Shaping the field: the role of academic journal editors in the construction of education as a field of study

In a previous British Journal of Sociology of Education article (Nixon & Wellington, 2005 Nixon, J. and Wellington, J. 2005. ‘Good books’: is there a future for academic writing within the educational publishing industry?. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26(1): 91–103. Taylor & Francis Online], Web of Science ®] Google Scholar]) we examined current trends in book publishing and how these have influenced and will influence the construction of the field of educational studies. (The latter study was a follow‐up to an earlier study reported in Nixon 1999 Nixon, J. 1999. Teachers, writers and professionals. Is there anybody out there?. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 20(2): 207–221. Taylor & Francis Online], Web of Science ®] Google Scholar]].) The present article focuses on journals and their editors and, to a lesser extent, the role that the peer review process plays in shaping the field of educational studies. We use (critically rather than deferentially) notions drawn from the work of Bourdieu (1996 Bourdieu, P. 1996. The rules of art: genesis and the structure of the literary field, Cambridge: Polity Press. (Trans. S. Emanuel) Google Scholar])—the ‘field of power’, defining boundaries, systems of dispositions, right of entry and the ‘illusio’—to consider and conceptualise data from interviews with 12 journal editors. Our own position in writing this article is as academic practitioners involved in reading, peer‐reviewing and editing academic journals within the field of educational studies.

The plea is to recognise that the pen is a mighty sword. We are of course embedded in practices and constrained by them. But these practices owe their dominance in part to the power of a normative language to hold them in place, and it is always open to us to employ the resources of our language to undermine as well as to underpin the practices. We may be freer than we sometimes suppose. (Skinner, 2002 Skinner, Q. 2002. Visions of politics. Volume 1: regarding method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Google Scholar], p. 7)