DETERMINANTS OF DISCIPLINARY DISCONTENT

Data from the 1984 Carnegie survey of faculty at U.S. universities show substantial disciplinary variation in perceptions that one's field is stagnant. We examine the extent to which variation in pessimism about the intellectual state of one's field can be explained by theories that attribute it to field-level variation in anomie and consensus. We also examine the effects of individual-level characteristics on disciplinary discontent using a multilevel analysis. We find that both anomie and consensus exert strong effects on the average levels of scholarly pessimism within fields. In addition, there is an interaction effect involving the level of consensus in a field and whether the field is primarily pure or applied. The multilevel analysis shows that the effects of field-level variables are not attributable to compositional differences in individual characteristics and that, as a group, the field-level variables are stronger determinants of scholarly pessimism than individual characteristics.