How to make Sense of Academic Elites?
The seminar is dedicated to a larger social phenomenon that occurs in all academic disciplines but has been paid little attention: the prestige elite. Members of this elite attain the highest levels of peer recognition, their books sometimes circulate by the hundreds of thousands, and every student has read about them. Who becomes and who remains member of the elite? What does it take to become an academic star? Do prestige elites have power over their peers in academia?
To answer these questions, I will provide these insights that can as well be gained from by forthcoming book Star Sociologists. Anatomy of a Disciplinary Elite (Palgrave Macmillan) that is rich in empirical material:
- There exists a link between the overall intellectual structure of a discipline and the composition of the elite
- In intellectually disintegrated disciplines such as sociology, eminence is a nested phenomenon: Scholars make it into the elite if their ideas are adopted in very difference intellectual fields.
- In the 1970s, members of the elite could impact the shape of national disciplines.
Philipp Korom, Dr. habil., is currently PI of the FWF-project „National and regional elites in Austrian Politics“
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