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The author reviews the primary frameworks through which North American sociologists have conceived of the relation between formal education and culture and explains how sociologists' preponderant conception of formal schooling as an individual-level phenomenon and a metrical quantity has come to constrain intellectual progress in much of the subfield. The author offers two analytic strategies that might help loosen this constraint.

The author reviews the primary frameworks through which North American sociologists have conceived of the relation between formal education and culture and explains how sociologists' preponderant conception of formal schooling as an individual-level phenomenon and a metrical quantity has come to constrain intellectual progress in much of the subfield. The author offers two analytic strategies that might help loosen this constraint. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2008 The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

AbstractWe integrate contemporary sociological scholarship on higher education to appraise universities as peculiar organizations, on three dimensions. Universities are positionally central to the institutional order of modern societies, providing working links between state, market, civil society, and private‐sphere organizations. Universities are polysemic, embodying civic, economic, and sacred meanings simultaneously. And universities are quasi‐sovereign, enjoying a substantial margin of jurisdiction over their own boundaries and internal affairs. These insights are harmonious with classic insights on the character of academic organization and offer concise dimensions for observing variation in higher education systems across space and time.

AbstractThe massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior scholarship names academic leaders as key drivers of this expansion, yet the conditions for the possibility and fate of their activity remain under-specified. We fill this gap by theorizing what Randall Collins first callededucational entrepreneurshipas a special kind of strategic action in the US polity. We argue that the cultural authority and organizational centrality of universities in the US national context combine with historical contingency to episodically produce conditions under which academic credentials can be made viable solutions to social problems. We put our theorization to the test by revisiting and extending a paradigmatic case: the expansion of engineering education at Stanford University between 1945 and 1969. Invoking several contemporaneous and subsequent cases, we demonstrate the promise of theorizing educational expansion as an outcome of strategic action by specifically located actors over time.

The GI Bill's college-attendance provisions posed an evaluation problem. How would returning veterans, most of whom were without high school diplomas, be judged fit for college? Drawing from a variety of primary source material from the years surrounding the close of World War II, we show how leaders in government, the military, and academia cooperated to produce a measure of college fitness that would deem virtually all veterans fit for college entry. We use this historical moment to develop a novel theoretical insight. Measurement is diplomatic when it facilitates transactions across institutional distinctions while recognizing and honoring those distinctions. This insight has broad utility for students of American political development.

US higher education has enjoyed growing attention from social scientists and historians. We integrate recent scholarship by framing a political and historical sociology of the sector. We show how higher education has been central to projects of nation building and social provision throughout the course of American political development. US higher education has three institutional configurations: an associational one, defined by voluntary intermural organizations; a national service one, defined by massive government patronage; and a market one, defined by competition for students, patrons, and prestige. Continuity and change over time may be understood with the theoretical tools of historical sociology: path dependence, coalescence, and robust action. Our review substantiates assertions of deep turbulence in US higher education at present and calls for a closer integration of scholarship on state building and social stratification to inform the future. [ Erratum ]

Although it is evident in routine decision-making and a crucial vehicle of rationalization, commensuration as a general social process has been given little consideration by sociologists. This article defines commensuration as the comparison of different entities according to a common metric, notes commensuration's long history as an instrument of social thought, analyzes commensuration as a mode of power, and discusses the cognitive and political stakes inherent in calling something incommensurable. We provide a framework for future empirical study of commensuration and demonstrate how this analytic focus can inform established fields of sociological inquiry.