Scientific Elite (Foundations of Higher Education) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560008555 ISBN 13: 9781560008552

Publisher: Routledge, 1995

Synopsis

Scientific Elite is about Nobel prize winners and the well-defined stratification system in twentieth-century science. It tracks the careers of all American laureates who won prizes from 1907 until 1972, examining the complex interplay of merit and privilege at each stage of their scientific lives and the creation of the ultra-elite in science.

The study draws on biographical and bibliographical data on laureates who did their prize-winning research in the United States, and on detailed interviews with forty-one of the fifty-six laureates living in the United States at the time the study was done. Zuckerman finds laureates being successively advantaged as time passes. These advantages are producing growing disparities between the elite and other scientists both in performance and in rewards, which create and maintain a sharply graded stratification system.

About this title

About the Author:

Harriet Zuckerman is vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and professor emerita of sociology at Columbia University. She has written on the reward system of science, scientific misconduct, the careers of men and women scientists, and problems and prospects in the sociology of science.

Harriet Zuckerman is vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and professor emerita of sociology at Columbia University. She has written on the reward system of science, scientific misconduct, the careers of men and women scientists, and problems and prospects in the sociology of science.

Review:

“Scientific Elite is a standard and definitive work. It need not be done again. . . . unmistakably the work of someone who has something to say and knows how to say it.”—Peter B. Medawar, Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Minerva

“[C]learly describes the processes and mechanisms of stratification in science. It tackles some very big questions in the sociology of the Nobel Prize and in the allocation of prestige in science . . . important and should be read.”—Barbara Rosenblum, American Journal of Sociology

“There can be little doubt that historians and sociologists who in the future examine the stratification of science will return time and again to Zuckerman’s study.”—Saul Benison, American Historical Review

“[I]nformative and scrupulously researched . . . should be read by all those interested in stratification in science.”—Paul Allison, Political Science Quarterly

“An absorbing study of the sociological aspects of the Nobel prizes. . . . The critical analysis reveals a great deal about the structure of the scientific establishment and the psychology of its intellectual leaders. Perfectly fascinating reading.”—Dr. Ernst Mayr, Harvard University

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1560008555
• ISBN 13: 9781560008552
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 382
• Editor: Zuckerman Harriet