Not only have I never heard of this kind of "handbook" (in spite of having an advanced degree), it isn't clear to me how they actually would be a reliable source of wisdom. It sounds like they are supposed to be a meta-analysis of the current state field, but to take it up a meta-level, who is analyzing the meta-analysis? How do I know the editors didn't just select their friends who have similar viewpoints? In the abstract, a handbook seems as likely to send me wildly astray as it is to send me down the right path. Almost by design, I'd naively expect handbooks to amplify the status quo and discourage more radical ideas (as most institutions are wont to do). This might be good or bad depending on the status quo but either way I'm likely only going to get out wisdom proportional to what I bring in.
I've never seen a handbook that led anyone "wildly astray". They're put out by major academic publishers (Oxford, Routledge, etc.) who hire (publishing) editors qualified to select qualified (academic) editors to select qualified chapter contributors. It's not like they're randos self-publishing or something.
The entire point is to be a fairly neutral, comprehensive state of whatever field or subfield the handbook covers. And they generally do a pretty good job. A place like Oxford is never going to publish a handbook that's trying to push some ideological agenda and ignoring half the field.
But if you don't trust the senior editors at major academic presses, then I don't know what to tell you.
And since you've never heard of handbooks, see my peer comment with links so you can see they exist. :)
Is that advanced degree an academic oriented one or industry oriented?
People on the academic oriented degrees tend to use them a lot. But industry oriented degrees tend to stick with textbooks. (By the way, yes, textbooks are the other kind where you can find wisdom. Normally in an easier to get, more condensed form, but of an older kind.)
About who selects the books, well, who tells you if a book is any good? Some have very radical untested ideas, others stick to older but proven ones. You decide what book to get.
>People on the academic oriented degrees tend to use them a lot.
Are you from the EU? Becuase having been in US STEM graduate programs in 2 different fields I have never come across such a handbook or know anyone who has. It's certainly not common in the US.
If there are different schools within a field, every one of them might have a handbook (so you might have a handbook on linguistic typology, and on the other hand a handbook on generative grammar - although often the topics are even more narrow), so they still are useful to get a survey of the land even when there are different schools of thought. I also do not at all share your sense that all science is crazy antagonistic and political in the sense that "institutions discourage radical ideas" - maybe that's true of some fields, but definitely not all of them (for example, the idea makes no sense at all for mathematics). Even when different opinions and schools of thought exist that doesn't necessarily mean that there's nothing that people can agree on.
But more concretely, you can just look up the authors that contributed to the handbook and if you do indeed have a degree in the field, you'll probably recognise them and their affiliations and will be able to know (or at least look up) what tradition they belong to and what this implies for the handbook.
