Abstract
Introduction
It is now a year since we took on the role of editing Sociology, an apt time to consider the position that the journal has reached and to convey our vision for the journal. Our editorship will last a total of three years, a short span of time in the history of the journal which reached its 50th anniversary in 2017. Like probably all editors before us, we are aware of the responsibility entrusted to us to ensure the high quality of output of an established institution in British and international sociology. However, we are also mindful of the need for journals to keep abreast with developments within the discipline and in the world around us, and to innovate accordingly. This editorial introduction looks back to appreciate the journal’s success and we also turn our attention to the future in the form of an editorial manifesto.
Looking Back
Sociology, the flagship journal of the British Sociological Association, was established in 1967 as a forum where sociologists could debate and develop theoretical and methodological issues and report on empirical research. To celebrate the journal’s 50th anniversary, the Editorial Board compiled a series of four e-Special Issues to showcase the rich back catalogue of articles published in Sociology. Each e-Special Issue focused on a decade or so of journal content through a particular thematic lens as a way of exploring the journal’s contribution to sociological theorising. In ‘Social class and Sociology’ the e-Special Issue editors Louise Ryan and Claire Maxwell (2016) collected together articles, mostly from the journal’s first decade and a bit (1967–1979), that help illustrate how Sociology has contributed to the conceptualisation and empirical research of social class. The e-Special Issue that focuses on the 1980s, edited by Silke Roth and Katherine Dashper (2016), turns its attention to the role that Sociology played in the ‘cultural turn’ that took place in the discipline at the time, as reflected in the rising importance of feminist analyses of gender and intersectionality. Self and identity form the focus of the third e-Special Issue edited by David Skinner, Vanessa May and Nicola Rollock (2016). Many of the articles in this collection from the 1990s engage in critical dialogue with the individualisation thesis, offering challenges to the often simplified readings of this thesis. In ‘Sociology in the 21st century: Reminiscence and redefinition’, the editors Rana Jawad, Paddy Dolan and Tracey Skillington (2016) review the journal’s content from 2000 onwards to discover a new-found spirit of adventure among sociologists as they stretch conventional disciplinary boundaries and challenge categorical distinctions such as those drawn between, for example, nature and society or technology and society.
These 50th anniversary collections are joined by three more e-Special Issues. The first, edited by Linda McKie and Louise Ryan (2012), explores the debates sparked in the discipline by the publication in Sociology of Mike Savage and Roger Burrows’s seminal article ‘The coming crisis of empirical sociology’ (Savage and Burrows, 2007). The two remaining e-Special Issues focus on race and racism (Meer and Nayak, 2013) and on families and relationships (May and Dawson, 2018) respectively. These issues demonstrate the central role that Sociology has played in shaping theory, methodology and empirical research in the discipline and offer both a good introduction to a novice to the discipline and a valuable resource to the seasoned researcher who wishes to access reviews of the development of particular sub-fields or debates within the discipline.
No editors today could write such a manifesto without some reference to the metrics by which individual academics, academic departments and scholarly journals are measured. Happily, Sociology’s impact factor has been rising in recent years, with the latest 2018 impact factor being 2.537, ranking the journal as 18th out of 147 sociology journals. Of course, impact factors only reflect the use of the journal’s content in academic publications, and in a narrow window of time spanning only two years. As the e-Special Issues discussed above indicate, some pieces have had long-lasting impact on the discipline and continue to be highly cited.
The membership of the British Sociological Association who receive the journal as part of their subscription is varied, comprising university academics, researchers and practitioners in industry and government, and teachers of sociology. The high download figures for certain key pieces in the journal’s back catalogue indicate the importance of scholarly papers in teaching. Sociology thus plays a central part in shaping how the discipline is understood by students of sociology who, whether or not they become academic scholars, will hopefully continue to use critical sociological thinking throughout their lives. In order to encourage a broader audience to engage with latest developments in the discipline, Sociology regularly makes a number of articles available to view without subscription for a limited period of time.
We would like to thank the previous editorial team, Sarah Neal, Karim Murji, Andrew King, Sophie Watson and Kath Woodward, as well as the Editorial Board, Associate Board and the many reviewers, on whose hard work the journal relies, for ensuring the high quality of content that has enhanced the journal’s relevance in the field. If success begets success then Sociology should maintain its position as a key international sociological journal attracting high quality submissions which help develop, challenge and transform the field. We now turn to discuss how we as editors aim to ensure that Sociology remains an attractive place to publish.
Looking Forward – Our Editorial Manifesto
Our vision is that Sociology should continue to be a vibrant journal attuned to critically exploring the big social questions that form the social and material environments in which people live, and to do so in ways that challenge, stretch and revise disciplinary orthodoxies. Sociology as a discipline has never stood still (or at least not for long), something very apparent in the e-Special Issues discussed above, which chart the many theoretical and methodological transformations the discipline has undergone during the journal’s lifetime. Challenging the forms of classed, racialised, gendered and sexual inequalities that continue to blight the lives of so many people are central to these transformations. Sociology has addressed big social shifts, such as de-industrialisation, globalisation and the financial crisis of 2008, and the impact these have had on politics, economy, social institutions and everyday life. More recently, the increasingly pressing environmental crisis and attendant issues of sustainability and consumption have been a key topic of debate. As sociology has turned to address these various social challenges, it has had to innovate how it conceptualises the relationship between people, things, places and societies, and how it empirically researches these.
Innovation
We are keen to ensure that Sociology continues to offer a home for articles which question accepted conventions in thinking and doing sociology. We invite submissions that are timely, theoretically complex and that might surprise, excite and perhaps even aggravate (all in the name of a good theoretical debate). We are happy to consider articles that depart from the usual, by now rather formulaic, structure of the empirical article – although all submissions will continue to be judged against conventional standards of theoretical and methodological rigour. In particular, we are keen to encourage theoretical articles which review a literature with the aim of updating and even transforming how a particular issue is conceptualised sociologically. In order to attract articles that exemplify complexity of argument and analysis, we are currently trialling a new venture whereby authors are given the option of applying for an extended word count for their articles. When considering requests from authors, we look for greater complexity in data reported, and for more extensive argumentation and theoretical sophistication. Such articles might cover several dimensions of a major research project, apply complex analysis of mixed methods data or develop a novel theoretical argument. Extended articles will normally be required to be of more than specialist or narrow sub-disciplinary interest.
Internationalisation
An important part of ensuring that Sociology retains its standing as an internationally significant publication is to increasingly draw on multiple global perspectives. The journal has in the recent past been international, in the sense that 38% of the articles published in the journal in 2018 were authored by scholars who are based outside the UK (based on the first author’s location). Nevertheless, the journal’s content has tended to address how the pressing social issues of the day have shaped societies in the Global North and to reflect the theoretical and substantive concerns of western sociology. In recent years, the journal has started to become more international also in the sense that an increasing number of articles address issues that affect the Global South and do so from perspectives that do not originate from western sociology (see, for example, the 2017 Special Issue on ‘Global Futures and Epistemologies of the South’, edited by Gurminder K Bhambra and Boaventura De Sousa Santos). In an era when the colonial legacies of sociology are being critically debated, by professional scholars and students of the discipline alike (for example, in recent calls by students to ‘decolonise my curriculum’), we want Sociology to stand at the forefront of this re-appraisal of the discipline’s history and of the shaping of its future. For example, in the call for our upcoming Special Issue ‘Nationalism’s Futures’, we highlight that we welcome submissions that critically examine the role in which sociology has played in the conceptualisation of nationalism and how past and current developments of nationalism can be understood through a postcolonial lens.
Efficiency
Finally, we turn our attention to more practical matters, which are no doubt crucial in terms of how authors experience the submission process and hence how they view the journal. Mindful of the pressures that colleagues face to publish, we are working together with the Editorial Board to ensure that submissions are reviewed in a timely fashion and in the spirit of constructive criticism. It takes an average of about 10 months for articles submitted to Sociology to proceed from submission to final decision. While as an average, this is very good, some articles spend a longer time in review. Delays sometimes arise because we generally require three sound reviews in order to ensure as high a quality of articles as possible. Three reviews are beneficial to authors in improving their articles and enhance the final product. We also endeavour to return to the same three reviewers through the different stages of the review process, although sometimes this is not possible (e.g. reviewers may go on leave, retire or be unable to undertake reviews of re-submitted articles because of changes in their workloads). We aim to communicate with authors when we hit such snags.
Sociology relies on the free labour not only of authors but also reviewers, the members of the two Editorial Boards and editors, all of whose time is precious and increasingly pressured. The un/fairness of the free labour that goes into academic publishing has, in recent years, become a central concern in the UK and in other countries too. This is one of the reasons why we have adopted quite a strict desk-reject policy – this allows authors to get faster feedback on their articles and also helps protect the time of reviewers. We hope that authors whose article is not sent out to review understand that due to the high volume of submissions received, we cannot offer an in-depth review, but we will usually indicate the criteria on which the article has been desk-rejected.
Conclusion
As editors we are in a position to witness not only the exciting developments in sociology as a discipline, but also changes in the world of academic publishing. How readers engage with the journal has changed in the preceding decades as more and more people access content online. One way in which we have responded to this is by our ongoing improvement of the journal’s online presence, initially by giving our Twitter feed a face-lift. Please stay tuned as we continue to develop our online materials. We also welcome comments from readers about the relationship between print and on-line publication.
We envisage turbulent times ahead as pressure for open access, as signalled by many European research councils signing up to the Coalition S proposal, disrupts established ways of funding the journals of learned societies. Although responding to such a threat is not a responsibility of the editors, we are concerned that the quality of work secured by rigorous peer review should be safeguarded.
The journal will continue to publish sociological work of all kinds, from all branches of the discipline, and from a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. In order for Sociology to retain its leading position, it is important that we continue to publish work at the forefront of developments in the discipline. Our hope is that submissions will be increasingly global, both in origin and in empirical focus. We also encourage greater diversity of form and more intellectual controversy. We believe that work which is exciting to read is the best means to promote the discipline.
