On January 4, 2024, the editorial board of Theory & Society has collectively resigned due to Springer Nature's decision to appoint a new Executive Editor without prior consultation with the journal's Senior and Corresponding Editors.
The letter of resignation stands as follows:
Dear Kevin McCaffree, Jonathan Turner, and Esther Otten:
We write as Corresponding Editors of Theory & Society to collectively tender our resignations. We did not reach this decision lightly. We take this step because of Springer Nature’s decision to choose a new Executive Editor(s) to replace Janet Gouldner without consulting the journal’s community of Senior and Corresponding Editors. Springer Nature’s unyielding position on this was a clear violation of our profession's academic norms and standards and was fundamentally at odds with the spirit of the journal. Given our long service and dedication to the journal, we were extremely disappointed that at no point in the publisher’s effort to install a new Executive Editor was a single one of the Senior Editors (nor, to our knowledge, any of the Corresponding Editors) consulted regarding their vision for the future of the journal. Additionally, their attempts to have input into the process of selecting new leadership for the journal were repeatedly rebuffed. We are unaware of any other publisher handling its relationship with an editorial board in such a dismissive fashion.
For us, this is not only about Theory and Society, but more broadly, the precedent of for-profit owners of academic journals unilaterally installing their selected editors. At stake here is how much control we academics are willing to give to for-profit publishers who have so much influence over our professional trajectories on the one hand and rely on our uncompensated labor on the other.
We emphasize that we are not criticizing the choice of Professors McCaffree and Turner as Editors-in-Chief. Our objections are to the process of selecting new leadership, not the leaders chosen.
Given these recent developments, we have lost confidence that Theory and Society will continue to advance the intellectual project founded by Alvin Gouldner five decades ago, a continuing project that has engaged and excited us over the years. We see no alternative but to resign from our role with the journal.
Sincerely (in alphabetical order),
Javier Auyero (University of Texas Austin)
Tim Bartley (Georgetown University)
Jean Beaman (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Karida Brown (Emory University)
Miguel A Centeno (Princeton)
Katie E. Corcoran (West Virginia University)
Claire Decoteau (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Paul DiMaggio (NYU)
Eva Fodor (Central European University)
Harriet Friedmann (University of Toronto)
Marion Fourcade (UC Berkeley)
Roger Friedland (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Marco Garrido (University of Chicago)
Alya Guseva (Boston University)
Jack A. Goldstone (George Mason University)
Josée Johnston (University of Toronto)
Christian Joppke (University of Bern)
Jaeeun Kim (University of Michigan)
Krishnan Kumar (University of Virginia)
Magali Sarfatti Larson (Temple University)
Omar Lizardo (UCLA)
Tey Meadow (Columbia University)
Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra (UC San Diego)
John N Robinson III (Princeton U)
Chris Tilly (UCLA)
Tianna S. Paschel (UC Berkeley)
Michael Schudson (Columbia University)
John Torpey (CUNY Graduate Center)
Bruce Western (Columbia University)
Marina Zaloznaya (University of Iowa)