Towards a sociology of suspicion: A theory of recommendational relations with applications to the academic world

Abstract

The article explores a distinct social form -recommendational relations -in which an agent (a recommender) serves for another (a recipient) as a source of information on a third one (a recommendee). Our vocabulary of suspicion suggests that in a situation like that, a recipient may fall a victim of collusion between the recommender and the recommendee. The readiness of the recommendee to trust the recommendation depends on relations in the triad and, specifically, on (1) the moral distances between them; (2) the recommender's awareness of being a source of information on the recommendee; (3) the recommender's preoccupation with other roles; (4) the possibilities of the recipient's retaliation, and (5) the presence or absence of conditions for cooperation between the recommender and the recommendee. The character of distances between the agents (physical, cultural, or moral) determines which mechanisms of generating trust the recipient is most likely to rely on. It is further argued that some conditions on which a recipient may rely on from a recommender involve the latter's externalization of their thinking processes and the leaving of material traces of the decision-making algorithm, as such traces may serve as a basis for the recommender's retaliation. It is further argued that the degree of externalization is responsible for the overall dynamics of the signal system towards inflation (the decline of a particular signal's "purchasing power" without the decline of its information contents) or devaluation (the decline of a signal's ability to mark possession of certain qualities). Empirically, the article relies on the yields of a comparative study of academic markets, symbols of academic status, and the application of formal performance measures in five countries.