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Just got a tip from Retraction Watch for this paper: Phillips, David     2015    Who gets published? Comparative Education 51(3): 303-304. Phillips present a list of common reasons for the rejection of manuscripts from journals in the field of education research: ·          wrong journal; ·          too long/short; ·          journalism; ·          extract from report/dissertation unadapted; ·          no clear topic;          too little context; ·          too little theory; ·          clear gaps in literature; ·          polemical; ·          research not fully...

A lot of archaeologists like to use high-level, abstract social theory. I think that such theory is not only a waste of time, but harmful to archaeology. It is harmful because such theory does not explain variation and change in past human societies, and it diverts attention away from the kind of middle-range theory needed to explain past social developments in a causal framework. I am NOT talking about Binford's concept of middle-range theory; I refer instead to the standard social-science meaning as described by Robert Merton). See Smith (2011) for discussion. Here is a passage from Smith (2011): “High-level theoretical schemes describe how the social world works on a very abstract, philosophical level, and as a result their utility in the analysis of particular empirical cases is rather limited (Ellen, 2010). In the words of [sociologist C. Wright] Mills, grand theory is “so general that its practitioners cannot logically get down to observation. They never, as grand theorists, ...