The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences

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.