The Editorial Meeting at a Little Magazine: An Ethnography of Group Judgment

Abstract

Judgment and distinction have been topics of persistent interest for cultural sociologists. Recent theory has particularly emphasized social interaction and cognition as key sites for understanding judgment, and a number of studies examine gatekeeping practices as a means of understanding the interactive and perceptual determinants of judgment. This article builds upon previous work by presenting the results of an eighteen-month ethnography at a long-running little magazine based in a large American city. In addition to providing an empirical description of an important but understudied domain of cultural production, this article has two findings of theoretical interest. First, without strong external constraints on processes of group evaluation, editors’ judgments became markedly negative, and their deliberations were often inconclusive. Second, negative and positive evaluations were not symmetric, but were produced by two differing sets of evaluative practices. These findings are broadly consistent with developing field theoretic descriptions of social life, but also raise many empirical and theoretical questions.