The Knowledge Polity : Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences

Producing knowledge is not just about producing research; it is also about teaching, about helping others improve their work, and about communicating information to the public. The Knowledge Polity examines how faculty in the social and behavioral sciences do all these activities. The book draws on surveys of working academics in two major disciplines to explain how, when, and why different scholars teach, research, and provide service to their home institutions and far-flung professional communities. In the process, the findings help to document and explain long-standing inequalities by race and gender in academia.

Drawing on surveys of diverse social science faculty, three acclaimed scholars develop a rich and sometimes surprising portrait of who produces research, teaches students, and contributes to the business of higher education - and how, when, and why. In The Knowledge Polity, Paul A. Djupe, Amy Erica Smith, and Anand Edward Sokhey envision academics as members of a polity where the primary output is knowledge and citizenship comes with rights and responsibilities. Leveraging the 2017 Professional Activity in the Social Sciences (PASS) Study, they develop a theoretically and empirically rich account of who produces knowledge, and how. The data enable an unparalleled understanding of the nature and sources of inequalities by gender and racial or ethnic identification in the disciplines of sociology and political science in the US. To explain those inequalities, the authors consider academics as embedded in institutional and social contexts-including their home lives-and carefully consider their personalities and changing compositions of the academic workforce. A comprehensive and wide-ranging analysis, this book documents patterns that have long been shrouded in anecdote and enables scholars from across the social and behavioral sciences to make empirically-grounded decisions about their individual and collective futures.