Scientific Paradigms and Status Hierarchies

The processes by which scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, evaluated, and organized are permeated by inequalities across social, institutional, and geographic scales. This results in science being a highly stratified, constantly evolving, layered, and global multiscale network. However, not all scientific fields are created equal. While inequalities in science have been widely studied, differences in the conceptual organization of scientific fields have been overlooked. I explore the link between the paradigmatic cohesion of fields and the hierarchical ordering of participating organizations and individuals via citations, as well as through faculty hiring flows. For 11 fields in the social and natural sciences, from 1990 to 2012, and across a plethora of levels and measures, I find robust support for the positive association between scientific paradigms and status hierarchies. Put differently, high paradigm fields exhibit more status inequality in attention, reward and influence than low paradigm fields.