1In 1964, in volume 15, the third series of L’Année sociologique, Raymond Boudon published his first article in the journal, in collaboration with André Davidovitch (Davidovitch and Boudon 1964). In 2013, his last, posthumous article, entitled “La science aux sources des faux savoirs dans l’espace public” (“Science as a Source of False Beliefs in the Public Domain”), was published a few months after his death, and brought to a close fifty years of publications and involvement in the journal founded by Émile Durkheim over a century ago (Boudon 2013). During these fifty years, the publishing and institutional landscape of French sociology has changed radically. The discipline, which was still on the margins and barely institutionalized in the years following the Second World War, has become established in most French universities. It is served by dozens of journals, both general and specialist in their scope, and assembles almost a thousand sociologists from diverse institutions (Chenu 2002; Heilbron 2015). [1] It has become pertinent to ask about the position of L’Année sociologique—which formerly held a monopoly in the field—in this academic and publishing landscape. How has the canonical journal of French sociology navigated this half century? What transformations has it undergone during this period? Has it retained its generalist and critical aims, as intended by Durkheim, while holding onto the national and international fame that it enjoyed from its beginnings? Or has it become, under Boudon’s guidance, the journal of a specific theoretical school, namely that of methodological individualism?

2This article contends that, on the one hand, the last fifty years have seen the journal lose a significant amount of its original particularity, in favor of a standardization that responds to the increased competition and saturation of the French sociological publishing landscape. On the other hand, the academic trajectory of the journal has oscillated between maintaining a generalist identity, with more of a basis in institutionalized sociology than before, and other tendencies that retain a connection with the journal’s Durkheimian origins. Finally, although Boudon’s intellectual brand has made itself felt, through specific networks and institutions, the journal has retained a theoretical openness that distinguishes it from other journals in the field.

Standardization and openness in a canonical journal

4An initial approach to studying the transformations of a publication such as L’Année sociologique over fifty years might be to cross-reference scientometric and quantitative data and indicators relating to the journal’s academic production, with a consideration of material bibliography (Varry 2011). A journal is of course a site of academic publications, but it is also an original published object, characterized by a certain format and a certain internal organization. L’Année sociologique was historically a highly identifiable publication among journals, owing to the form that Durkheim had given it, which combined ‘original essays’ [“mémoires originaux”], often of considerable length, and a section of critical bibliography, which occupied the majority of the annual issue. [6] The journal had the same format in the mid-1960s when Raymond Boudon published in it for the first time. Half a century later, although its title remains the same, the journal that readers hold in their hands has little in common with the original Durkheimian format. During these decades, the journal underwent a major evolution, transforming the publication deeply, in a way that aligned it with the standard format of social sciences journals. Firstly, from being published annually—as its title suggested—the journal started to be published biannually (every six months), starting in 1995. [7] The imposing annual volume of more than 500 pages was replaced by two issues of roughly half the length.

5This change in the publication’s format and rhythm was also accompanied by a radical transformation in the journal’s content. The distinctive balance between ‘original submissions’ and ‘bibliographic analyses and critical notes’ was altered in the 1970s–80s by reducing the content in the latter category (see Figure 1). The bibliographic section was dominant in the journal’s first series, and even made up a large part of the journal’s identity (Müller 1993). In the 1960s and 1970s, it still took up the majority of the journal, at times up to three quarters of the total. It pursued Durkheim’s very specific ambition: to cover all the domains of sociology. For example, the bibliographic section occupied two thirds of the volume for 1970 and was divided into six sections, which were themselves divided further into sub-sections, largely following the original classification set down by Durkheim. [8] Nonetheless, the tendency over this period was for a decrease in the bibliographic section. It went from taking up an average of 69% of the volume over the period 1964–1973, to 53 % between 1974 and 1983. This reduction in the bibliographic analyses continued and accelerated in the following decades. From 1995, it never exceeded 15% of the volumes, and some issues had no bibliographic section at all—over all publications in the decade from 2004 to 2013, the average space taken up by the bibliographic section was 5% of the total, and it was then devoted only to the theme of the issue. [9]

Figure 1

Proportion taken up by the bibliographic analyses in L’Année sociologique, third series, 1964–2013 (three-year moving average, in %)

Proportion taken up by the bibliographic analyses in L’Année sociologique, third series, 1964–2013 (three-year moving average, in %)

6The first section of the journal, which historically contained the ‘original essays,’ was transformed first by the addition of new sub-sections (‘studies’ [études], which were generally shorter in length, or, in the 1970s, ‘Works of the French Sociological Society’ [Travaux de la Société française de sociologie]), [10] then, with the reform of 1995, by the disappearance of these distinctions between types of articles. This transformation began, from 1975, with the publication of thematic issues—subsequently, a distinction remained between the articles published within the context of this theme (which became the ‘studies’) and the articles without reference to the theme. In this way, the journal functioned like many generalist journals in the social sciences, which combine thematic articles with “varia.”

7A detailed examination of this first section of L’Année sociologique over fifty years also illustrates these transformations. Between 1964 and 2013, 567 articles were published in the journal. [11] However, this number conceals a notable alteration in the annual production of articles. Until 1975, the number of articles per issue varied between 2 and 5, some of which were the long ‘essays’ in the original Durkheimian tradition. [12] Over the following decades, we see an increase in the number of articles and a reduction in their length, which leans towards the standard size of articles in the social sciences: there were about 10 articles per issue in the 1980s, then an average of about 17 articles per year over two issues. [13] This progression was inevitably accompanied by an increase in the number of authors publishing in the journal over this period. Therefore, in total, 514 different authors contributed to these 567 articles. From one decade to the next, the number of different authors increased substantially: only 38 authors published a ‘essay’ or ‘study’ in L’Année sociologique between 1964 and 1973. There were 181 between 1994 and 2003, and 172 between 2004 and 2013 (for an equivalent number of articles over the two decades). During the fifty years under consideration, the vast majority of these authors only contributed one article to the journal (434 out of 514, or 84% of them). Only 80 authors published two articles or more, and 15 published four or more. We would note here that Boudon was the primary contributor to the journal throughout the half century, with 11 articles published (including a posthumous one, and to which we should add two introductions to thematic issues). [14]

8This large number of authors—in relation to the number of articles—who contributed to L’Année sociologique over half a century, also informs us about the journal’s favored mode of production of sociological knowledge. In fact, almost 90% of the articles published in the journal between 1964 and 2013 had a single author. Over the whole period studied, the average number of authors per article is 1.16—and there is no notable change in this between the 1960s and the 2000s (over the course of the five decades the figure varies between 1.21 and 1.14). The journal does not share in the global trend towards collaboration, which, admittedly, is more relevant to the natural sciences and certain more formalized social sciences—such as economics or psychology—but has also had an effect in sociology, especially in the United States (Gingras 2002). Since the 1980s, more than half of articles published in American sociology journals have at least 2 authors and, more broadly, in the social sciences, the average number of authors was almost 3 in the 2000s (Gingras 2014, 41). Nonetheless, we should note that L’Année sociologique is in this respect not dissimilar to other major French sociology journals, which are only marginally more inclined to publish articles with several authors. [15] The typical model for an article published by the journal remains one written by a single author, and the sociology published in L’Année sociologique is still, in this respect, close to the other humanities subjects, such as philosophy or history.

The sociological orientations of a generalist journal

16Although the elements discussed in the preceding paragraph can tell us about the functioning of the journal, its standardization, and the general characteristics of academic production published in it and of the authors associated with it, this does not allow us to specify the place occupied by the journal in French sociology over fifty years. L’Année sociologique was a crucially important journal in the inter-War period, but after the Second World War it was confronted with growing competition from the increased number of sociological journals, both generalist and specialist ones. [25] From the 1970s to the 2000s, several dozen new journals emerged, [26] following the morphological development of the discipline, first in terms of the number of academics linked to sociology institutionally and intellectually, and also in terms of the diversity of academic institutions (universities and other organizations) that employed sociologists and produced sociological work (Heilbron 2015).

L’Année sociologique, a generalist journal in sociology

19The expansion of sociology in France over recent decades has led to an increase in academic production, which is demonstrated by the creation of many new journals, as we have mentioned. Most of them are specialized in a specific topic (Blondiaux et al. 2012, 239 ff.), whereas L’Année sociologique has always presented itself as a generalist journal with the original goal of covering all the domains of sociology. [30] Analyzing its evolution over fifty years requires us to question its maintenance of this status as a generalist journal: do the articles published over this period cover, in their subject matter, the different domains of sociology? To try to grasp the general academic and intellectual orientations of this journal, I took two steps: first, a thematic coding of all 567 articles, [31] and second, an analysis of the thematic issues after 1975 (which represent the vast majority of issues after this date).

20The analysis of Table 2 shows that the journal remained, over the period studied, a generalist journal, even though certain themes became less prevalent in favor of others. The diversity of themes addressed in the articles proves that L’Année sociologique is not limited to a sub-domain of sociology. However, a certain number of major axes of research stand out, which give the journal a distinctive character over this period. The first is the importance attributed to theoretical and methodological questions in sociology, but also to the history of the discipline itself: over the decades, between a fifth and a little more than a third of the articles belong to this category, thereby constituting the journal’s foremost thematic pole. We can note that between the 1980s and the start of the 2000s, this pole became more pronounced, owing to the importance attributed both to the history of Durkheimism, and to the theoretical discussions inspired by the works of Boudon (we shall return to these two points). The second major axis, devoted to questions of law, justice, and criminality, and accounting for one in seven articles, continues the old Durkheimian orientation, which was sustained, among other reasons, because of the prevalence of legal specialists in the editorial board. Next comes the economic domain, questions of morality and faith, and themes relating to culture and education (roughly one article in ten, for these different topics). The domains of politics, the family, science, and knowledge, are relatively marginal in the journal. From one decade to the next, we observe a large degree of variability between the prevalence of certain themes, which can be explained largely by the series of thematic issues over the period studied.

21This generalist ambition is also found in the development of the thematic issues, which were published from 1975. Over the period 1975–2013, a large number of these were devoted to sub-disciplines of sociology, thereby seeking to produce a synthesis of sociological knowledge in a given domain. [32] We can cite, for example, the inaugural issue “Sociologie des migrations” (‘Sociology of Migration’) in 1975 edited by the demographer Alain Girard, the issue “Sociologie de la famille (1965–1985)” [33] (‘Sociology of the Family’),” edited by Jean Kellerhals and Louis Roussel in 1987, or the issue devoted to the “Sociologie de l’éducation” (‘Sociology of Education’) in 2000, edited by Marie Duru-Bellat. The journal therefore covered, over almost four decades, a large number of the discipline’s (sub-)domains: migration, the sciences, family, religion (more specifically Catholicism), arts and culture, communication, economics, etc. However, from the 1990s, although some thematic issues were still presented around sub-domains of sociology (on communication in 2001, on economics in 2005, or on consumption in 2011), the thematic topics of the issues were usually more precise and did not aspire to cover a whole sub-domain of sociology, but more specific objects. [34] The principal directions of the issues were then shared between themes connected to the specific research of the editors of the issue (for example, “Nation, nationalisme et citoyenneté,” [“Nation, Nationalism and Citizenship”], edited by Pierre Birnbaum in 1996, or “Au-delà de l’emploi… le travail” [‘The work beyond employment’], edited by Françoise Piotet in 2003), themes inspired by Boudon, or themes connected to the history of sociology (see below for these last two directions). Although this development did not betray the journal’s generalist aim with regard to the diversity of themes that were addressed, we can nonetheless analyze it as a form of renunciation of the journal’s traditional ambition towards synthesis, in favor of more specific topics or problematics. In this respect it followed in the same direction as other generalist sociology journals.

22However, over the last two decades in question, the journal was also able to explore “new paths,” as suggested by the title of an issue published in 2002. These new paths were numerous, and explored innovative and original domains or approaches (such as network analysis), while building on the acquired knowledge and history of the discipline. Michel Forsé and Simon Langlois (2002, 8) introduced the orientation of the issue mentioned above in the following terms: [35]

23Novelty is therefore always in debt to that which precedes it: new paths develop by developing an earlier idea, which has sometimes fallen out of use or is considered unimportant, but also criticizing it, not to mention the role played by borrowing from another discipline. Sociology is no exception to the rule. It is therefore not a simple matter to find these paths, especially if we do not have the benefit of a sufficient delay to tell the difference between that which seems to lead to a dead end, and that which seems to offer new perspectives.

24Therefore, although the sociology of law was already present in the journal, an issue published in 2003 and edited by Marie-Anne Frison-Roche proposed to explore “Le droit au féminin aujourd’hui” (‘Women and Law Today’), combining historical perspectives and studies on contemporary developments. In the domain of the sociology of the arts, but also of culture, L’Année sociologique has been innovative by devoting issues to relatively marginal domains of contemporary French sociology, but which have been developing rapidly for some years. We can cite, for example, the 2002 issue edited by Pierre Parlebas, “Sociologie du sport en France aujourd’hui” (“The Sociology of Sports in France Today”). This issue addresses “the sporadic development of the sociology of sport,” insisting that it “is a discipline at a nascent stage, which is finding its way” (Parlebas 2002, 245). Similarly, Hyacinthe Ravet, sociologist and musicologist, and Bruno Brévan edited an issue in 2010 entitled “Sociologies de la musique: Relecture et voies nouvelles” (“The Sociology of Music: Reevaluation and New Perspectives”). They take stock of a domain whose “true development we can situate, in France, from the 1980s, with the publication of several studies based on empirical inquiries” (Ravet and Brévan 2010, 265). In 2011, military sociology was the subject of a collection entitled “Valeurs, métiers et action: évolutions et permanences de l’institution militaire” (“Values, Profession, and Action: Developments and Constancies in the Military Institution”). In his introduction, Éric Letonturier emphasizes the “constantly marginal and fragile nature of this sociological specialism, despite its longevity” (Letonturier 2011, 268). These different issues share an ambition to explore and delineate domains that may have experienced a recent growth, but which have not obtained the degree of recognition that might be expected for them, especially within other sociology journals. Accordingly, Letonturier writes, with regard to his own domain, that “few sociology journals have devoted a whole publication to this topic and to the problems attached to it” (ibid., 267). Other themes such as morality or collective beliefs, which had been significant for Durkheim, are also treated in depth, inviting us to reflect more directly on the legacy of Durkheim, which is still present in the journal.

The visibility of L’Année sociologique in French and international sociology

28A study of the journal’s transformations and content cannot be separated from an analysis of its reputation in the sphere of sociology and the social sciences, both in France and internationally. [41] The analysis of citations based on WoS, a major bibliometric tool (Martin 2000) provides a means of measuring this development. Although the biases of WoS, especially its emphasis on English-language journals, are well known (Archambault et al. 2006), it still offers a way to objectively consider the journal’s position within the academic sphere—the fact that the journal itself is not indexed does not pose any problem in this regard, since we are measuring its presence, in the form of citations, in other social science journals.

29The first observation is that the citations referring to the journal increase over the period in question. We can also point to a very recent increase in its reputation, since 45% of these citations are concentrated across the last 15 years (1999–2013)—and 56% of them relate to the journal in its new format (since 1995). However, to conclude that there is a transformative effect or a substantially different level of reputation in these later years could be simplistic, owing to the largely artificial nature of this result. In fact, the transformations in the WoS database over the latest decades have automatically created an increase in the total pool of journals that cite L’Année sociologique (Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras 2014). [42] Although the journal is cited, over the whole period, by more than 650 journals, a little under a quarter of these account for more than 70% of these citations (this result resembles the classic equation of Lotka’s law). Predictably, because of the clear linguistic bias created by the journal’s Francophone nature, we see that the main journals that cite L’Année sociologique are French-language journals (in first place, the Revue française de sociologie, followed by Sociologie du travail, then the Cahiers internationaux de sociologie) [43] or multilingual journals for which French is one of their publishing languages. (such as the Archives européennes de sociologie or Social Compass). [44] That does not mean that the journal is not cited in English-language journals: 52% of the citations listed on WoS belonged to articles published in English and only 41% from articles published in French. Yet this result, considered in light of the overwhelming domination of English-language journals on WoS, paradoxically constitutes a confirmation of the journal’s Francophone grounding.

30Next arises the question of knowing more precisely what is being cited when these journals cite L’Année sociologique. In fact, as might be supposed from the journal’s memorial dimension, the first result of this analysis is that around 40% of the citations recorded by WoS are citations of Durkheimians in the strict sense—and mainly of Durkheim and Mauss, who are the most cited authors, out of all authors over the five decades in question. [45] We must also distinguish between citations with regard to the language of the citing publication, since, although the phenomenon described here concerns the totality of articles citing L’Année sociologique, it is even more pronounced in the English-language articles, whereas the French-language articles still predominantly cite classic Durkheimian texts, but as a smaller proportion. [46] The contemporary impact of the journal again relates largely to citations that are made to the first and second series of L’Année sociologique. A separate study would be needed for analyzing the uses that contemporary works make of classic sociological texts (between, for example, works on the history of the human sciences [47] and contemporary updates of classical authors), but we must observe that L’Année sociologique benefits from its century-long status as a founding journal which, in its time, was the home of the foremost works of French sociology. [48]

31The following remarkable fact emerges from citation analysis: although we shall address the journal’s Boudonian dimension in the next paragraph, we note here that the two most cited articles from the period 1964–2013 are signed by authors who were unconnected with the Boudonian circle (Table 3). These are an article by Pierre Bourdieu, “Le marché des biens symboliques” (“The Market of Symbolic Goods”), published in the issue of 1971 (with 141 citations in WoS), and Michel Callon’s article “Éléments pour une sociologie de la traduction: la domestication des coquilles Saint-Jacques et des marins pêcheurs dans la baie de Saint-Brieuc” (“Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen in the St Brieuc Bay”), published in 1986 (with 102 citations). The contemporary reputation of L’Année sociologique is therefore based on two sociologists who each published only once in the journal and were engaged in specific theoretical constructions. [49] In these two cases, the relation between, on one hand, the published article, and on the other, the medium of dissemination that is the journal, must not be described too simplistically. The medium of publication for these two texts, in this case L’Année sociologique, has little to do with the construction of their fame. The next most cited authors have far fewer citations, with 30 citations for Pierre Lascoumes, 25 for Pierre-Michel Menger, and only 24 for Boudon. This low level of visibility for Boudon invites us to reflect on his influence on the journal’s movements over the fifty years in question. [50]

Has L’Année sociologique become “Boudonian”?

32Questioning Boudon’s role in the journal over the last decades requires a study of the development of the journal with reference to several indicators. Boudon presided over the journal for a quarter of a century, becoming president of the board in 1977 and stepping down in 2003, when he retired from the Université Paris-Sorbonne. Although he is the author with the greatest number of contributions to the journal over fifty years in question, we cannot, however, assume that it was Boudon’s main place of publication, as we see for journals attached to a particular school, such as Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. [51] Instead, Boudon published widely in other journals. Yet he made his mark on the journal, both institutionally and theoretically, and this can be seen even after his departure from the journal at the start of the 2000s.

33This mark was manifested first in the journal’s internal organization, and its editorial board. As we saw above, although the journal’s board of patrons, in the 1960s–1970s, gathered certain major figures from French sociology of the day, with a specific grounding in the Law Faculty, the 1980s and following years saw the board take on a more sociological direction. However, it maintained a great institutional and theoretical diversity. These (new) members were not, in any case, unequivocal supporters of methodological individualism or of the Boudonian theory of rationality. [52] Nonetheless, the preponderance of sociologists from the Sorbonne and/or members of the GEMASS, the research center founded by Boudon in 1971, increased during this period. In 1983, when the journal acquired an editorial board, only 2 out of its 9 members belonged to the GEMASS and taught at the Sorbonne (namely Boudon and François Chazel). In 2003, when he left the leadership of the journal, out of 16 members, 6 taught at the Sorbonne or were members of the GEMASS. The editorial board, although it maintained an institutional and theoretical pluralism, was therefore aligned, over the recent period, with the institutions in which Boudon played a major role. This institutional grounding was also manifested in the increase, in the journal, in the proportion of authors connected to the Université Paris-Sorbonne or to the GEMASS. Between 1977 (the year when Boudon took on the presidency of the board of patrons) and 2003 (the year of his departure), the affiliations of authors to the GEMASS went from being almost nonexistent to more than 10%. This figure then increased further to reach a level of one article in five between 2004 and 2013, proving that the institutional grounding was more significant than the direct influence of Boudon himself—we should also mention here that the GEMASS involved figures such as François Chazel or Jean Baechler, whom we cannot link straightforwardly, in terms of their theory, to Boudon.

34This reality of the journal’s grounding in a Boudonian institution corresponds, if not with the journal’s theoretical dimension, then with its thematic orientations. Although, as we have seen, in the 1970s–1980s, the journal’s ambition, as it appears from its thematic issues, was to cover a considerable number of domains or sub-domains of sociology, including very diverse theoretical approaches, in the 1990s–2000s a relatively large number of issues were published which were broadly of Boudonian inspiration. These issues, often led by former students of Boudon (but not always), were also more specialized than the thematic issues devoted to a sub-domain of sociology, and then addressed specific epistemological questions or took up issues that were typical of the Boudonian intellectual path (for example, “Argumentation et sciences sociales” [“Argumentation and the Social Sciences”] in 1994–1995, “Le juste: normes et idéaux” [“The Just: Norms and Ideals”] in 1995, “L’explication de l’action sociale” [“Explaining Social Action”] in 2005, “L’abstraction en sociologie” [“Abstraction in Sociology”] in 2006–2007, or “Les croyances collectives” [“Collective Beliefs”] in 2010). Boudon also contributed an article to these thematic issues on several occasions, thereby marking them with his intellectual authority. [53]

Conclusion

38What would Émile Durkheim have thought of the fate of his journal in 2013, that is, 115 years after its first publication? He would first have recognized that it had lost its virtual monopoly as the organ of French sociology, a status that it had retained for several decades and until the years after the Second World War. L’Année sociologique has become, as of a little over half a century, one sociology journal among others, in a densely packed and competitive field. This morphological transformation of journals devoted to sociology, whether generalist or specialized, is a mark of the success of the discipline’s institutionalization, but it has taken place at the expense of the uniqueness of the journal founded by Durkheim. This uniqueness was also manifested in a specificity in its production, the part devoted to bibliographic analyses. Would Durkheim have approved of the disappearance of this element of critical bibliography from the journal? It belonged to Durkheim’s project to build the study of sociology using materials from other social sciences. More than a century later, this approach no longer seems necessary, given the development that the discipline has undergone. The profusion of sociological publications also makes it difficult to aspire to cover every subject of contemporary research, and Durkheim would therefore undoubtedly have pursued this fundamental reform of this journal.

39His next observation would be that the journal had, several decades ago, departed from its strict basis in Durkheimian thought, for reasons once again rooted in the morphological and intellectual transformations of the discipline. The Durkheimian school, which had been dominant until the 1930s, did not maintain its influence through the Second World War and the pluralist renewal of French sociology after 1945. Nonetheless, L’Année sociologique retains the mark of Durkheim. Durkheim and Mauss are thus the two authors most cited by contemporary sociologists who refer to the journal. Over the last few decades, the journal has also become the authority, not on Durkheimism, but on the history of Durkheimism, with the publication of issues and articles on this subject, but also of original texts related to this Durkheimian sociology. The space that the journal allocates to the sociology of law also recalls its origins, as does the space allocated to economics or morality. Furthermore, the diversity of the journal’s themes constitutes another Durkheimian continuity, as his aim was to cover all the domains of sociology.

40Finally, over the period studied, the institutional and intellectual trajectory of the journal set it along the path of a specific sociologist, Raymond Boudon, via this French sociological pluralism already described. This was done without making it the journal of a specific school. Would Durkheim, with his holistic approach, have felt betrayed when seeing his journal subjected to the influence of the theorist of methodological individualism? Such an opposition as this, too simplistic and artificial, does not take account of a continuity between the Durkheimian project and Boudon’s ambition for the journal. Durkheim aspired to make sociology emerge from “the era of generalities” by giving it a solid academic and positivist basis, far from the many, varied ideological temptations. This was at the heart of the Durkheimian project. From this perspective, the Boudonian conception of sociology and, therefore, the influence that it had on L’Année sociologique, was a continuation of the “scientific ideal of the founders” (Boudon 2010, 4). The journal is no longer Durkheimian, and did not become Boudonian in the strict sense, given the diversity of its objects of study, its approaches, and its contributors over the last few decades. However, influenced by both thinkers, L’Année sociologique continues to advocate scientific rigor in the study of sociology.