Written with AI: In mid-December 2023 the senior editors of Theory and Society learned that Springer Nature had decided on a different view of the journal going forward. Ten of them resigned. The corresponding editors followed on January 4, 2024. The names came out on a listserv and then on the sociology blog Scatterplot: Javier Auyero at Texas, Tim Bartley at Georgetown, Jean Beaman at Santa Barbara, Karida Brown at Emory, Miguel Centeno at Princeton, Claire Decoteau at Illinois Chicago, Jack Goldstone at George Mason, Tianna Paschel at Berkeley. The letter thanked the executive editor, Janet Gouldner, and the managing editor, Karen Lucas, for years of service, and said the signers had lost confidence that the journal would continue the project Alvin Gouldner founded five decades earlier.
Alvin Ward Gouldner (1920-1980) took his doctorate at Columbia under Robert Merton and held the Max Weber Research Professorship at Washington University in St. Louis. He founded Theory and Society in 1974 to renew social theory against what he took to be the constraints of positivism. He wrote The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. He described the rising intellectual class as a flawed universal class, one that claimed to speak for humanity while pursuing its own interests, which is the argument Musa al-Gharbi has been running with better data ever since. In 2026 Washington University in St. Louis, which paid Gouldner’s salary and named his chair after Weber, paid for a commission to investigate whether scholarship in the humanistic social sciences has been subordinated to politics.
The publisher replaced Gouldner’s widow with two men. Janet Gouldner had held the post since 1981, the year after her husband died in Madrid at sixty. Kevin McCaffree, an associate professor at the University of North Texas in Denton, and Jonathan H. Turner (b. September 7, 1942), the 38th University Professor of the University of California. They published a statement of goals for the journal, subtitled “The Troubled State of Sociology,” which said that a monoculture of critical approaches dominates the discipline and undermines its professional legitimacy, and called for a theory journal devoted to scientific theorizing. Philip Cohen at Maryland wrote that he would not submit to the journal or review for it, and suggested others do the same. Turner told Retraction Watch he was surprised and saddened by the board’s reaction, could not see why they were upset, and intended to ignore the controversy until the first issues came out and everyone saw that the mission was being served.
Thirty-three years before this, Sage published The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology. It remains the standard one-volume history of the discipline. It has two authors who share a surname and little else. One is Jonathan H. Turner. The other is Stephen Park Turner (b. March 1, 1951), born in Chicago, now Graduate Research Professor and Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida.
The book argues that American sociology kept failing to become a science for institutional reasons rather than intellectual ones. It grew out of the reform movements of the Progressive era, so it inherited a demand for moral usefulness before it had a method. It lived on undergraduate enrollment, so its size tracked student taste rather than discovery. It depended on foundation and government patronage, so its questions bent toward what funders wanted asked. It fragmented into subfields that shared no core, so each generation could announce a fresh start without owing anything to the last. The scientific ambition was real and recurrent. So was the failure. The title is a diagnosis.
The two authors then went in opposite directions.
Jonathan Turner kept building. Forty-two books. General theory of interaction, the sociology of emotions, social institutions, stratification, and in the last two decades evolutionary sociology and neurosociology, a program that asks sociologists to reconnect with biology and takes their refusal as an overreaction to sociobiology. He has been president of the Pacific Sociological Association, a fellow of the AAAS, and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the ASA emotions section. He directs an institute for theoretical social science in Santa Barbara. He is a man who read the diagnosis in 1990 and spent the decades after trying to supply the missing core by writing it.
Stephen Turner took the tools apart. In The Social Theory of Practices (1994) he argued that the concept everyone was leaning on, the shared practice, a tacit understanding held in common by a group, has no plausible route by which it gets transmitted or reproduced. He traced the contortions from Durkheim to Kripke’s Wittgenstein and concluded that this defect explains why social theory cannot get past constructing fuzzy analogies. Brains/Practices/Relativism followed, then Explaining the Normative, which asks what the appeal to normativity explains that the social sciences do not, and finds the answers all over the place and nobody embarrassed. Then Understanding the Tacit, on what can be made explicit and what cannot. Then American Sociology: From Pre-Disciplinary to Post-Normal (2014), an update on the near-death of the discipline in the 1980s and its transformation inside the new university.
He has written that his intellectual community is European social theory and that he lives on European time. He is happiest in an outdoor cafe on a European square, talking with colleagues. Brill published a volume of essays on his work. A biographical volume, Mad Hazard: A Life in Social Theory, traces the career from the violent South Side of Chicago through the rebellion against the hegemony of Merton and Parsons. None of it registers in American sociology’s status system, which reads four markers: association office, an editorship at ASR or AJS, a Du Bois award, a chair in a ranked sociology department. He has none of them.
In 2022 he coedited The Future of Sociology: Ideology or Objective Social Science? with Robert Leroux (b. 1964) of Ottawa and Thierry Martin (b. 1950) of Franche-Comté. The book asks whether the subjugation of sociology to political ideology reflects an exhaustion of ideas or a failure in the founding program of making sociology a science. That is the question the American academy would spend 2026 shouting about. Jonathan Turner reviewed the volume in Contemporary Sociology in 2023. A review appeared in Philosophy of the Social Sciences in early 2026. The book entered no fight.
Then the fight arrived without it.
Shelley Correll took the ASA presidency and chose a theme for the New York meeting in August 2026: putting sociology to work for a more equitable society, with an argument that the discipline needs solutions, externally engaged research, and theories of change. Sociologists for Palestine petitioned for a membership vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions, the association declined on procedural grounds, and the group is boycotting the meeting. Melissa Wilde ran for the presidency on the position that the association should stay out of politics and lost to Rory McVeigh of Notre Dame, a quantitative sociologist of right-wing mobilization and a former editor of ASR. Paul Boghossian of NYU delivered a report to the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis finding that scholarly standards in several fields have been subordinated to political goals. Several scholars named in it said they had never been contacted. Pamela Paul told the story in the Wall Street Journal on July 24, 2026, and quoted Christian Smith, lately of Notre Dame, wondering what would happen if the discipline were liquidated.
Every source in that fight reaches for Smith’s The Sacred Project of American Sociology. Almost nobody reaches for The Impossible Science, which is in print and known. Smith wrote a moral indictment, and a moral indictment can be picked up by either side and swung. Stephen Turner wrote an institutional history, and an institutional history gives both sides worse news than they want. It tells the reformers there is no golden age of scientific sociology to restore, because the program failed at the founding and kept failing under Merton and Parsons, who were nobody’s activists. It tells the association that the moralizing it defends is the discipline’s oldest habit, present in the reform societies before the departments existed, and no vocal minority put it there. Nobody can build a coalition out of that.
Grant the incoming editors their premise about the monoculture and grant Springer its case. The publisher says it spent years trying to discuss a successor with Janet Gouldner and got nowhere, raised the question with five senior editors in person in 2019 and got no engagement, and inherited turnaround times that had become indefensible, which the departing side does not much dispute. Take all of that as true. A journal is still a referee network before it is a doctrine. The competence to tell a good theory paper from a bad one lives in the people who have done it for years, and by Stephen Turner’s own argument that competence has no route of transmission apart from those people. It cannot be written into a statement of goals. It cannot be installed by memo. The board walked out and took the thing being restored with them, and the new editors report that the scholars they approached with critical credentials declined. You can announce standards. You cannot appoint the tacit skill that applies them. That inference is mine, drawn from his 1994 book. He has not made it about this journal.
One Turner holds a journal, a program, and a fight, at eighty-three, after nearly six decades of trying to give the discipline the core it lacks. The other holds the argument that explains why the fight will produce nothing, and holds it in books shelved under philosophy, honored in Uppsala and Manchester and read in Europe, uncited by the people whose situation he described. Gouldner’s chair sits at a university that now audits politicized scholarship. The journal he founded to renew critical theory prints a manifesto against critical monoculture. His widow was replaced by mail.
A discipline with a cumulative core would owe The Impossible Science an answer. A federation of moral projects can route around it. It has.
Notes
Theory and Society’s impact factor in 2024 was 1.4. That’s the Clarivate’s Journal Impact Factor, from the Journal Citation Reports. The arithmetic: take every citation recorded in 2024 to articles the journal published in 2022 and 2023, divide by the number of citable items published in those two years. So 1.4 means the average article from that two-year window picked up about one and a half citations during 2024. One tracker puts the underlying counts at 36 articles in 2022 and 24 in 2023, drawing 43 and 21 citations in 2024, which lands near that figure. Different databases compute different versions of the same idea and disagree; Scopus-based measures put the journal above 2 for the same period. Clarivate dropped from three decimals to one in 2023 to discourage people from treating small gaps as real.
Three things follow.
It is a mean over a skewed pile. Sixty articles, sixty-odd citations. A few pieces carry most of that and a large share get cited zero times in the window. The mean tells you almost nothing about the typical article.
The two-year window punishes theory journals by construction. Sociology cites slowly. Arguments arrive in books, get absorbed over a decade, and show up in footnotes long after publication. An empirical paper in the American Sociological Review on a hot inequality question gets cited within eighteen months because a dozen people are running adjacent regressions. A theory paper on Bourdieu and valuation gets cited in 2031. ASR has run around 9 on this metric, AJS around 3, both figures a few years old. Theory and Society was never going to sit near them, and never did, including in the decades when the people who just resigned considered it essential.
The third point. The 2024 figure counts citations to articles published in 2022 and 2023. Every one of those articles was submitted, reviewed and accepted under Janet Gouldner. McCaffree and Turner took over in December 2023. Their first acceptances began appearing in 2024, so the earliest report that measures their editorship is the 2026 or 2027 JCR. This is a fact about the old regime.
Springer inherited a journal with long turnaround times and modest measured reach, which is the strongest part of its case for acting.
What would show whether the reform took hold is all countable and none of it comes from Clarivate. Submission volume. Desk rejection and acceptance rates. Time from submission to first decision, since that was the publisher’s stated reason. Whether the new editorial board got populated, given that Turner said the scholars with critical credentials he approached declined. Who publishes there now, and whether job candidates from top-twenty departments list it. Whether the Annual Review of Sociology essays and the section syllabi cite anything from the new volumes. Two more years and that record will exist.
