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
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11495688 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jacob Richard Thomas (0000-0002-8171-4341, Corvinus University of Budapest, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 304-321 |
| Publication date | 2025-03-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0268-5809 • E-ISSN: 1461-7242 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/02685809251325014 |
| OpenAlex | W4409352634 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 29 |
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
Cosmopolitanism · Cross disciplinary · Discipline · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Cultural Differences and Values · Law · Qualitative Comparative Analysis Research · Social and Cultural Dynamics
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Ethnocentric Sociology
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Expansion and Its Discontents
Isomorphism, Institutional Parochialism, and the Sociology of Religion
International Representation in US Social-Science Journals
Detecting Topical Divides and Topical “Bridges” Across National Sociologies
Report of the President's Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies
Panoptic geographies
Introduction
Debating the Direction of Comparative Politics
Contemporary Comparative Politics
Comparative Political Science
The neglected 95
American Sociology in a Transnational World
The Iron Cage Revisited
Globalizing Knowledge
Sociology
Provincialism and Internationalism in Contemporary American Sociology
Scholarly attention and the limited internationalization of US social science
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Travelling abroad with a map of a made-in-the-USA neo-liberal city
| Highly cited | No |
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