About Transaction Publishers
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» About Transaction |
35 Berrue Circle Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8042 Telephone: 732-445-2280 Telefax: 732-445-3138 |
| About Transaction |
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Transaction Publishers is a major independent publisher of social scientific books, periodicals and serials. Transaction's mission is scholarly and professional inquiry into the nature of society. Transaction offers publications in established core disciplines such as economics, political science, history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, as well as recently established disciplines ranging from area research to urban studies, policy analysis, philosophy of social science, organizational behavior, and criminology. Located on the campus of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, Transaction has strong ties to the traditional mission of American university life as a center of learning, and to applied needs of public and private institutions in social research. Through its many publications, Transaction promotes mutually beneficial exchanges between academic and professional life. |
| Goals |
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Transaction Publishers is dedicated to the expansion and elevation of the social sciences. It is committed to the enhancement of public, professional and scholarly awareness by reaching the widest possible audience for work done by social researchers. Its goals are:
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| History |
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Transaction began on July 1, 1962 as part of a multiplex grant sponsored by the Ford Foundation at Washington University in St. Louis. Transaction was initially divided into a documentary films division, a public education division, and a publications division. Within two years, it was decided that the first two areas of the grant were better conducted by other areas at Washington University. The first issue of Transaction: Social Science and Modern Society was released in 1963. In 1970 Transaction was rechristened as Society magazine. The magazine grew and flourished in an era in which the public role of social science became intertwined with such dramatic concerns as increased demands for racial equity, involvement in overseas military actions, and attendant shifts in the locus of campus power and authority. Society also evolved in response to increased specialization in the social sciences, which made access to information by wider publics more difficult. In its early years, the publication built up an enviable reputation as a social science counterpart to Scientific American. Indeed, in its early years, that periodical assisted Transaction in design and technical aspects of production. In 1969, Transaction relocated to the newly formed Livingston College, on the Kilmer campus of Rutgers University—where it has since remained. Invited to join Rutgers by its then president, Mason W. Gross, and the first dean of Livingston College, Ernest A. Lynton, the firm developed a special role as a private enterprise serving a public institution, one that has endured for three decades. Of the trio of founders of Transaction, Alvin W. Gouldner left for a distinguished teaching appointment in Holland in 1965. He died in 1980. Lee Rainwater accepted a teaching position at Harvard University in 1969, where he remained until retiring in 1991. Irving Louis Horowitz continued his association with the publication in its move to Rutgers University. In 1968, as the first president of Transaction, Horowitz assembled a group of investors from the social science community to ensure its survival during this transition period. Two senior executives of Transaction (one current, the other former) also came to the Rutgers campus: Scott B. Bramson (former president of Express Book Freight and its client service divisions), and Mary E. Curtis (now president of the entire firm). Both are graduates of Washington University. Despite the change in ownership—from a foundation-supported university activity to a privately-funded, university-based activity—continuities over three and a half decades remain powerfully intact. While the original purposes of Transaction have remained paramount from the outset, changing circumstances compelled reconsideration of its formal structure. Above all, the need to sustain operations without grants or external support after coming to Rutgers University, required redirection and broadening the range of social science publications offered. This now includes not just publications in book, journal and serial forms; but a wide range of distribution and fulfillment services for allied publishers. From the outset of its conversion from a public to a private enterprise, stockholders have been eminent social scientists and scholars. Shareholders have included David Riesman, Seymour Martin Lipset, John W. Bennett, Marion J. Levy, Jr., Sheldon Messinger, Howard S. Becker, the late Aaron Wildavsky, Herbert Blumer, and Oscar Lewis. In addition, all editorial advisors within the book and periodical divisions are eminent figures in social research in their own right. In this way, Transaction has remained actively involved with university life, while maintaining an independent operating program and sense of mission. A central factor in the success of Transaction is its relationship with Rutgers University. It has had the firm support of four presidents: Mason W. Gross, Edward J. Bloustein, Francis L. Lawrence, and Richard McCormick. The Transaction mission with respect to the University has been, and continues to be, the enhancement of its social science and social research capacities. Many editors, authors and advisors are drawn from the faculty. Important journals are edited by Rutgers personnel. By emphasizing products over profits, Transaction has been able to maintain a clear sense of the needs of Rutgers University without losing a sense of its own basic professional priorities. This is possible because both the University and Transaction share a common faith in the needs of science and scholarship. |
| Logic of Transaction by Irving Louis Horowitz |
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Having written and prepared statements—brief and long, for public consumption and private, i.e., boardroom occasions, I should find it relatively simple to produce a brief summary for the dedicated readers of LOGOS. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is not because I am ever at a loss for words—my critics and supporters alike would acknowledge my gift for the written and spoken word. Rather, I hesitate because the very nature of Transaction itself is part of a shifting tide. Like all decent publishing activities that aim both to serve a professional public and to succeed as a commercial enterprise, the demands of the marketplace serve as a check and a reminder that the aims or policies of a chairman are circumscribed by what is euphemistically called the “real world.” In the case of Transaction, that real world is comprised of many forces and factions. They range from the literary performance of authors, the shifting habits of buyers and users who shop the retail outlets and frequent the libraries, the ideological as well as emotional proclivities of those who make actual purchases or decisions as to what to buy, the fancies of sales personnel and booksellers, whose concerns may be less the quality of our list than the amount of discounts provided, to the character of human interaction within the publishing house as such. In short, as Herbert Blumer, my dear deceased colleague in sociology, and the first chairman of Transaction might have said: it is not the action of a single person that matters nearly as much as the interaction among people that defines a situation. Publishing social science may be a mission, but at the same time, it is a grounded situation. It offers an interaction among people as well as perspectives. Too often, hortatory proclamations emphasize the uniqueness of a publishing house. Indeed, after forty-one years as “publisher of record in international social science,” a claim that Transaction works hard to justify, one is entitled to make such a bold statement, albeit in quiet tones. For our uniqueness is in the mix, not the purity. We owe a great debt to others, forerunners like Jeremiah Kaplan who defined the original purposes of The Free Press; Martin Kessler, who amplified social science to include public policy. Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer, who early on understood that unfettered social science publication must be free not just of the usual conventions, but no less, liberated from professional organizations for which boundary maintenance is more important than boundless vision. And yet, it is also the case that a firm like Transaction follows with admiration in the footsteps of great houses such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Harvard University Press, University of Chicago Press, and the Johns Hopkins University Press. Without their pioneering role (and here one must also add the extraordinary efforts of the founders of Routledge & Kegan Paul and George Allen & Unwin in the United Kingdom) the social sciences would still be scrambling to find a proper set of homes. That we refer to publishing firms as “houses” may seem curious to the outsider, but to those of us who have spent a lifetime at this business, it is quite natural. It conveys a sense of people as well as purpose, of intimacy as well as function. Indeed, my decade of service as social science advisory editor for Oxford University Press in the United States (following in the footsteps of Robert Nisbet) arguably was my most important training for the tasks later to be undertaken by Transaction. Under the quiet and unassuming tutelage of Sheldon Meyer, I came to appreciate the sense and nonsense of scholarly and professional publishing. To start with, Transaction’s targeted mission-oriented activity cares little about whether a book is defined as a commercial book, a textbook, or a trade book. Such categories may prove useful for in-house administrative rationalization, but they are of little merit in title-by-title decision making. In a nutshell, the key to “our” kind of publishing is to determine and define whether the book being published or the serial being launched is a good work. Sheldon Meyer helped me appreciate the fact that the ultimate category with which we work as publishers whether in the sciences, history or arts or any specific category, is the quality of the end product. A title is defined by how well it is written, how clearly it addresses a unique theme, how honestly it presents its information, how precisely it draws its conclusions from what has come before, and how good is the work in the ethical sense of fulfilling some human goal beyond the vanity of the well turned phrase or fame of the author. Seen in this way, a certain essential modesty is incumbent on those who aspire to lead through the power of words. The editorial director and chairman of a professional publisher, such as Transaction, is much like a conductor. We direct the music written and played by others. And these “others” whom we select to publish form over time part of a community of people who in turn define quality and goodness. The sum and substance for the result of these efforts is the “list”—the seasonal catalogue, the complete catalogue, the subject area brochures, the book announcements — all of these define the company of players and hence the company as such. The conductor that orchestrates these parts should do so with a sense of modesty, no less than grandeur of purpose. If he proceeds in this way, he has an opportunity to be successful. But even then, we remain at the mercy of larger, impersonal forces: the will of the university at which we reside as well as the whim of the economic market that determines just how much discretionary capital is available for books and journals and serials. In short, even the decent conductor, or in our vernacular, head of house, is not assured any rousing success. The next day at the office, or the next letter of complaint may disturb an equilibrium established over the course of years. My great good fortune is having come to publishing from a life of scholarship and university teaching. It has sensitized me, and I hope continues to do so, to the centrality of the author to the process of publishing. The scholar in social science, as in all else, must face the blank page and put something on it that is compelling. He or she must anticipate a nameless critic who decries that something, must confront the wrath of academic colleagues who must pass judgment on that individual’s right to a permanent post, and must face himself or herself with the horrible question: was the effort worthwhile? Worse, does anyone really care? The social scientist, for the most part, is closer to the poet in our age than to the crime story writer: he or she must come face-to-face with the search for immortality, while always recognizing that such a search is undertaken by mortals in a world of six billion others—each with a claim on this thing called the Earth. The scholarly publisher can scarcely offer a sufficient fiscal incentive, but this community can offer friendship and the protection of a community of excellence that can at least cushion the inevitable blows identified with the world of research and ideas. The new technology has actually taught us what we should have recognized long ago and more clearly: that such material entities like books, serials, and journals are simply vehicles for the transmission of ideas. They have no more intrinsic merit than other media does: reading ideas on a screen, downloading them from a CD-Rom, or reading aloud in an auditorium. Indeed costs vary and durability is different. But while St. John had it right when declaring that “In the beginning was the word,” he was wise enough not to declare whether that word was to be written or oral, divinely inspired or diabolically imposed. The world of publishing brings us back to first principles, including those that presumably guide our civilization as such. And all permanent things are ultimately about first principles. They guide us in our actions as publishers and they are revealed by what we publish. It has been my great good fortune to spend a lifetime in social science—what I fervently believe to be the most distinctive and unique feature of intellectual life of the twentieth, and now the twenty-first century. Like publishing itself, the long-range goals of social science research may be unwavering, but the forms of social research constantly change to meet the needs of the human race. The purpose of Transaction is to serve with honor and distinction both the eternal aims of the human race, and the endless variety of ways of anticipating and achieving such goals. |
| Organization |
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The formal organization of Transaction is based on the cardinal premise that it is a private enterprise in the service of a public good, the expanded awareness and use of the social sciences. Members of the board of directors and officers of the corporation have a longstanding commitment to scientific and professional publishing in scholarly and policy institutions in the United States. |
| Advisory Board Of Directors |
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Irving Louis Horowitz Mary E. Curtis Daniel Yankelovich Herbert Blumer* Current Advisory Board Members James T. Bennett Jonathan Brent Mary E. Curtis Joshua Feigenbaum Jeanne H. Guillemin William B. Helmreich Irving Louis Horowitz Penelope Kaiserlian James E. Katz Roger Kimball Fred Kobrak Paul Kurtz Michael Leonard Sandra K. Money Ray C. Rist Judith L. Rothman Luther Wilson Corporate Officers Irving Louis Horowitz, Chairman Mary E. Curtis, President Lori Fellmer, Secretary |
| Contact |
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Transaction Publishers Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey |