Received: from mail.missouri.edu (mail.missouri.edu [128.206.2.169]) by csf.Colorado.EDU (8.7.6/8.7.3/CNS-4.0p) with ESMTP id OAA05496 for ; Fri, 20 Jun 1997 14:20:00 -0600 (MDT) Received: from skynet.sky.net (ip87.kc.sky.net [206.230.165.87]) by mail.missouri.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA124886 for ; Fri, 20 Jun 1997 15:19:58 -0500 Message-Id: <199706202019.PAA124886@mail.missouri.edu> From: "Brent" To: Subject: Re: Areas of interest/prestige Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 15:17:43 -0500 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Priority: 3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit HI, I think this is a cool topic too (as is most topics here!). I wonder what criteria a person would use when determining prestige? If it's popularity, then I think that criminology/deviance is up there, as well as medicine (I just saw in a text book that it was the most popular). Inequalities, organization/work, theory, methods... those seem to be tops. But there would be other ways to think about the prestige. Certainly the demand for people who study deviance is high , and we could think of prestige as social demand. This would mean that the prestige is determined outside of sociology, either by governmental demand or public interest. I would guess that we would get different specialties in the top five depending on which audience we asked--sociologists, or the public. Brent