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 University. From 1971 to 1982, he was a graduate student in the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago.^[1] 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.^[2]

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 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 more 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 also affiliated with Nuffield College at Oxford.

Research Areas

Abbott is well known for this study of professions and status. His book, "The System of Professions" (1988), has been considered an important contribution to sociology.^[3][4] The book was awarded the ASA Sorokin award in 1991.

Another important aspect of Abbott's work deals with methods and their relation to (social scientific) knowledge. 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. His 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. The development of this set of methods has heavily influenced the development of the field of social sequence analysis.

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 has written also about knowledge production in Methods of Discovery (2004 - a handbook for social science heuristics) and Digital Paper (2014 – a handbook for research with data found in libraries or on the internet). He analyzes the various ways of knowing and its relation to materials.

Barbara Celarent

Each issue of the American Journal of Sociology features an essay reviewing a sociology book from the past, written under the pen name of Barbara Celarent, supposedly writing from the year 2049.^[5]

Bibliography

• The emergence of American psychiatry, 1880-1930, 1982.
• The system of professions : an essay on the division of expert labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 ISBN 978-0-226-00069-5
• Department and discipline: Chicago sociology at one hundred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 ISBN 978-0-226-00099-2
• Chaos of disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 ISBN 978-0-226-00101-2
• Time matters: on theory and method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001 ISBN 978-0-226-00103-6
• Methods of discovery: heuristics for the social sciences. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004 ISBN 978-0393978148
• Digital paper: a manual for research and writing with library and internet materials. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014 ISBN 978-0-226-16778-7

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Andrew Abbott

• Abbott’s webpage at the University of Chicago
• Barbara Celarent's web page
• Andrew Abbott's Biography