The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills

If we are to understand what is going on in any area of cultural and intellectual work, we must understand its immediate social context. I must accordingly now make a brief excursus on academic cliques. Of course it is true that to the extent that an idea is durable and significant, any given personality or clique can be but its temporary symbol. Yet the whole business of ‘cliques' and ‘personalities' and ‘schools' is rather more complicated than that; their importance in shaping the development of social science deserves more awareness on our part. We must confront them, if for no other reason, because any cultural activity requires financial support of some kind and also a public of some sort to give it the help of criticism. Neither the money nor the criticism is given solely on the basis of objective judgments of worth, and besides there is usually argument about the objectivity of the judgments themselves as well as about the worth.

The function of the academic clique is not only to regulate the competition, but to set the terms of competition and to assign rewards for work done in accordance with these terms at any given time. It is the canons by which men are judged and work criticized that are the most important intellectual feature of the clique. To my previous point about ‘the ethos of the technicians' of the bureaucratic social science-their qualities of mind and their influence upon the making of reputations and hence upon dominant fashions in social science and upon the canons of critical judgment that prevail-I here need only add that the means by which the internal tasks of the clique are accomplished include: the giving of friendly advice to younger men; job offers and recommendations of promotion; the assignment of books to admiring reviewers; the ready acceptance of articles and books for publication; the allocation of research funds; arranging or politicking for honorific positions within professional associations and on editorial boards of professional journals. In so far as these means constitute assignments of prestige, which is, in turn, very much a determinant of academic careers, they affect the economic expectations of the individual scholar as well as his professional reputation.