The social space of Italian leading sociology journals. A network and field-theoretic analysis of sociologists' interlocking editorships

This article focuses on the boards of Italian top-ranked sociology journals by conceiving of them as an affiliation network formed by scholars participating in the same journals’ editorial boards as members. We consider the space formed by editorial memberships in these journals as a social space and analyse it by means of network-analytic and factorial techniques, providing a field-theoretic representation of such space. Through Cluster Correspondence Analysis, we look at how the different clusters (network positions) relate to each other and to what extent journals’ patterns of board participation differ through clusters. Our findings show how this social space is structured along dimensions that oppose journals and scholars by reason of their mutual relationships (interlocking editorships), thus highlighting the relative positions of journals with similar or distinct patterns of board membership and the positions of scholars linked by common participation in various editorial boards. We interpret this participation as a form of ‘position-taking’ in Bourdieu’s sense, reflecting the adjustment of boards’ composition to meet the recent demands of the journals’ accreditation system.