Symposium: Thinking Academic Evaluation after Michéle Lamont’s How Professors Think. Introduction

Academic excellence and its social construction is far from being a classical issue in sociological research and debate. To be sure, the sociology of science has for long studied how intellectual reputations rise and are established, and how they impact on both intellectual production and the working of academic and scientific organizations. Based on the measurement of citations, bibliometrics is possibly the most renown and used research strategy for empirically assessing intellectual prestige and studying its correlates, its possible causes and its consequences. However, social scientists have not paid any special attention to the actual working of procedures and practices of evaluation as well as to its cognitive underpinning and its impact on the final assessment. This international symposium debates peer review method starting from the work of Michele Lamont "How professors think" with contribution of scholars from different sociological perspecitives: sociology of science (Collins, Brian), cultural sociology (Inglis), the sociology of ideas and intellectuals (Angermuller), and behavioral economic sociology (Squazzoni).