Data from the 1984 Carnegie survey of faculty at U.S. universities show substantial disciplinary variation in perceptions that one's field is stagnant. We examine the extent to which variation in pessimism about the intellectual state of one's field can be explained by theories that attribute it to field-level variation in anomie and consensus. We also examine the effects of individual-level characteristics on disciplinary discontent using a multilevel analysis. We find that both anomie and consensus exert strong effects on the average levels of scholarly pessimism within fields. In addition, there is an interaction effect involving the level of consensus in a field and whether the field is primarily pure or applied. The multilevel analysis shows that the effects of field-level variables are not attributable to compositional differences in individual characteristics and that, as a group, the field-level variables are stronger determinants of scholarly pessimism than individual characteristics. Scholars often dismiss research in a particular discipline, specialty, or subspecialty as unproductive, describing such fields as "stagnant," "in the doldrums;' or "intellectual backwaters." That scholars so assess fields other than their own seems a natural result of disciplinary or specialty chauvinism. In this article we examine scholars' assessments of the vitality of current work in their own fields. We examine both individual-level and disciplinary factors that may produce perceptions that recent developments in one's discipline are pedestrian and uninteresting. Previous discussions of discontent with the state of one's field have focused on disciplinary differences and have identified two possible disciplinary-level sources: scholarly anomie and low consensus. The first condition is a form of the "anomic division of labor;' which Durkheim defined as specialization without integration. Although Durkheim ([19021 1947) drew most of his examples of this condition from economic systems, he also pointed to the state of the social sciences during his time as an example:

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