other disciplines as perhaps presaging a desirable break- down of disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences generally, a view they share with Craig Calhoun (1992). Others, like Collins (1986) and Gitlin (1990), may attribute temporary malaise within sociology to its substantive diversity, but also see, within the diversity, the potential for creative and constructive change in the discipline. The upshot of many critiques, however, is that this substantive diversity may not only represent a problem in itself, but also a problem for sociology's ability to attract resources.

Now, however, I would like to focus on a growing literature that sees the increasing gender diversity within the discipline as a potential solution for what ails the discipline. Even the quest ion of whether this diversity has affected sociology's "voice," however, was a matter of debate for a while. Thus, while their evidence covered only about a decade of change after early 1970s feminist writers had critiqued the field, Ward and Grant (1985) reported that women had had "little or only limited impact" (1985: 139) on what was being said in sociology's


professional journals. Not only were sociology articles less focused on gender and feminist concerns than Ward and Grant felt they should be by 1983, but the representation of female authors had actually declined from 22 percent of solo authors in 1975 to 21 percent in 1983.

The aforementioned trends at the graduate school level, however, will almost surely have, by the middle 1990s, made a greater difference in the authorship of sociological literature than they had by the middle 1980s. Moreover, there are those who argue that changes in sociology's sex structure have had extrinsic, as well as intrinsic, benefits for the profession. Cappell and Guterbock (1992: 270) approvingly note that women are disproportionately represented in "visible colleges" (or groups of specialists) devoted to the family, sex and gender, medical sociology, population, aging and racial and ethnic minorities. One may reasonably wonder whether women's interests in such cutting-edge fields as family and gender hasn't made sociology more, rather than less, attractive to external funding agencies.

It may be, for instance, that social sciences with larger percentages of females and/or with relatively diverse substantive foci are advantaged in the acquisition of that funding. D'Antonio (1992: 122) found that while economics, the social science discipline with the least gender diversity and perhaps the least diverse substantive foci, did receive substantial increases in federal funding for basic research between 1976 and 1983 from $25.6 million to $41.0 million, it actually received substantial decreases in the next four years--by 1987, economics received only $29.0 million from the federal government for basic research. Con- trast this with the experience of the more gender- and substantively-diverse disciplines of sociology, anthropology and psychology, each of which shared economics' attractiveness between 1976 and 1983 (with increases in federal obli- gations from $16.6 million to $32.8 million, $6.4 million to $11.2 million, and $45.5 million to $92.9 million, respectively), but then maintained or increased that attractiveness in the subsequent four years (sociology received $34.3 million in 1987; anthropology, $12.3 million; psychology, $147.1 million). D'Antonio also calls into question whether sociology's diversity makes it unattractive to students, showing that, in the late 1980s, after a decade of decline, the discipline experi- enced a surge of student interest at both the undergraduate and graduate levels (1992: 102-107).

Hypotheses

This paper presents the results of content analyses of American sociology journals in 1996, 1976, 1956 and 1936 and of American journals in 1996 for chemistry, economics, political science, psychology and anthropology. Because of the diffi- culty with measuring things like theoretical perspective and certain demographic characteristics of authors, it is an exploratory analysis of the effects of diversity that focuses mainly on substantive/methodological area and gender. I deduced several hypotheses, some contradictory, from the aforementioned literatures.

Primarily from the "diversity as problem" literature come:

1. There will have been an increase in the diversity of subject matter handled and meth- odologies employed in sociology articles between 1976 and 1996.

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2. Thepercentage of sociology articles citing outside sources offunding will have increased from 1936 to the 1976 sample, but declined in the 1976 to 1996period.

3. The percentage of sociology articles citing funding in 1996 will be much lower than that for chemistry and lower than that for economics and political science.

From the "diversity as solution" literature come:

4. The representation of women in the production of articles in sociology will have increased dramatically between 1936 and 1976 and still more dramatically in the last twenty years.

5. There will have been an increased diversity in the subject matter of articles in sociology between 1976 and 19961 a diversity reflecting, in particular, women's interest in sex and gender, family, and related fields.

6. Authorships or coauthorships that include women were more likely to cite funding than authorships or coauthorships that did not in all the social sciences in 1996.

7. The percentage of articles citing funding in 1996 will be higher in sociology than in economics and political science, but lower than in psychology and anthropologyfi

8. Thepercentage of sociology articles citing funding in 1996 will be higherthan it's ever been.

M e t h o d s

Criticism of some of the "diversity as problem" literature has faulted the literature for a lack of explicit comparisons over time and between sociology and other disciplines (e.g., Bulmer, 1994; Camic, 1994; Demerath, 1994; Schuman, 1994). I have tried to address this omission through a content analysis of sociology articles in 1936, 1956, 1976, and 1996 and of chemistry, economics, political science, psychology, and anthropology articles in 1996.

The sociology articles were drawn from 1936, 1956, 1976, and 1996 because these dates provide an opportunity to test the Turners' assertions about funding patterns using data about journal publications. If, for instance, there were substantial increases in the private funding of research between the 1930s and the 1950s, this should show up in comparisons of journal articles from 1936 and 1956. Comparison between sociology articles of 1976 and 1996 also permits an examination of crucial questions about what's happened to sociology's voice, subject matter, methods and funding patterns in the last twenty years. Data from journals in other disciplines are used to examine hypotheses about similar questions across disciplines.

My sampling strategy in 1996 involved the construction of lists of North Ameri- can journals from Ulrich 's International Periodicals Directory (1996) and the Katzes' (1995) Magazines f o r Librarians. I then divided each list into two strata, consist- ing of high-circulation and non-high-circulation journals. I wanted non-high-circulation journals so that my conclusions would not be based solely upon articles published in each discipline's most selective journals, which, while often setting standards for the rest, are hardly representative of them.

The high-circulation stratum included the three to five top North American journals in the discipline in terms of circulation. The non-high-circulation stratum included all other journals published in North America. My final sample included all or almost all of the high-circulation journals and a random sample of two to five of the non-high-circulation journals. Thus, for instance, in sociology the high-circulation category included the American Sociological Review, the Ameri- can Journal o f Sociology, Sociology o f Education, Social Forces, and Social Prob-


lems; the low-circulation category included the Journal of Family Relations, Gen- der & Society, the Sociology of Religion, and the International Journal of Com- parative Sociology, all of which were drawn at random from a list of journals with circulations under 4,000.

I wanted to analyze about 200 articles in each discipline (or time period), with a slight oversampling of sociology articles. Thus, while every article in a given issue of a journal was analyzed, the number of issues included varied by discipline. In sociology, political science, economics and anthropology, all issues of each journal published in 1996 before November were included. In psychology, whose journals tend to include many more articles per issue, only the two most recent issues were examined; in chemistry, whose journals tend to include many more articles per issue than even psychology, only the most recent issue of each journal was examined. The resulting sample included 2,016 journal articles. Be- cause Gender & Society in sociology was the only journal selected from any discipline that focuses on gender (and therefore may be unusually attractive to female authors), analyses of 1996 journals were done twice, once with articles from this journal included, once excluded.

Let me note several measurement procedures and problems. I think my count of the number of authors per article was pretty reliable. I'm less certain about my attribution of gender to each author and about whether an article cites funding sources, and, if so, the nature of that source. I have least confidence in my classification of articles by subject matter.

Gender of author, you'd think, would be simple enough, but, for a non-poly- glot, it's not. The problems were particularly acute, in fact, for chemistry, where the presence of many Asian contributors and the absence of contributor biogra- phies left me acutely aware of my ignorance. Where I wasn't reasonably certain of an author's gender, I treated it as a missing datum.

I could employ no such strategy when dealing with whether a piece of research cited funding, however. In most cases, especially in the 1996 and 1976 (sociology) samples, the citation of funding was conventionally situated, either at the beginning or end of the article. In the older (1956 and 1936) sociology samples, however, funding citations are more haphazard, frequently appearing, when they do, within the text of the article, as features of the methodology. I may have missed some subtle reference to funding sources in some older articles, and some authors may not have ment ioned funding in journals of any age.

Perhaps my most unreliable measurements, however, attach to classifications of sociology articles alone: of primary data source (my indicator of methodological strategy) and subject matter. When it came to data source, I classified articles by what I took to be the most significant data source from the author's or authors' point of view. The categories were: questionnaires, interviews (including personal histories), field studies, documents (including those used for content and historical analyses), government statistics, organization statistics, secondary data (i.e., data collected by others, usually through questionnaire surveys), and theory. This categorization is problematic. Especially since "theory" is a category of its own, there are very few sociology articles that could not have been classified in several categories. Perhaps the best I can do is stress again that it was my con- stant aim to classify by what I perceived as the most significant data source from the author's or authors' point of view.

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Classification by subject matter may have been even more problematic. Since the real point here was to get a feel for how the diversity of sociology's subject matter has changed, category creation necessarily affected findings. So far as I know there are no standard ways of measuring the scholarly diversity within a discipline, so I simplified my task by adapting Cappell and Guterbock's (1992) list of topics that seem to have attracted women to sociology. As mentioned before, these topics are family, sex and gender, medical sociology, population, aging and racial and ethnic minorities. In examining changes in sociology's substantive diversity, then, what I really measured is the degree to which the topics covered in sociology articles reflect the areas of interest that Cappell and Guterbock suggest are ones that interest female sociologists in particular. Since sociology's human face has evidently been most affected by recent gender diversification, it is rea- sonable to ask whether its substantive diversification, if such there is, reflects this particular demographic change.

If the validity of measuring subject matter in this way is imperfect, its reliability may be too. As in the case of data source, I classified articles by what I consid- ered to be the most significant of the categories that applied, after reading the article's title and its abstract, where there was an abstract. To reiterate, the categories were: family, sex and gender, medical sociology, population, aging, racial and ethnic minorities and other. My major indicator of diversification, or lack thereof, was the percentage of articles that fell into the "other" category. (The higher the percentage, the lower the diversification.) As with data source, there were many articles that could have borne several distinct classifications. Suffice to say, if I felt an article could reasonably be classified in one of the non-"other" categories, I did classify it that way, even if I wasn't sure I'd necesarily picked the right non-"other" category.

Results

Hypotheses 1 and 5 require that we investigate the degree to which there has been diversification in the subject matter treated by sociology journals in the last twenty years. Table 1 suggests that there has been considerable diversification. One indication is that while just over 69 percent of the articles appearing in sociology journals in 1976 dealt with topics outside of the Cappel and Guterbock's "invisible colleges," only 40 percent did so in 1996. The largest "growth areas" weren't uniform across the non-"other" categories, however. They were in the areas of family (which claimed just over 18 percent of the articles in 1996, as compared to about 3 percent in 1976) and sex and gender (which also claimed over 18 percent in 1996, as compared to 10 percent in 1976). Even deleting articles from Gender & Society (which tends to have articles about sex and gender) and the Journal of Family Issues (which tends to contain articles about family) leaves the 1996 sample with a considerably higher percentage of articles devoted to sex and gender (about 14 percent) and family (12 percent) than were devoted to these topics in 1976. Interestingly, none of the other areas identified by Cappell and Guterbock as being particularly attractive to female sociologists (i.e., medical sociology, population, aging, or even racial and ethnic minorities) showed the kind of scholarly growth that family and gender did, though the area of racial and ethnic minorities, always a major field in sociology, did show modest growth (claiming 16 percent of 1996 articles, as compared to 13 percent in 1976).


TABLE 1

Percentage of Sociology Articles o n Part icular Topics By Year

(N=986)

Topic 1996 1976 1956 1936

Family 18% 3% 6% 5%

Sex and Gender 18% 10% 1% 1%

Medicine 3% 2% 7% 1%

Population 2% 1% 5% 6%

Aging 2% 2% 2% 0%

Racial/Ethnic Minorities 16% 13% 10% 15%

Other 40% 69% 70% 72%

Number of articles 294 277 235 185

Diversification of sociology's subject matter, of course, is just one part of the diversification that has concerned authors in the "diversity as problem" literature. Diversification in theory and method has also been a concern. Measuring theoretical diversification was beyond the scope of this paper, but, as suggested above, I did try to measure methodological diversification. Table 2, showing the preva- lence of certain data techniques at different times, provides a few clues. In 1936, when grant money, as we'll see later, was particularly scarce, sociology authors tended to use inexpensive research techniques: fully 55 percent of all articles used either communications (books, newspaper articles, etc.) or theory as grist for the research mill. Only about 16 percent used interviews or questionnaire surveys, relatively expensive techniques, as their primary source. By 1956, questionnaire surveys had become the modal source of data for research articles (23 percent were based on them), followed closely by interviews (20 percent). Ques- tionnaire surveys were still the modal source of data for articles written in 1976 (24 percent), but a new, much cheaper source of data, secondary data collected by others through questionnaire surveys, had become very popular (fully 22 percent of articles used this kind of secondary data in 1976).

By 1996, secondary data were used in 39 percent of articles published in sociology and had become, far and away, the most popular data source. When the percentage of articles using this technique is added to the number using easily available communications (11 percent), government data (7 percent), data produced by various kinds of other organizations (3 percent), and theory (10 per-

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TABLE 2

Percentage of Sociology Articles Using Particular Methods of Data Collection by Year

(N=986)

Technique 1936 1956 1976 1996

Communications 35% 14% 12% 11% (Books, newspapers, etc.)

Theory 21% 19% 18% 10%

Fieldwork 12% 11% 4% 5%

Survey Questionnaire 11% 24% 25% 10%

Interview 5% 20% 5% 15%

Government data 13% 9% 13% 7%

Organizational data 4% 1% 1% 3%

Secondary data 0% 2% 22% 39% (i.e., questionnaire data collected by someone else)

Number of articles 185 235 277 294

cent), one finds that fully 70 percent of the sociology journal articles published were produced using relatively inexpensive data sources. The putative resistance of sociologists to using cheap data sources (e.g., Crane and Small, 1992: 229) can, it seems, be overrated.

Has sociology's increasingly gender-diverse "face" been reflected in an increasingly gender-diverse "voice" in its journal literature (see Hypothesis 4)? Table 3 shows the percentage of all gender-identifiable authors who were female in sociology at different points in time and in five other disciplines in 1996. It shows an extraordinary jump in the percentage of female authors in sociology in the last twenty years--from 18 percent to 41 percent, making sociology, in this sample, second only to anthropology (43 percent) in the percentage of its journal authors who were female in 1996. Even when articles from Gender & Society, a journal with a ratio of about 2.5 female to 1 male authors and that came into being in the mid-1980s, are deleted from the sample, the percentage of female authors in sociology in 1996 was 36 percent, twice what it had been in 1976. In psychology,


with 34 percent of its journal authors being female, women appeared in print in almost exact proportion to their proportion in the academic labor force. In chemistry (15 percent), economics (13 percent) and political science (11 percent), they still seemed relatively "unheard."

TABLE 3

Percentage of Authors Who are Female by Year for Sociology and by Discipline

Discipline/Year

Sociology/1936 17%

Sociology/1956 11%

Sociology/1976 18%

Sociology/1996 41%

Anthropology/1996 43%

Chemistry/1996 15%

Economics/1996 13%

Political Science/1996 11%

Psychology/1996 34%

(N=3,229)

% A u t h o r s Who a r e F e m a l e

What's the historical pattern in sociology? The latest upsurge in women's authorial representation was foreshadowed in the previous period, when the percentage of authors who were women rose from 11 percent to 18 percent. But that 11 percent in 1956 may have been something of a low-water mark, since its counterpart in 1936 was actually about 17 percent? The decline between 1936 and 1956 fits with others into a coherent picture. Thus, for instance, since the 1920s, the 1950s was the decade when women received the lowest percentage of sociology doctorates--they received only about 14 percent of the Ph.D.s then. (They received about 20 percent in the 1930s [Roos and Jones, 1993: 402]). Appar- ently the "domesticity of the fifties" did as much to muffle women's voices in sociology as it did in other realms.

Can any of the increase in sociology's substantive diversity be ascribed to the greater likelihood that women, with their distinctive interests, are seeking and gaining greater voice in those articles (see Hypothesis 5)? Table 4 compares the percentage of articles addressing what Cappell and Guterbock identified as topics that attract females to sociology for articles with and without female authors in

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1996. Much of sociology's substantive diversification towards topics attractive to women seems attributable to the greater participation of women in the production of sociological knowledge. Thus, authorships involving women were almost two-and-a-half times as likely as purely male authorships to deal with the topic of family (about 25 percent of authorships involving women did so, while only 11 percent of purely male authorships did), more than four times as likely to deal with sex or gender topics (29 percent versus under 7 percent), and about half as likely to deal with topics that Cappell and Guterbock did not identify as attractive to females (27 percent versus 55 percent). Interestingly, the findings for other categories of research that Cappell and Guterbock claim have attracted women are much more equivocal, there being essentially no difference be tween authorships involving women and other authorships in their likelihood to do medical sociology, population and aging, and there being a considerably greater chance that wholly-male authorships will have focused on racial and ethnic minorities than authorships involving women (21 percent versus 12 percent).

TABLE 4

Percentage of (Co-) Authorships With or Without Females Focusing on Particular Topics in

Sociology, 1996

(N=294)

Topic Of (Co-) Authorships Of (Co-) Authorships Wi th F e m a l e s W i t h o u t F e m a l e s

Family 25% 11%

Sex and Gender 29% 7%

Medical 5% 2%

Population 2% 2%

Aging 1% 3 %

Racial/Ethnic 12% 21% Minorities

Other 27% 55%

Can women's entry into sociology explain the changes in methodological preferences, as well as in substance, that have occurred in the recent past? Apparently not. Table 5 shows that in 1996 authorships involving women were slightly less likely to have employed secondary data than purely male authorships (about 38 percent versus 41 percent), but that they retained the use of the traditional data collection procedures of the interview (23 percent versus 6 percent) and questionnaire surveys (13 percent versus 7 percent) to a much greater degree than their all male counterparts.


TABLE 5

Percentage of (Co-) Authorships With Or Without Females Employing Particular Methods of Data Collection

Sociology, 1996

(N=294)

T e c h n i q u e Os (Co- ) & u t h o r s h i p s With Females

Of ( C o - ) & u t ~ o r s a x p s W i th o u t Females

Communications 9% 14%

Theory 5% 15%

Fieldwork 4% 5%

Survey Questionnaire 13% 7%

Interview 23% 6%

Government data 6% 9%

Organizational data 13% 7%

Secondary data 38% 41%

How have the increasing diversity of sociology's authorial voice, substantive interests and perhaps even methodological preferences affected its ability to attract funding (see Hypotheses 2, 3 6, 7, and 8)? Table 6 shows that the percentage of articles in sociology citing funding increased dramatically between 1936 (8 percent) and 1956 (31 percent). The percentage grew again between 1956 and 1976, from 31 percent to 45 percent. In accord with expectations from the "diversity as solution" literature (but not the "diversity as problem" literature), the percentage of articles citing funding grew again between 1976 and 1996, from 45 percent to 57 percent of articles examined. The relevant percentages were 54 percent and 67 percent in 1976 and 1996, respectively, for the four (high-circulation) journals that had existed since 1936 (i.e., all high-circulation sociology journals except Social Problems).

Interdisciplinary comparisons in 1996 are more equivocal in their support of the "diversity as solution" position because they are confined to a single point in time and don't tell of funding changes. But they are notable. Thus, sociology articles were much less likely to cite funding than chemistry articles (57 percent versus 87 percent), but were much more likely to cite funding than political science articles (57 percent versus 32 percent) and about as likely to cite funding as economics articles (57 percent versus 59 percent). Moreover, consistent with the "diversity as solution" approach, the two social sciences with greater gender diversity than sociology, psychology and anthropology, each had journal literatures that were more likely to cite funding (at 65 percent and 71 percent, respectively) than sociology. But one can take the gender-diversity interpretation of

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TABLE 6

Percentage of Articles Citing Funding by Year for Sociology

and by Discipline

(N=2,016; Disciplinary Ns in Parentheses)

Discipline/Year

Sociology/1936

Sociology/1956

Sociology/1976

Sociology/1996

Anthropology/1996

Chemistry/1996

Economics/1996

Political Science/1996

Psychology/1996

Percentage Citing Funding

8% (185)

31% (237)

45% (277)

57% (294)

71% (195)

87% (229)

59% (209)

32% (186)

65% (204)

these interdisciplinary differences only so far, since conventional research in different disciplines does involve differing capital and operating costs.

Where does cited funding come from? Table 7 suggests that in 1936, 2 percent of sociology articles cited funding from government sources. That means about 6 percent of sociology articles (8 percent minus 2 percent) cited funding from other sources--always categorized as private or school (college or university) funding in my measurement scheme. The difference between the overall percentage of sociology articles citing funding in 1956 (31 percent) and the percentage citing funding from government sources (8 percent) was much larger (23 percent) and than it had been in 1936 (6 percent). This suggests that virtually all of the increase in funding between 1936 and 1956 came from non-government sources, consistent with histories suggesting that funding from private agencies was much more important for sociological research during this period than funding from government (e.g., Turner and Turner, 1990). And, in fact, statistical


TABLE 7

Percentage of Articles Citing Government Funding and the Dif ference Between Total Percentage Citing Funding

and that Percentage by Year for Sociology and by Discipline

(Ns are same as for Table 1)

Disc~line/Year

Socioiogy/1936 2%

Sociology/1956 8%

Sociology/1976 28%

Sociology/1996 37%

Anthropology/1996 41%

Chemistry/1996 72%

Economics/1996 42%

Political Science/1996 15%

Psychology/1996 48%

1. % Citing Gov't Funding 2. % Citing Funding - 1.

6%

23%

17%

20%

30%

15%

17%

17%

16%

controls (not shown here) indicate that virtually none of the relationship between these years (1936 or 1956) and funding citation is explained by government- funding citation.

Consistent with the same histories, which indicate that much of the increase in funding for sociological research between 1956 and 1976 was due to increases in government funding is the finding that while 8 percent of articles in 1956 cited government funding, 28 percent did in 1976, for an increase of 20 percent, considerably more than the percentage-points increase in articles citing any funding (31 percent in 1956 and 45 percent in 1976). Sociologists may have been less able to count on private funding in 1976 than in 1956, but they found government funding much more forthcoming. In this case, statistical controls (not shown here) indicate that virtually all of the relationship between year (1956 or 1976) and funding citation is explained by government-funded citation. Similar statisti-

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TABLE 8

Percentage of Articles Citing Punding for (Co-) Authorships Including and Excluding Females

by Year for Sociology and by Discipline

(N=2016)

Discipline/Year % of (Co-)&uthorships With Females C i t ing Funding

% of (Co-)Authorships Without Females Ci t ing Funding

Sociology/1936 10% 8%




Anthropology/1996 84% 58%

Chemistry/1996 88% 87%

Economics/1996 72% 55%

Political Science/1996 40% 31%

Psychology/1996 69% 61%

cal controls (again not shown here) suggest that virtually all of the increase in funding-cited research in sociology between 1976 and 1996 is accounted for by government-funding citations.

In other words, when looked at twenty-year intervals, the percentage of articles citing funding has increased dramatically and steadily over the last sixty years. In the first twenty years (between 1936 and 1956), this increase was almost totally attributable to increases in funding from private foundations; in the last two twenty-year intervals (1956 to 1976 and 1976 to 1996), it's attributable to increases in government funding alone.

Has women's increased participation in sociology diminished the discipline's capacity to draw funding? Probably not. Comparisons in Table 8, sociology at four periods and five other disciplines, show that articles with females participat- ing in authorship are more likely to cite funding than ones without female par-


ticipation. Sometimes differences are modest. This is true for sociology before 1996 and for chemistry in 1996. But other comparisons, including the one for sociology in 1996, suggest a substantial difference in favor of authorships including females. This difference was most evident for anthropology, in which 84 percent of authorships involving w o m e n cited funding while only 58 percent without women did, and for economics, in which 72 percent of authorships with women cited funding while only 55 percent of those without did so. It is unlikely, then, that sociology's increased gender diversity has impaired the discipline's chances to receive grants.

It's possible that the topics favored by women are also favored by funding agencies. Table 9, for instance, suggests that articles dealing with family and sex and gender were more likely in 1996 to cite funding than articles with other topics. In fact, analyses not shown here suggest that virtually all of the funding difference between sociological authorships with women and those without in 1996 is explained by the greater likelihood of the former to examine family or sex and gender.

TABLE 9

Percentage of Articles Citing Funding by Topic of Article, Sociology, 1996

(N=294)

Topic Percentage Citing Funding

Family 69%

Sex and Gender 58%

Other 54%

Discussion

My investigation leaves me feeling fairly optimistic about diversity in sociology. The hypotheses deduced from the "diversity as solution" literature fared better than those from the "diversity as problem" literature. Both literatures suggest sociology's subject matter is getting more diverse, a hypothesis that I found support for in comparing more recent and older journals. In particular I found greater concentration on substantive areas that are reputed to be of special interest to the group that has changed sociology's "face" the most in the last twenty years: women.

I found no evidence that sociology's increased substantive diversity has made it less attractive to funding agencies than it was in earlier periods. I also found no indication that it is less attractive than are social science disciplines, especially

Clark 39

economics and political science, that have undergone less gender, and perhaps substantive, diversification.

All of the increases in the citation of outside funding in sociology since 1956 may be attributed to increases in the citation of funding from government sources. The increase be tween 1936 and 1956, on the other hand, was almost wholly due to increases in the citation of private funding sources. Recent increases are not easily attributed to increases in the costs of collecting data, since nearly 70 percent of sociology articles cited fairly inexpensive data sources (secondary data, communications, government- or other organization-produced data and "theory")--- a figure that may actually have grown over time, even while the balance among the fairly inexpensive sources of data had shifted strongly in favor of secondary data by 1996. Increasing "demand" for a variety of sociological research, rather than its increasing costs, may be the reason for the discipline's greater ability to attract funding.

If there has been increasing demand for sociological research, why would this be? One possible reason is that sociology's substantive diversity has, in some way, given it adaptive advantages. Roos and Jones (1993) suggest that this diversity helps, in fact, to account for sociology's relative attractiveness to women. If so, the discipline's substantive diversity has contributed to its gender diversi ty-- a desideratum in and of itself. I have shown that the entry of w o m e n into sociology has, in fact, changed the gender composit ion of its authorial voice, as well as its substantive foci, at least as reflected in its journal articles. The entry of w o m e n into sociology has probably also made sociological research more attractive to funding agencies than it wou ld have been otherwise.

Substantive diversity probably also ensures that there will be a "paying" student audience for at least-part of the discipline's fruits, even if interest in some substantive areas wanes. Of course, the ability to pay its bills is only one way of measuring a discipline's general value. It is hard to believe, however, that if sociology's substantive diversity is tied to an increasingly diverse body of active researchers, it will long stay out of touch with the interests that that human diversity may represent. One may even hope that sociology's increasingly diverse authorial voice will enable it to "speak" to an even more diverse public than it has in the past.

N o t e s

1. I thank the American Sociological Association, and particularly Andrew Sutter, for data on section memberships, as well as some data on demographic diversity.

2. See Ray, 1995, for a discussion of why economics has failed to attract women. 3. While there are, of course, many other considerations involved in funding research, the

expectation that women are more likely to do what funders see as cutting-edge research leads to the expectation that, other things being equal, social science fields with a greater proportion of women will receive proportionately more funding.

4. Both the 11 percent figure in 1956 and the 17 percent one for 1936 are much higher than they would be if data from the Sociology of Education were deleted. Contributors to this journal were mainly teachers and educators, at least through the 1950s, and therefore unusually likely to be women. By 1976 and 1996, however, by far the largest portion of the contributors to SOE were sociologists.


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Diversity in sociology: Problem or solution?

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