Journal editorships and inequality in academic fields. A study on an affiliation network of Italian sociology journal boards

The chapter aims to discuss gender and academic status inequalities in the composition of the committees of Italian top-ranked sociology journals from a social network analysis perspective. Scholars gain participation in academic journal boards thanks to their individual characteristics and academic position or experience. However, roles and memberships are often unequally distributed within these boards, where gender differences (i.e., female scholars are underrepresented or hold the position of editors-in-chief less frequently than male ones) are often neglected or unnoticed and mayalso be intertwined with disparities in the participation of less established researchers. These inequalities do matter in the networks formed by joint memberships in journal boards, within which scholars may hold more or less advantageous or powerful positions. Hence, the chapter first presents a descriptive analysis of the composition of the committees of Italian top-ranked sociology journals – i.e., those which have been acknowledged as “Class A” journals by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR) – focusing on gender, academic position and the geographical area of affiliation of their members. Following Bourdieu’s theory of academic and scientific fields, academic position is considered as an indicator of academic and symbolic capital, while direction of journal boards stands for possession of scientific capital. Then, journal board memberships are formalized as an affiliation network of Italian sociologists (actors) involved as members or editors-in-chief in the set of journal boards (events) thus selected. The scholar-by-scholar one-mode network derived from that affiliation network is analysed in order to highlight the differential positioning of scholars within it, using network centrality measures as indicators of social capital. The findings of this study show that few women with high academic status, along with several less established (fixed-term) researchers, occupy leading positions within these journal boards and in the related network, while male, academically prominent scholars (working mainly in institutions located in Italy’s northern or central regions) are the dominant figures. Therefore, women and less established scholars, as well as those who are affiliated with institutions located in Southern Italy, seem to be largely excluded from accumulation of symbolic capital associated with memberships in these journal boards, nor are they able to benefit from (and utilize) the related social capital.