ASCRIPTIVE CAREER CONTINGENCIES OF SOCIOLOGISTS: A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS.

The system of social inequality in American science has been the subject of numerous empirical investigations in the last decades. A persistent theme of such studies has been the attempt to de-mystify the social organization of academic life as supposedly exemplary of the domination of the universalistic-achievement pattern. Investigators have stressed the descriptive-like antecedents and consequences of the reputation of universities or departments as a career contingency for individual scientists. Given the various independent dimensions of the analysis, zero-order correlations were computed as a gross index of the relation among the variables, both for the year 1959 and 1970. For both time periods, standardized regression coefficients are used for art assessment of the predictive utility of each independent dimension when the effects of the remaining independent variables are removed. The model used assumes additive effects for variables in both time periods, this may be useful as a first approximation but it is, of course, conceivable, for example, that the dimension highest degree would interact with other independent variables.