The Academic Labor Market: With Special Reference to Political Science

Abstract

The academic labor market i1s a fact of life for all present and prospective academicians. Like some other important facts of academic life, it has remained largely unexamined. This article is an analysts of the academic labor market. While there are specific references to political science, they serve to illustrate the operations of the market in general. A reliable sociology orf knowledge is still in an embryonic stage of development. Even a sociology of the knowledgeable remains to be realized.1 American political scientists, many of whom are ahistorical, have devoted little attention to the history and sociology of political science as an academic discipline. As the authoTs of a pioneering work on the discipline noted, "most American political scientists are largely unfamiliar with the origins and early evolution of their discipline."2 To the extent that political scientists lack disciplinary self-consciousness, political science as an academic discipline remains underdeveloped.