International audienceDrawing on interviews with peer-review panelists from five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions, this paper analyzes one of the main criteria used to evaluate scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences: originality. Whereas the literature in the sociology of science focuses on the natural sciences and defines originality as the production of new findings and new theories, we show that in the context of fellowship competitions, peer reviewers in the social sciences and humanities define originality much more broadly: as using a new approach, theory, method, or data; studying a new topic; doing research in an understudied area; or producing new findings. Whereas the literature has not considered disciplinary variation in the definition of originality, we identified significant differences. Humanists and historians clearly privilege originality in approach, and humanists also emphasize originality in the data used. Social scientists most often mention originality in method, but they also appreciate a more diverse range of types of originality. Whereas the literature tends to equate originality with substantive innovation and to consider the personal attributes of the researcher as irrelevant to the evaluation process, we show that panelists often view the originality of a proposal as an indication of the researcher's moral character, especially of his/her authenticity and integrity. These contributions constitute a new approach to the study of peer review and originality that focuses on the meaning of criteria of evaluation and their distribution across clusters of disciplines

Knowledge about how reviewers serving on interdisciplinary panels produce evaluations that are perceived as fair is especially lacking. This paper draws on 81 interviews with panelists serving on five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions. We identify how peer reviewers define "good" interdisciplinary research proposals, and how they understand the procedures for selecting such proposals. To produce an evaluation they perceive as fair, panelists must respect the primacy of disciplinary sovereignty, deference to expertise and methodological pluralism. These rules ensure the preponderance of the voices of experts over non-experts in interdisciplinary panels. In addition, panelists adopt a range of tactics and strategies designed to make other reviewers who lack such expertise trust that their judgments are disinterested and unbiased.

Much of the research explaining the generosity of antipoverty programs has focused on the perceived deservingness of the poor. While the notion of deservingness is useful in explaining the scope and general outlines of policy, it does not help us understand the development and change of the specific policy instruments that constitute antipoverty policies. The author argues that to better understand the development of antipoverty policy tools aimed at changing the behavior of the poor, we need to analyze how policy elites frame both the causes of poverty and the nature of the poor. He illustrates the utility of this approach by analyzing congressional antipoverty discourse in two periods, comparing the “Great Society” period of 1964 to 1968 and the “neoliberal” era of 1981 to 1996, and shows how policymakers’ frames about the causes of poverty and about the capacities and desires of the poor shaped the specific antipoverty policies adopted in each period.

The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and the Ghost Dance movement that preceded it offer a compelling sociological case for understanding legitimation, elite framing, and repression. Building on the social movements literature and theoretical insights on power, institutions, and inequality, we engage in multimethod, in-depth analyses of a rich body of archived correspondence from key institutional actors at the time. Doing so contributes to the literature by drawing attention to (1) the cultural foundations of inequality and repression; (2) super-ordinate framing by political elites and the state; and (3) key institutional conflicts and their consequences. We find that, within an ambiguous colonial context, officials of the Office of Indian Affairs and federal politicians shelved benign military observations and, instead, amplified ethnocentric and threat frames. Force was consequently portrayed as justifiable, which increased the likelihood of the massacre. We conclude by discussing the utility of our results for conceptions of culture, power, inequality, the state, and state violence.