In this article from the year 1990 Gísli Pálsson and E. Paul Durrenberger revisit a discussion on the "skipper effect" and point out that while there may be strong skipper effect in some societies, in other societies it is weak or neglible. They suggest that it is important to distinguish between the statistical reality of the skipper effect and its sociology and that the concept of skipper effect is of limited utility in comparative studies, since different researchers using it have not always been talking about the same phenomena and fishing success is conceived differently in different societies.

Systems of production and social discourse: The skipper effect revisited