In this paper, we analyze the role of science and technology studies (STS) journal editors in organizing and maintaining the peer review economy. We specifically conceptualize peer review as a gift economy running on perpetually renewed experiences of mutual indebtedness among members of an intellectual community. While the peer review system is conventionally presented as self-regulating, we draw attention to its vulnerabilities and to the essential curating function of editors. Aside from inherent complexities, there are various shifts in the broader political–economic and sociotechnical organization of scholarly publishing that have recently made it more difficult for editors to organize robust cycles of gift exchange. This includes the increasing importance of journal metrics and associated changes in authorship practices; the growth and differentiation of the STS journal landscape; and changes in publishing funding models and the structure of the publishing market through which interactions among authors, editors, and reviewers are reconfigured. To maintain a functioning peer review economy in the face of numerous pressures, editors must balance contradictory imperatives: the need to triage intellectual production and rely on established cycles of gift exchange for efficiency, and the need to expand cycles of gift exchange to ensure the sustainability and diversity of the peer review economy.

In this article, we study the development of the STS journal article format since the 1980s. Our analysis is based on quantitative data that suggest that the diversity of various journal publication types has diminished over the past four decades, while the format of research articles has become increasingly typified. We contextualize these historical shifts in qualitative terms, drawing on a set of 76 interviews with STS scholars and other stakeholders in scholarly publishing. Here, we first portray the STS publication culture of the 1980s and early 1990s. We then contrast this with an analysis of publishing practices today, which are characterized by a much more structured research process that is largely organized around the production of typified journal articles. Whereas earlier studies have often emphasized the importance of rhetorical persuasion strategies as drivers in the development of scholarly communication formats, our analysis highlights a complementary and historically novel set of shaping factors, namely, increasingly quantified research (self-)assessment practices in the context of a projectification of academic life. We argue that reliance on a highly structured publication format is a distinct strategy for making STS scholarship ‘doable’ in the sense of facilitating the planning ability and daily conduct of research across a variety of levels – including the writing process, collaboration with peers, attracting funding, and interaction with journals. We conclude by reflecting on the advantages and downsides of the typification of journal articles for STS.

This paper charts the changing intersections between sociology and science and technology studies (STS) using computational textual analysis. We characterize this “quali-quantitative” approach as a Big Data method, as this calls attention to the commixture of textual and numeric data that characterizes Big Data. The term Big Data, too, calls attention to the increasing privatization of both data and data analytics tools. The data mining was done using a commercial analytics tool, IBM SPSS Modeler, that to the best of our knowledge has not yet been used for STS or sociological research. The identification of intersections occurred as part of a larger project to analyze political-economic and epistemic changes within STS, focusing on academic publishing. These epistemic changes were identified qualitatively, through 76 interviews with STS scholars, and quantitatively, through a computational analysis of three decades of STS journals (1990–2019).

Perspectives (2021) reveals that it is logic, broadly conceived, that joins together the disparate fields of postcolonial studies and disability studies. For postcolonial STS scholars, the book is of interest insofar as it shows how logic has served, at different moments in history, to define certain peoples as "primitive." For scholars of disability studies, the book provides historical examples of the use of logic to cast specific social groups-including children, the intellectually disabled, and the insane-as less than human. The contributors variously define logic both formally (as inductive and inferential, or deductive and syllogistic, or pragmatic and action-oriented) and informally (as common sense, or rationality, or the capacity for abstract thought, or the avoidance of contradiction, or native intelligence). Dominique Poirel (chapter 7) relates that what would later become the dominant definition of logic-dialectical reasoning-was once a contested terrain.The key message of the book is that the sociological study of the history of logic is a decolonizing move, one that reveals overlaps between colonization and the marginalization of the disabled. Again and again, the various contributors describe how logic was conceived of as "natural," by virtue of its inscription in the body, and yet restricted to the "civilized," the "learned," and the "sane." For example, Claude Blanckaert