Adel Daoud and Sebastian Kohl Is there a New Economic Sociology Effect? A Topic Model on the Economic Orientation of Sociology, 1890 to 2014 September 2015 Working Paper 20/2015 Department of Economics The New School for Social Research The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the New School for Social Research. © 2015 by Adel Daoud and Sebastian Kohl. All rights reserved. Short sections of text may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit is given to the source. Is there a New Economic Sociology Effect?? A Topic Model on the Economic Orientation of Sociology, 1890 to 2014 1 Adel Daoud Department of Sociology and Work Science University of Gothenburg & The Economics Department The New School for Social Research [email protected] Sebastian Kohl Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies [email protected] Abstract The conventional story tells us that since the birth of the discipline of sociology, the economic orientation of the discipline has peaked twice: the first peak was during the classical era between 1890 and 1920; the second peak was sometime after 1985, marking Granovetter´s Economic Action and Social Structure paper. We have tested this story by using all full-text articles provided by JSTOR between the periods 1890 to 2014: this contains 142 040 articles and 157 journals. We used a combination of topic modelling (machine learning applied to text) and multilevel modelling (regression) to accomplish this. We have found the following. (1) there is strong evidence for the first peak, but contrary to this narrative, we also find a decreasing proportion of economic topics over the last century. (2) The rise of the new economic sociology as a sub-discipline of sociology, comes not in the form of an increasing focus on general economic issues, but rather in the form of a particular topic mix of organization and social-theory research. (3) We show, accordingly, that this particular topic mix reached its bottom and started to rise by the 1929; it peaked by 1989. (4) We suggest, therefore, that Granovetter´s article (and the new economic sociology) does not mark the beginning of a second peak – as the conventional story has it – but it is rather a product of a preceding sociological interests, innovations, and orientation towards socio-economic theory development. (5) Moreover, we discover that neither the classics nor the new economic sociologists contribute much to an empirical (applied) type of economic topic found in industrial relations and political economy research. In conclusion, the future impact that the discipline of sociology might have on economic oriented research in the social sciences, will most likely require (a) less of a within- and between disciplinary fragmentation that is most likely hampering the potential contributions sociologists can make; (b) more of engaging with applied economic affairs and thus bridge current sub-disciplinary divides. This is crucial in the age of austerity and if we seek to conceive of better socio-economic theories than existing economic theories. 1 We thank Pascal Braun, and Hans Ekbrand for their support. The article has profited from its presentation at the Gesis Text Mining Workshop and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in 2015. We thank JSTOR for providing us with the necessary data and technical support. Contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 3 2 Literature background ........................................................................................................ 5 3 Data and Methodology ....................................................................................................... 7 3.1 Data – the full JSTOR sociology data between 1890 to 2014 ..................................... 7 3.2 Limitations of the data ................................................................................................. 9 3.3 Topic modeling .......................................................................................................... 10 3.4 Multilevel modeling .................................................................................................. 11 4 Analysis and Result .......................................................................................................... 14 4.1 The topic model: validation, interpretation, and analysis .......................................... 14 4.1.1 The first validation step: The word-over-topic distribution ............................... 15 4.1.2 The second validation step: The topics-over-articles distribution...................... 18 4.1.3 The third step: Leading economic sociologists and their topic distribution....... 20 4.2 Hypotheses and questions derived from the topic model results ............................... 24 4.3 The multilevel modeling: analyzing the time-trend of the economic orientation of sociology over the last 124 years. ........................................................................................ 26 4.3.1 Journal rankings ................................................................................................. 31 5 Discussion and Conclusions ............................................................................................. 32 6 References ........................................................................................................................ 35 7 Appendix .......................................................................................................................... 39 2 1 Introduction The story of the new economic sociology is usually presented as a story of success: after a dearth of economic topics in the Parsonian era, the 1980s, and particularly Mark Granovetter’s much cited 1985 article publication, the sub-discipline saw an unprecedented Renaissance of economic topics in sociology much as in its classical founding period. In one of the latest reflections on the state of economic sociology, the entry in the new International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, it reads: "Over the past 30 years, economic sociology has erupted into a vibrant and visible subfield as sociologists increasingly apply social theories to study the economy" (Fligstein and Dioun 2015: 4128). By analyzing all full-text articles in JSTOR between 1890 and 2014 (n=142040), this article puts these claims under closer scrutiny: does the development of economic topics in sociology really follow a U-shaped trend and did Granovetter’s article make in fact a difference? Our findings challenge indeed the established narratives about the discipline: economic topics have seen a more or less constant decline over the last century, while organizational sociology, social theory and labor-related topics, as realized particularly in articles of New Economic Sociologists, have grown. Rather than narrowly writing about the economy, economic sociologists seem to have moved from their original disciplines such as network analysis or organizational sociology into describing more economic phenomena. We thus confirm claims about the fragmented status of economic sociology (Beamish 2007: 1000, DiMaggio and Zukin 1990). A positive effect of Granovetter's most-cited article on increasing economic topics cannot be found. The article contributes to the sociology of sociology by making use of the largest text data set used so far, to the best of our knowledge, while applying for the first time advanced methods in automated content analysis. On the one hand, it thus makes empirical accounts of the sociological discipline and its sub-disciplines more replicable, data-driven and rigorous. While many claims are made about the empirical development, state of the art and possible future of economic sociology, those are almost never accompanied by an empirically grounded sociology of science but rather by anecdotic evidence and personal impressions of involved authors (see e.g. Beamish 2007). Our article enriches these self-interpretations of the discipline. On the other hand, it makes use of topic modeling techniques not for its own methodological sake, but to address existing claims and questions concerning a substantive topic. Sociology of any sociological sub-discipline is important because implicitly it guides not only researchers’ self-interpretation and academic identity, but it is often part of the legitimation for the existence and support of certain disciplines. Disciplines often emerge in opposition to existing ones supposed faults and gaps they intend to cure. Growth studies about disciplines' past successes are used to attract research money. Disciplinary history is therefore no political neutral field, is often undertaken by insiders and does not always necessarily live up to standards of scientific rigor. 3 Furthermore, the extreme and ongoing division of labor in scientific disciplines such as sociology makes it impossible for individual authors to read the entire output of a discipline, even of some sub-disciplines. To read the already somewhat selective JSTOR-corpus of American journal articles a researcher devoting her entire lifetime on reading would hardly come through. Meanwhile, a similar corpus would have been produced without the researcher having herself written anything. This suggests that some more powerful tools of automated text analyses might be of use which by losing information increase the time and number of documents covered.