Andrew Abbott

Andrew Delano Abbott (born November 1948) is an American sociologist and social theorist working at the University of Chicago. His research topics range from occupations and professions to the philosophy of methods, the history of academic disciplines, to the sociology of knowledge. He is also the editor of the American Journal of Sociology.

Education and career

Abbott attended Phillips Academy at Andover, and majored in History and Literature at Harvard College. From 1971 to 1982, he was a graduate student in the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago. He defended his dissertation in 1982, written under the supervision of Morris Janowitz. The dissertation, never published, was a study the emergence of psychiatry as a profession.[1]

From 1978 to 1991, he was on the faculty at Rutgers University. He then returned to the University of Chicago and later became the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Distinguished Service Professor in Sociology. Abbott has held different positions at the University. He was Master of the Social Science Division (1993-1996) and Chair of the Department of Sociology (1999-2002). Until recently, he was also the chair of the University's library board, where he spearheaded the development of the Mansueto library, an innovative structure aimed at making the ever growing amount of print material easily accessible to researchers.

Abbott has also been the editor of the leading journal in U.S. Sociology, the American Journal of Sociology, since 2000. Prior to that, he edited Work and Occupations from 1991 to 1994.

Prizes and Awards

Abbott has received many awards for his work and service, amongst which are several American Sociological Association prizes. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received a Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Versailles - Saint Quentin (2011, France). He is affiliated with Nuffield College at Oxford.

Research Areas

Professions

Abbott's research looms large in this field. His initial work, partly drawing from his dissertation, dealt with professions and offered explanations for their internal status structures. In The System of Professions (1988), Abbott suggested that professions are occupations which successfully claimed and maintained their monopoly ("jurisdiction") over certain activities. Taking cues from the body of research in this area but also distancing himself from it, Abbott called for a systemic approach to professions. More precisely, he advocated not only for an attention to the evolution of occupations in time (their "natural history"), but also attention to the contentious relations between professions at any given moment. The book was awarded the ASA Sorokin award in 1991 and has since been widely discussed.

Methods

Another important aspect of Abbott's work deals with methods and their relation to (social scientific) knowledge. Early in his career, Abbott expressed his discomfort with the hegemony of inferential statistics in US sociology. The technique, whose merits he acknowledged, nonetheless relies on a set of philosophical assumptions whose implications are often ignored. . Attempting to provide a methodological remedy for resulting problems, Abbott imported into social science computational techniques for analyzing sequence data: in particular optimal matching analysis, a technique that detects proximities between vast numbers of sequences, hence enabling a quantitative approach to careers and other social sequence data. The book Time Matters, published in 2001, is a collection of essays on the philosophy of methods that summarizes and furthers Abbott's main arguments on time and processes.

Disciplines

Turning his analytical framework onto himself and his peers, Abbott analyzed academic disciplines in two books, Department and Discipline (1999) and Chaos of Discipline (2001). The first book analyzes the history of sociology at Chicago and in particular the history of the American Journal of Sociology. The second provides a systematic approach to the intellectual development of disciplines. Abbott argues that the social sciences are organized by “fractal distinction.” For example, the division between methods (qualitative vs. quantitative for instance) or between disciplines (sociology and history) are replicated within themselves (sociology divides into a historical and a sociological version, as does history as well). Disciplines hence experience a permanent process of "fractalization," which combined with external factors (funding, jobs, politics), accounts for much of the evolution of knowledge.

Abbott has written extensively about knowledge production. From Methods of Discovery (2004 - a handbook for social science heuristics) to Digital Paper (2014 – a handbook for research with data found in libraries or on the internet), he has analyzed the various ways of knowing and its relation to materials. The latter book offers a reflection on the conditions and forms of knowledge in the era of big data, and, based on his experience as a teacher and as a scholar, points towards strategies to deal with it.

Barbara Celarent

In an attempt to provincialize U.S. Sociology, Abbott has recently written wrote a series of essays about foreign books. Every issue of the American Journal of Sociology features a long essay review of his, under the pen name of Barbara Celarent. According to her webpage, Celarent is "a woman of 51 years" writing from the year 2049, and is "the Neptunian Professor of Sociology of Particularity at the University of Atlantis."[2] For more informations on Celarent, see Alan Sica's portrait of her.[3]

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Abbott, Andrew (2006). "Losing Faith". In Sica, Alan; Turner, Stephen P. The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties. University of Chicago Press. pp. 21–37. Retrieved 12 April 2015.
  2. ↑ "Barbara Celarent". University of Chicago. 2015. Retrieved 12 April 2015.
  3. ↑ Sica, Alan (July 2011). "The Case of Barbara Celarent, Champion Book Reviewer". Contemporary Sociology (Sage Publications) 40 (4): 385–387. doi:10.1177/0094306111412511. Retrieved 12 April 2015.

External links

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