There aren’t that many specifically academic memes. Maybe this will work as one?

Meme: What are your top 3 favorite journals (in no particular order) and why?

1. Theory & Society. T&S is interdisiciplinary in a good way, and publishes high quality theoretical articles that often interweave interesting empirical stories. Some of my favorite pieces by Mitchell, Krippner, Mizruchi, and even Bourdieu are in T&S, and a new issue of T&S consistently brings something interesting to my attention. Helpfully, T&S switched from endnotes to parenthetical citations recently, making their formatting more consistent with the top tier of journals and thus decreasing the conversion costs to submit to them. Not that I’ve thought about that much, or anything.

2. Accounting, Organizations and Society. AOS is kind of a niche journal, but it’s a niche that’s near and dear to my heart. While most of my work focuses on macroeconomic rather than corporate or personal accounting, the issues involved in accounting are fascinating and get at the guts of how our economy works. AOS has Foucauldian governmentality stuff, science studies-inflected stuff, and just generally interesting empirical work on the history of accounting. Espeland and Hirsch have a piece from 1990 that’s simply fantastic, as one example.

3. The Journal of Economic Perspectives. I’m not an economist, but I play one on TV. Er, I mean, I study them – I am a sociologist of economics. As such, I often want to know what economists think about a particular topic, or what the space of the debate is. I often want to know this without wading through twenty variations on a complicated game theoretic model mixed with a debate about the appropriate estimator for the variance of suchandsuch data and so on. JEP is an amazing resource for a quick and human-readable perspective (get it?) on a topic. It’s like an Annual Review piece in scope, but written for a more general audience, rather than for experts or future experts looking for an updated lit review. I’m taking an applied econometrics course this term, and just read a nice overview of debates about binary choice models (Horowitz and Savin 2001). It was short, non-technical without skipping all of the modeling details, and helpfully pointed to larger debates without getting into the blow by blow.

What are your 3 favorite journals?