Welcome on board! Prefiguring knowledge production in the sociology of language

Abstract

The everyday life of an academic journal is punctuated by a series of challenges, tasks, duties, and obligations. We spend most of our time reading papers, deciding who could or should review the work, convincing colleagues to agree to evaluate a piece, collecting comments, then pondering and synthesizing them, communicating the results to the authors, and dealing with bad news (when a paper has been rejected) and good news (when authors are happy with the reviews). We must constantly make decisions, and we often face dilemmas that leave us wondering if we took the right course of action, or if we might have given a paper a second or third chance. In the turmoil of a journal that publishes six issues a year, we are running behind the clock, trying to keep deadlines to make sure papers do not stay too long in review and are published within a reasonable amount of time after they are accepted.