Abstract
For the 2013 meeting cycle, the Pacific Sociological Association (PSA) implemented subtle but important changes in the processes by which the program is constituted – centralizing the processes of review and assignment, and making distinctions between presentation types. Those changes, the product of several years of discussions, were designed to address member concerns about the uneven quality of presentations, as well as shifts in membership composition which had led to a predominance of student members and a shrinking proportion of faculty members from doctoral-granting institutions. The changes were intended to increase the overall quality of presentations (and reestablish PSA’s reputation as a venue for disciplinary leading research) while retaining the programmatic diversity and culture of inclusion so valued by PSA members. Assessment of annual member survey data suggests that members across all membership components evaluated the changes positively. Specific patterns suggest that while the creation of research-in-progress sessions was seen as an inclusionary change, the centralization of program development processes was seen as exclusionary. We discuss the implications of the data for considering the contemporary role of regional sociological associations.
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Notes
In the PSA, the leadership with central responsibility for planning and implementing the annual meetings are the Program Chair, the Executive Director, and the President. Typically, the President selects the Program Chair, who leads the Program Committee (a team of two to three dozen members) in setting up and implementing the process through which submissions are reviewed and assigned. As the Program Chair is traditionally unremunerated, the Executive Director is essential for supporting the process in a variety of ways. The President takes a variable role; some have been more active in planning and organizing, and some have been relatively uninvolved.
Both authors were part of the Membership Committee during the years when the issues addressed here were discussed. In addition, Downey served as Program Chair during the 2013 cycle in which the innovations were initially implemented; Orr is Program Chair for the 2014 cycle which has implemented a refined version.
Those concurrent shifts present an interesting irony: the growth of students was fueled in part by the valuable opportunity it gave to doctoral students to present their emerging research in a professional setting. Those opportunities benefit not only them, but their advisors as well (in an indirect way) as it assists them in the professional development and success of their students. Of course, those are the very faculty members who (in aggregate) were increasingly opting out of the PSA. That juxtaposition of trends was discussed in the Membership Committee meeting as an example of a “free rider problem” (Olson 1965).
The survey also identified external factors that contributed to the declining participation of research faculty. Most notable among those factors is the emergence of interdisciplinary professional associations focusing on topics of relevance to sociologists (e.g., the Population Association of America, the Rural Sociological Society, and various Ethnic Studies associations). The emergence of those venues for research presentation and networking, in the context of time and funding limitations, also explain the decline.
The primary exceptions include the 2004 meetings in San Francisco, which represented a substantial jump followed by a substantial decrease the following year. The reason for that jump was that it was the association's 75th anniversary and special efforts were made to develop the program and participation accordingly.
We should add: implementing those changes generated a set of complicated logistical challenges involved in the commissioning of an electronic submission system to accommodate the new categories and processes. Those unexpected technical issues compounded the expected confusions associated with any organizational change. We will not address the technical issues here, but they became an important and unfortunate part of the process.
The means for the three variables are 4.22 (overall), 4.22 (research-in-progress), and 4.25 (topical areas).
The familiarity question acted as a filter for the favorability questions; those indicating that they were “completely unfamiliar with the changes” were not invited to respond to the question regarding favorability.
The association between familiarity and favorability is statistically significant (Gamma = −.297, p = .007).
The degree categories here are reconstituted from response data to match conventional status levels. Specifically, respondents indicating that they had earned a bachelors degree were grouped with those who indicated that they are currently earning a Masters degree, and are labeled in the graph as “Masters students.” Likewise, respondents indicating that they had earned a Masters degree were grouped together with those who indicated that they were currently earning a doctoral degree, and are labeled in the graph as “Doctoral students.”
It is important to recall that undergraduate students submit to a special area of the program, so do not compete with other status categories for space on the program.
Problems in each of those areas were exacerbated by technical difficulties, most closely associated with the online submission system, but also with communications through the webpage. Here, we will focus on the conceptual rather than the technical issues.
Submission categories for 2013 included: formal research paper presentation, research-in-progress presentation, sociological commentary or analysis, and formal theoretical or methodological presentation. They were reduced to two categories for the 2014 cycle: formal research presentation and research-in-progress presentation. Although even that distinction has been difficult to institutionalize; those submitting a formal research proposal, for example, were required to submit a full paper, but there was no way in the online system to enforce the requirement, and submission of full papers was therefore extremely uneven.
Since submissions were universally down in the 2013 cycle due to the conference site, it is impossible to measure the specific effect of the submission framework.
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Downey, D.J., Orr, A.J. Between Scylla and Charybdis: Designing, Implementing, and Assessing Innovations in the Annual PSA Meetings. Am Soc 45, 159–176 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-014-9224-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-014-9224-y