UC Riverside

The purpose of this dissertation was to use sociology in the United States as a case study to explore the extent to which the relative popularity of topics which scientists choose to study are influenced by inequalities in three major aspects of the social structure of a discipline: (1) the network of specializations in a discipline, (2) the network of PhD-granting departments in a discipline, and (3) sociodemographic clustering within specializations. A longitudinal dataset containing 70,960 total observations of 5332 full-time sociologists at 92 US PhD-granting departments between 1976 and 2016 was constructed from several publicly available data sources. The results showed that there is evidence to support the conclusion that specialization centrality, and in limited cases, specialization communities, impacted the relative popularity of sociological specialization claims between 1976 and 2016. The results also showed that popularity among the top-5 departments influenced the relative popularity of specializations, and that this was likely due the stratified graduate placement network rather than these top departments being the first to adopt new specializations. However, sociodemographic clustering on gender did not appear to impact the popularity of specializations. The results contribute to advancing our understanding of the identities of scientists, scientific disciplines, and academic departments. They also have important implications for research policymaking and funding aimed at guiding the production and validation of knowledge within a discipline.