Departmental Structure, Cooperative Scholarship, and Productivity: A Fuzzy Set Qualitative-Comparative Analysis of Selected Sociology Departments

Previous studies of scholarly productivity have neglected the impact of departmental and institutional structure on the outcome. This study examines the relationships between departmental and institutional structure, cooperative scholarship, and individualistic scholarship with productivity in 31 highly ranked sociology departments in the United States. We measure scholarly productivity by the number of peer reviewed articles that were published either jointly or individually by faculty members during 2009–2010. By applying fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, we conclude that a combination of four conditions are associated with higher levels of scholarly productivity. These are: type of institution (public vs. private), proportion of tenured professors, individualistic scholarship, and cooperative scholarship. The results reveal that the conditions (independent variables) combine in different ways (pathways) to be sufficient for the outcome. Further, we conclude that cooperative scholarship and productivity are more complex constructs than suggested by previous literature and that there are multiple pathways by which departments may facilitate scholarly productivity. We address implications and recommendations for future research