Sociology as a vocation: Reputations and group cultures in graduate school

Abstract

Graduate training in sociology involves more than meeting organizationally imposed demands such as satisfying departmental requirements, taking exams, and completing a dissertation. More central is the development of identity through institutional and interactional forces. We examine the experience of graduate students as tied to the social psychological processes associated with professional training. We consider the faculty-student relationship, identifying how student identities as future sociologists are negotiated and constructed within a reputation market linked to status politics. Through this process, graduate students construct frames of interpretation that make sense of a status system in which criteria for evaluation are often variable, uncertain, or undisclosed. To recognize how graduate students fit into their occupational routines, we build upon three core disciplinary constructs: identity, reputation, and group culture. This perspective permits graduate education to be grounded in sociological understandings, underlining the role of a sociological imagination. We propose strategies that sociology departments might follow to facilitate the professional socialization of graduate students, emphasizing the establishment of group culture and presentational norms. In the absence of these changes, we offer advice to graduate students on navigating their current programs.You wish me to speak about "Science as a Vocation." Now, we political economists have a pedantic custom, which I should like to follow, of always beginning with the external conditions. In this case, we begin with the question: What are the conditions of science as

Individual differences in expertise development over decades in a complex intellectual domain

“…The latter would easily understand chess material. In science, a widening of an initial productivity difference between top and lesser producers may be largely magnified by gatekeeper influences and by occurrence of the "Matthew effect" ("To him that hath is given") (Di Prete & Eirich, 2006;Ferrales & Fine, 2005;Simonton, 2008). Initially successful scientists may gravitate to universities with excellent research facilities and light teaching loads, find it much easier to get grants and to gather large research teams, and thus may become progressively more productive.…”

Learning the Unwritten Rules: Working Class Students in Graduate School

“…Without comparing the experiences of graduate students from working class backgrounds to those from middle or upper class backgrounds, it is difficult to argue that the difficulties reported by working class graduate students are unique to their class background and not simply a byproduct of the graduate school experience. Indeed, other accounts of graduate school experiences in sociology have found that many graduate students report feeling like outsiders and struggle to make important social connections (Adler and Adler 2005;Ferrales and Fine 2005). Without a comparison group, how can we truly be sure that the barriers reported by working class graduate students through autoethnographic accounts or in the Grimes and Morris study are not universal to the graduate school experience, but instead vary by one's class background?…”

Doctoral Dissertation Defenses: Performing Ambiguity Between Ceremony and Assessment

“…However, as Ferrales and Fine (2005) argue, 'reputation work' plays an important role in the entire trajectory of PhD training; throughout the multiyear process leading up to the submission of the dissertation and its defense, PhD students are continuously engaged in managing their own reputation. Thus, the reputation of doctoral candidates is not set exclusively by their dissertations, but constructed in the process of doctoral education-a process which also involves a group culture with shared traditions among cohorts of graduate students, and a transformation of identity from 'student' to 'scholar' (Ferrales and Fine, 2005).…”

“…Thus, the reputation of doctoral candidates is not set exclusively by their dissertations, but constructed in the process of doctoral education-a process which also involves a group culture with shared traditions among cohorts of graduate students, and a transformation of identity from 'student' to 'scholar' (Ferrales and Fine, 2005).…”