Invited to give a review of this issue, it is also a reminder to me, as I have also published in Actes. I also saw the backstage of the journal as I was admitted to a desk in Gabrielle Balazs’ office for a period in the middle of the 90s, when she had a key role in the edition of the journal. I can attest that while the journal’s final output was consistently high-quality, the production process was often arduous.

Mindful of the dangers of complacency that an anniversary opens up, the editorial committee instead foregrounds the role of journals in the production of social science. They situate Actes within the broader transformations of the scientific field. Several articles deal with the production process, and I appreciate their candour. 

Julien Duval revisits Actes’ first era under Bourdieu’s leadership, up to 2001. Besides the journal itself, Duval draws on testimonies from key persons involved in the editorial process over these years. He highlights Actes’ innovations – in content, composition of authors, writing style, visual presentation, editorial process and much more. One hallmark was its commitment to presenting social science through concrete examples of analysis, often of a very practical nature, reflecting Bourdieu’s epistemological view of knowledge as a practice. Yet it came at a cost. In its early years, the editorial team managed all practical tasks. Citing Boltanski, Duval invokes the notion of intellectual auto-exploitation. There is a sharp contrast between the journal’s ethos as a collective endeavour and the anonymity of the team (except the editor) until 1997, as well as the fact that Bourdieu always had the final word on a paper’s destiny.

Anne Bory and Eleonora Elguezabal dig more deeply into the journal’s behind-the-scenes labour, uncovering what I have heard referred to in Scandinavia as “academic housework”. The term captures its invisible and thankless nature: A work only noticed when neglected. The authors list up the many mundane tasks essential to producing the journal and name those who performed them, offering overdue recognition. Unsurprisingly, most of this labour fell to women. Like domestic work, it also involved a degree of emotional investment – dedication, solidarity and idealism – that made long hours and urgency acceptable. After 2002, without Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, the editorial team struggled to recruit authors on short notice. Whether the team’s own commitment waned remains unaddressed.

Camille François also remains backstage, offering a compelling study of the journal’s rejection practices between 1983 and 2005. Because evaluation and response to authors were often oral, documentation is incomplete, but revealing. François reminds us that autonomy requires a degree of violence to establish an entrance barrier. Editorial judgments were often harsh, yet the letters, usually signed by Bourdieu, were typically brief, formal, and polite, without mention of the true reasons for the rejection. François contrasts this with the ordinary rejection practices today, also applied by Actes, with detailed feedback from several reviewers. I suppose that after Bourdieu’s passing, the legitimacy of rejections required more than simply his powerful signature.

Christophe Charle traces the history of the book review Liber, published from 1989 to 1998 as a supplement to different European newspapers and journals, including Actes. Bourdieu envisioned it as a pan-European platform for international circulation of ideas, independent of state institutions. The financing challenged the project from the outset. The reprint from one journal issue of an ad for Mercedes Benz illustrates the project’s lack of economic sustainability, in a time of transformation of the media sphere. The scope of the journal did not seem well defined, and many readers found it difficult to read.

Two articles broaden the lens beyond Actes to examine social science publications more generally. Pierre Blavier writes about the proliferation of French social science journals over the past 50 years, questioning its causes and consequences. The initial surge of sociology journals corresponds to the increase in the number of sociologists, but stagnation has led to a crisis of overproduction. Many journals struggle to attract submissions and reviewers. I wonder if there are not also some deeper problems: excessive effort spent on writing and reading trivial texts and a fragmentation of shared references among sociologists. My utopian suggestion is that institutions should stop rewarding publication volume and instead impose emission quotas.

With eight authors, the article by Julien Boelaert, Samuel Coavoux, Estelle Delaine, Altaïr Despres, Sibylle Gollac, Narguesse Keyhani, Adèle Mommeja and Étienne Ollion represents Actes’ tradition of collective work well, all while embracing new methods. Using a Large Language Model, they analyse over 50 000 abstracts from 120 French social science journals to assess the presence of gender as an analytical dimension over the past 25 years. They find a steady, but modest increase. Contrary to popular belief, this rise does not diminish attention to class – rather, the two dimensions appear mutually reinforcing. The dimension of race/ethnicity remains, however, marginal.

Taken together, these articles compose an anniversary issue that is, true to Actes’ spirit, both nerdy and edgy: Each piece is grounded in labour intensive, empirical research, with underlying data and analytical process made visible to the readers. In a spirit of forthrightness, we do not only get to witness the backstage of the production of research, but also of the production of a journal. This issue thus contributes to Bourdieu’s quest for disenchanting the space of cultural production: his tools turned to work on one of his own major intellectual ventures. This bodes well for the future.