Thanks for this post! I love it! The intro especially fleshes out some of the background I only knew tangentially and gives more context than I knew. Super interesting. And the empirical results are great! The Fig. 1 is especially interesting: what do you make of the declining mentions overall in the first pane? The second pane, showing the rise of critical theory and conflict theory, fits my expectations, but combined with declining mentions is interesting and more complicated. Any sense of what's taking its place? Non-theory discussions?
"Notably, this decline parallels a broader pattern: all five theoretical traditions show remark- ably similar trajectories, with four out of five peaking in the 1980s–1990s before declining. The synchronized decline thereafter—despite stable absolute mention rates—indicates a pedagogical shift toward a more distributed coverage across an expanded theoretical rep- ertoire rather than a specific rejection of a certain tradition. Grand theory’s trajectory thus reflects this general transformation while maintaining its distinctively lower baseline prevalence throughout"
So the main trend is the challenge of covering an increasingly pluralistic field. Another related trend (not discussed as much in this paper, but also in our earlier ones) is a general shift toward pluralism and contextualism as the main narratives. With pluralism the authors' goal is to let a thousand flowers bloom, and with contextualism it is to situate a theory or author in its historical context. Both of those tend toward coverage that is more spread out, since they don't have strong principles of selection as to what to include or not.
The right panel is trickier, but together with the left, it is saying that, while there are fewer total chapters discussing those approaches, the discussion is more intense within the ones that do. We'd have to look closer, but my guess is that it means that now there's usually some broad overview of many perspectives, but then when we get to e.g. critical theory, that chapter is longer and covers more of its internal development and heterogeneity.
Thanks for this post! I love it! The intro especially fleshes out some of the background I only knew tangentially and gives more context than I knew. Super interesting. And the empirical results are great! The Fig. 1 is especially interesting: what do you make of the declining mentions overall in the first pane? The second pane, showing the rise of critical theory and conflict theory, fits my expectations, but combined with declining mentions is interesting and more complicated. Any sense of what's taking its place? Non-theory discussions?
thanks Ashley! Great questions.
We interpreted the first pane like this:
"Notably, this decline parallels a broader pattern: all five theoretical traditions show remark- ably similar trajectories, with four out of five peaking in the 1980s–1990s before declining. The synchronized decline thereafter—despite stable absolute mention rates—indicates a pedagogical shift toward a more distributed coverage across an expanded theoretical rep- ertoire rather than a specific rejection of a certain tradition. Grand theory’s trajectory thus reflects this general transformation while maintaining its distinctively lower baseline prevalence throughout"
So the main trend is the challenge of covering an increasingly pluralistic field. Another related trend (not discussed as much in this paper, but also in our earlier ones) is a general shift toward pluralism and contextualism as the main narratives. With pluralism the authors' goal is to let a thousand flowers bloom, and with contextualism it is to situate a theory or author in its historical context. Both of those tend toward coverage that is more spread out, since they don't have strong principles of selection as to what to include or not.
The right panel is trickier, but together with the left, it is saying that, while there are fewer total chapters discussing those approaches, the discussion is more intense within the ones that do. We'd have to look closer, but my guess is that it means that now there's usually some broad overview of many perspectives, but then when we get to e.g. critical theory, that chapter is longer and covers more of its internal development and heterogeneity.
Super interesting, thanks!