The focus here is on analytical and instrumental requirements for those collective decision exercises that lend themselves to a judgment-driven resolution. These have not as yet received much concerted technical attention from either of the two main movements in the field. They remain somewhere beyond the purview of the objectively-predicated instruments that mainstream GDSS (Group Decision Support System) designs tend to favour. Yet neither are they so inherently ill-structured as the situations with which the GDNSS (Group Decision and Negotiation Support (...) System) community is concerned, these usually allowing only a subjectively-predicated, compromisive or consensus-based conclusion. If the technical requirements peculiar to judgment-driven decision exercises are to be well met, it will be through the offices of analytical instruments that can help assure the rationality of the resolutions at which they arrive. The primary purpose of these pages is to offer some suggestions about the types of analytical instruments that might serve this end. (shrink)

For most literary sociologists serious modern work starts with Robert Escarpit’s Sociologie de la Littérature , a book which proposes that sociology can usefully explain how literature operates as a social institution. Subsequent Escarpit-inspired work on the literary enterprise covers topics such as the profession of authorship; the stratified “circuits” of production, distribution, and consumption; and the commodity aspect of literature. Critics have objected that Escarpit’s increasingly macroquantitative and statistics-bound procedures bleach out literary and ideological texture. And his model of (...) literature as discrete social system encourages the abstract model making which Raymond Williams despises.1 But, whatever its shortomcings, Escarpit’s definition of literary product and practice as social faits forms an essential starting point for the sociologist intending to investigate the apparatuses of literature.In what follows, I shall mainly fix on a problem currently disabling constructive research on the literary-sociological lines projected by Escarpit: namely, scholarly ignorance about book trade and publishing history technicalities. This sets up, I shall suggest, a large and troubling hole at the centre of the subject, and there is little indication, at this stage, how or when the hole is to be filled. 1. See Raymond Williams, “Literature and Sociology,” Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays , pp. 11-30. John Sutherland is professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology. His books include Fiction and the Fiction Industry , Bestsellers , and Offensive Literature . He is currently completing an encyclopedia of Victorian fiction. (shrink)