Too local relative to what? Cross-national and cross-disciplinary variability in the tension between local and cosmopolitan coverage in nation-branded social science journals
By: Thomas, Jacob Richard
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Material type: 
BookPublisher: International Sociology Reviews Description: 40(2), Mar, 2025: p.304-321.Subject(s): nt, Analysis, Cosmopolitan, Local, Political science, Sociology
In:
International Sociology ReviewsSummary: In the social sciences, certain academic journals brand themselves as local to some geographical nation – ‘American’, ‘British’, ‘Canadian’, or ‘Chinese’. However, some of these journals aim to publish research not only about the domestic society indicated in their name but also research about another individual society, multiple societies, or society in general. Despite this editorial aspiration, for over 60 years, scholars have regularly critiqued the ‘American’ branded journals as being overly ‘ethnocentric’, ‘parochial’, or ‘provincial’ – in a word, too local and not truly cosmopolitan. Yet hardly any of these critiques systematically compares how local ‘American’ journals are compared to other nation-branded journals. In this article, I conduct a content analysis of all articles published in nation-branded political science and sociology journals from 2019 until 2023 to show what percentage their articles each year are about their local society, how many are about a single foreign society, and how much are about multiple societies or society in general. I show how ‘Canadian’ and ‘Chinese’ branded journals are more locally focused and the ‘British’ branded journals are less locally focused than the ‘American’ branded journals, and nation-branded sociology journals remain far more local in their focus than nation-branded political science journals.- Reproduced
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/02685809251325014
| Item type | Current location | Call number | Vol info | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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Articles
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Indian Institute of Public Administration | 40(2), Mar, 2025: p.304-321 | Available | AR136577 |
In the social sciences, certain academic journals brand themselves as local to some geographical nation – ‘American’, ‘British’, ‘Canadian’, or ‘Chinese’. However, some of these journals aim to publish research not only about the domestic society indicated in their name but also research about another individual society, multiple societies, or society in general. Despite this editorial aspiration, for over 60 years, scholars have regularly critiqued the ‘American’ branded journals as being overly ‘ethnocentric’, ‘parochial’, or ‘provincial’ – in a word, too local and not truly cosmopolitan. Yet hardly any of these critiques systematically compares how local ‘American’ journals are compared to other nation-branded journals. In this article, I conduct a content analysis of all articles published in nation-branded political science and sociology journals from 2019 until 2023 to show what percentage their articles each year are about their local society, how many are about a single foreign society, and how much are about multiple societies or society in general. I show how ‘Canadian’ and ‘Chinese’ branded journals are more locally focused and the ‘British’ branded journals are less locally focused than the ‘American’ branded journals, and nation-branded sociology journals remain far more local in their focus than nation-branded political science journals.- Reproduced
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/02685809251325014
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