Abstract
One of the prominent ways sociologists make sense of what published texts we get to read is through the processes by which editors and authors “match.” Most accounts of this encounter explain editor-author matches as a result of dispositions, homophily, or instrumental concerns. Exploring the archives of University of Chicago Press social sciences editor Douglas Mitchell, we instead argue for the value of a framework anchored in the editor’s self-concept. We show how this self-concept structures not only the editor’s relationship with authors but also the definition of what an author should be to begin with. We do this by first looking at how Mitchell’s self-concept as a philosophical pragmatist framed how he organized his editorial work. Further, we examine the different figures of love that arise in his notes and writings to explain how he conceptualized his engagement with authors-to-be. Looking at authors’ acknowledgments as a further source of data reveals how others responded to Mitchell as an editor, often within the boundaries of his own self-concept.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The Gordon J. Laing Prize is awarded to the “author, editor or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction.” (“Gordon J. Laing Prize.” University of Chicago Press Website). The award is voted on by the faculty board of the Press, the same committee that gives final approval to author manuscripts based on packets prepared by acquisitions editors.
- 2.
As we explain later in our literature review, using self-concept allows us for ideas regarding the ideas people have about themselves, their self-definitions, the congruency between those concepts and practices, as well as how the self itself is understood as a kind of project that frames and organizes a person’s life and their work. Neither identity nor subjectivity, for instance, captures these dimensions in detail and nuance.
- 3.
Douglas Mitchell, letter to Richard M. Abrams, March 1, 1977
- 4.
The sociology of the creation of cultural products has consolidated itself while focusing on elite realms (literature, science, academic knowledge, the medical profession) and on the processes through which actors in particular social locations manage to trace boundaries and appropriate resources. In this chapter we aim to present a fuller picture, by showing what happens when competition for resources and status is bracketed as an explanatory variable, and external macro variables (since most scholars here share capitals and trajectories) are less present.
- 5.
April 2003 interview by Emily Garman, University of Tennessee student, with Douglas Mitchell at the Organization of American Historians, Memphis, TN.
- 6.
Andrew Abbott, speech “2018 ASA piece on Doug Mitchell” from American Sociological Association meeting, Philadelphia, PA.
- 7.
Douglas Mitchell, speech “Reading Sociology: Editorial Semantics and the Rhetoric of Invention and Judgment” at the 1987 meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, Chicago, IL.
- 8.
Field notes from American Historical Association meetings in 1977, 1979, and 1985; Organization of American Historians meeting in 1978; American Sociological Association meetings in 1978, 1979, and 1985.
- 9.
Douglas Mitchell, Summer 2004, “The Editorial Character” in Volume 4, Issue 1 of Bookmark, an internal publication of the University of Chicago Press.
- 10.
Douglas Mitchell, speech “Reading Sociology: Editorial Semantics and the Rhetoric of Invention and Judgment” at the 1987 meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, Chicago, IL.
- 11.
In those field notes his least preferred scholars were those who had done poor work writing reviewers’ reports on a book he thought had potential.
- 12.
While we have no way to know the motivation of authors in doing this, whether they were instrumental, routinary, or actually emotive about it, what is striking is how much he managed to have others talk about him in detail as the person he fancied himself to be in those intellectual encounters—and in life at large.
- 13.
A limitation of looking at successful matches, though, is that the archives do not provide enough data about how cultural matching generates social closure, as those excluded because they did not meet the standards for what a scholar should be and almost never made it into the files, or—of course—the catalog.
References
Benzecry, Claudio E. 2011. The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Benzecry, Claudio. 2018. “Habitus and Beyond: Standing on the Shoulders of a Giant Looking at the Seams” in Tom Medvetz and Jeff Salaz (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu. New York: Oxford University Press.
Boswell, John. 1980. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Burke, Kenneth. “Literature as Equipment for Living” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 293–304. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
Childress, Clayton. 2017. Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Childress, Clayton, and Jean-Francois Nault. 2019. “Encultured biases: The role of products in pathways to inequality.” American Sociological Review 84(1): 115–141.
Chong, PK. 2011. “Reading Difference: How Race and Ethnicity Function as Tools for Critical Appraisal.” Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts. 39 (1): 68–84.
Collins, Randall. 1998. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, M: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Coser, Lewis A., Charles Kadushin, and Walter W. Powell. 1982. Books: the Culture and Commerce of Publishing. New York: Basic Books.
Corcuff, Philippe. 2001. “Le collectif au défi du singulier: en partant de l’habitus”, in Bernard Lahire (dir.), Le travail sociologique du Pierre Bourdieu: Dettes et critiques. Paris: La Découverte. pp. 95–120.
Dosse, Francois. 1997. L’empire du sens: La humanisation des sciences humaines. Paris: La Découverte.
Elias, Norbert. 1993. Mozart: Portrait of a Genius. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Griswold, Wendy. 2000. Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gross, Neil. 2003. “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Ideas.” Theory and Society 32: 93–148.
Gross, Neil. 2008. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gross, Neil and Crystal Fleming. 2011. “Academic conferences and the making of philosophical knowledge.” In Charles Camic, Neil Gross, & Michele Lamont (Eds.), Social Knowledge in the Making. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Johns, Adrian. 1998. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kaufman, Jason. 2004. “Endogenous Explanation in the Sociology of Culture.” Annual Review of Sociology 30: 335–57.
Lahire, Bernard. 2003. “From the Habitus to an Individual Heritage of Dispositions: Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual.” Poetics 31(4): 329–355.
Lahire, Bernard. 2006. La Culture des individus. Paris: La Découverte.
Lahire, Bernard. 2008. “The Individual and the Mixing of Genres: Cultural Dissonance and Self-distinction.” Poetics 36(2): 166–188.
Lahire, Bernard. 2011. The Plural Actor. London: Polity.
Leschziner, Vanina. 2015. At the Chef’s Table: Culinary Creativity in Elite Restaurants. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Lewis, C.S. 1960. The Four Loves. London: Geoffrey Bles.
Long, Elizabeth. 2003. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: University Chicago Press.
Mahan, Margaret. 2007. The University of Chicago Press, 1966–2007: A Collective Memoir. Unpublished Manuscript.
McKeon, Richard. 1987. Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.
McKeon, Richard P. 1990. Zahava Karl McKeon, ed. Freedom and History and Other Essays: An Introduction to the Thought of Richard McKeon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McKeon, Richard P. 1994. David B. Owen and Zahava Karl McKeon, eds. On Knowing: the Natural Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McKeon, Richard P. 1998a. Zahava K. McKeon and William Swenson, eds. Selected Writings of Richard McKeon: Volume I Philosophy, Science, and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
McKeon, Richard P. 1998b. Zahava K. McKeon and William G. Swenson, eds. Selected Writings of Richard McKeon: Volume II Culture, Education, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McKeon, Richard P. 2016. David B. Owen and Joanne K. Olson, eds. On Knowing: the Social Sciences. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Mitchell, Douglas. 1982. Review of Books: the Culture and Commerce of Publishing by Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin, and Walter W. Powell. American Journal of Sociology. 88(2): 439–443.
Mitchell, Douglas. 1988. Review of Rhetoric: Essays in Invention & Discovery by Richard McKeon. Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 6(4): 396–414.
Mitchell, Douglas. 2016. “Creating Community through Communication: Richard McKeon’s Philosophic Pluralism.” Schools: Studies in Education. 13(2): 243–248.
Radway, Janice. 1987. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. London: Verso.
Rivera, Lauren A. Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Santana Acuña, Álvaro. 2020. Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic. New York: Columbia University Press.
Seybold, Catharine. 1983. The University of Chicago Press: A Brief History, 1891–1965. Unpublished Manuscript.
Shapin, Steven. 2012. The Sciences of Subjectivity. Social Studies of Science 42(2): 170–184.
Wohl, Hannah. 2021. Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art is Created and Judged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Silver, J.B., Benzecry, C.E. (2022). Editor’s Love: Matching, Reading, and the Editorial Self-concept. In: Thumala Olave, M.A. (eds) The Cultural Sociology of Reading. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-13226-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-13227-8
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)