Kindred Winecoff has a pretty sweet rebuttal to my ill-tempered rant of late March. A lot of it makes sense, and I appreciate reading graduate student’s perspective on things.
Some of his post amounts to a reiteration of my points: (over)professionalization is a rational response to market pressure, learning advanced methods that use lots of mathematical symbols is a good thing, and so forth.
On the one hand, I hope that one day Kindred will sit on a hiring committee (because I’d like to see him land a job). On the other hand, I’m a bit saddened by the prospect because his view of the academic job market is just so, well, earnest. Â I hate to think what he’ll make of it when he sees how the sausage actually gets made.
I do have one quibble:
While different journals (naturally) tend to publish different types of work, it’s not clear whether that is because authors are submitting strategically, editors are dedicated to advancing their preferred research paradigms, both, or neither. There are so many journals that any discussion of them as doing any one thing — or privileging any one type of work — seems like painting with much too wide a brush.
Well, sure. I’m not critical enough to publish in Alternatives, Krinded’s not likely to storm the gates of International Political Sociology, and I doubt you’ll see me in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in the near future. But while some of my comments are applicable to all journals, regardless of orientation, others are pretty clearly geared toward the “prestige” journals that occupy a central place in academic certification in the United States.
But mostly, this kind of breaks my heart:
I’ve taken more methods classes in my graduate education than substantive classes. I don’t regret that. I’ve come to believe that the majority of coursework in a graduate education in most disciplines should be learning methods of inquiry. Theory-development should be a smaller percentage of classes and (most importantly) come from time spent working with your advisor and dissertation committee. While there are strategic reasons for this — signaling to hiring committees, etc. — there are also good practical reasons for it. The time I spent on my first few substantive classes was little more than wasted; I had no way to evaluate the quality of the work. I had no ability to question whether the theoretical and empirical assumptions the authors were making were valid. I did not even have the ability to locate what assumptions were being made, and why it was important to know what those are.
Of course, most of what we do in graduate school should be about learning methods of inquiry, albeit understood in the broadest terms. The idea that one does this only in designated methods classes, though, is a major part of the problem that I’ve complained about. As is the apparent bifurcation of “substantive” and “methods of inquiry.”And if you didn’t get anything useful out of your “substantive” classes because you hadn’t yet had your coursework in stochastic modeling… well, something just isn’t right there. I won’t tackle what Kindred means by “theory-development,” as I’m not sure we’re talking about precisely the same thing, but I will note that getting a better grasp of theory and theorization is not the same thing as “theory-development.”
Anyway, I’ll spot a TKO to Kindred on most of the issues.
“More importantly, I don’t think that learning a bunch of methods closed
off avenues of research for me; on the contrary, it opened them up!
Learning that not every real-world variable has a Gaussian distribution,
that assumptions regarding the data-generating process are very
important, that (yes) not every process in the world is linear, that
bias can come in all shapes and sizes (regardless of what method one
uses, and I don’t just mean quant here)… this is important knowledge
to possess!”
If you’re a neopositivist, yes. What’s sad to me is that Winecoff doesn’t appear to acknowledge anything but neopositivism as a legitimate approach to social-scientific inquiry. And that may be the most depressing implication of the overprofessionalization I still think you are quite right to decry.
KW may have exaggerated how bleak the job market is for non-neopositivists (though by how much is an open question). I think the broader argument is worth pursuing, though. It’s not so much the academic job market that generates over-professionalization. It’s the non-academic market.
I’m not sure it’s right, but I’m not sure it’s wrong, either. And it’s interesting, which counts for something!
KW’s point seems to be that the current business model of higher education, relying on inexpensive labor to teach ever more undergraduates, generates demand for many more graduate students than higher education can accommodate on the tenure track. Never mind prestige, or possibilities outside polisci . . . the same problem afflicts other disciplines, and the numbers just don’t add up.
Grad students respond by learning skills that they believe will allow them to compete on private labor markets, in addition to the academic one. I daresay that very few reading this blog (blog!) believe that the best non-academic market is paid, print journalism.
Given those assumptions, as well as the assumption that the grad student in question is not independently wealthy, the dominant strategy is to toe the neopo line.
Thus, KW’s argument goes, the insufficient value accorded to (say) postpositivist work *outside* the academy contributes substantially to its marginalization inside.
And I would agree with this as a description of the situation (although the rise of significant employment for PhDs in Political Science outside of the academy is, I would say, a relative recent phenomenon). I disagree with the implication, or the conclusion, that what we should do is suck it up and toe the line. Here I am disagreeing with the implications of Dan’s argument too: I never advise any of my students to make sure that they toss in some statistical analysis as an additional chapter in their dissertations unless it actually helps them answer their research question, which for virtually all of my students it does not (part of why they are my students, why they sought me out as a supervisor in the first place — and just FYI, many of them now have academic jobs). There is a limit to how far one ought to confirm to the fashionable demands of the discipline, but — and here KW and Dan are both entirely correct — this can come with costs which people ought to be cognizant of.
“although the rise of significant employment for PhDs in Political Science outside of the academy is, I would say, a relative recent phenomenon”
Agreed. Perhaps this recent phenomenon is related to all of this professionalization we hate so much? Folks I know in the non-academic world say that my stats/software training combined with my substantive knowledge is worth a 6 figure starting salary in DC, and perhaps twice that on Wall St. I want to be an academic, but if a good spot isn’t there for me or if the vagaries of “how the sausage gets made” leaves me out in the cold, it’s nice to know that I can do something other than teach four courses a semester at a community college for $25k/year.Â
In other words, I think Guest is entirely correct.
I have been teaching in DC for 12 years and *I* don’t make a 6-figure salary. Fortunately I am not in this for the money — not that you are, but personally, I think I would have to shoot myself if I were working in a job that drew on my “stats software training” and “substantive knowledge” regardless of the salary it came with. Academia is a vocation with teaching at its heart. The fact that our graduate training in Political Science (and not just there, sadly) seems to have forgotten this key fact long ago is, I think, the bigger tragedy underpinning or overshadowing this entire discussion.
Really? Â You really don’t make a 6-figure salary (i.e. 100K), after 12 years? Â If so, you are preposterously underpaid. Â
Cage match? I was trying to be polite…Â
To PTJ —
I believe the examples of “important knowledge” I listed are important whether one is a neopositivist or not. Do you disagree?I am trained as (what you call) a neopositivist, despite having many other intellectual interests that I largely cultivate in my spare time. Some of the latter find ground in grad school studies; others do not. But if I get an academic job it will be because I can be a good neopositivist. If I instead get a policy job — and I already have offers for more money and in better places than I could reasonably expect from academia despite not yet being “on the market” (and isn’t that phrase itself loaded?) — it will be for neopositivist analysis, and only for that reason. If I get a private sector job it will be for neopositivist analysis and only for that purpose. Catch my drift? It’s not at all a question of whether I “acknowledge anything but neopositivism as a legitimate approach” to inquiry… it’s whether anyone else does. I don’t have the luxury of adjudicating what is legitimate or not if I hope to spin my 5 years of postgrad into something resembling a comfortable life. I have to accept what’s out there. Most people that might consider giving me a paycheck have something specific in mind. Usually it isn’t eclecticism. (Most of my post was about signaling, for a reason.) I’m not in it for the money, obviously, and yet man does not live on intellectual pluralism alone. Is that crass? I don’t think so, but then I’m poor.To D. N. –I had a conversation with a professor tonight over your comment to my post. It provoked further thought on my part and, I think, his. It’s been awhile since he was in grad school and therefore been awhile since he was in my frame of mind. A few things came out of it, which I hope to explore in a future (i.e. more meditative, less inebriated) post. The gist is that the sort of reflection that you might wish to see from grad students like me is simply not possible given institutional and other constraints. There is *no choice* but to pick a path and follow it. There may be several paths available (or not as the case may be) but you have to pick one. The kind of intellectual wanderlust that your first post was describing is a luxury for faculty, preferably tenured and preferably in an understanding department.Alternatively, you can be the grad student who forges her own path. If you succeed you’re a rock star. If you don’t, you’ve wasted 5 or 6 years of the best years of your life. The odds are strongly against you.The lack of eclecticism is one of my greatest discontentments about grad school, when contrasted to how I imagined it would be as an undergraduate. But now I understand it and I’ve come to accept it. In some ways I think it’s a very good thing. Students are the students of their mentors, not full-blown genius theorists the second they matriculate into post-grad study. They should get good at doing one thing before they try to do everything. I sometimes wonder if professors that lament the state of grad students (or grad student instruction) remember what their brains were like at 23 years old, or if they’re too far removed.Are you hitting on a real problem? I think so. But most “fixes” for it would introduce a whole new set of problems and it’s not clear to me that they’d be any less severe. Again… signaling will always be important. It’s even more important in low-information environments, e.g. job markets where every position everywhere gets 100+ applicants.One problem is that we admit far too many grad students, and we do far too little to screen them. That is a structural problem that has nothing to do with curriculum, philosophy of science, etc. But if UNC didn’t cast a fairly-wide net I probably wouldn’t’ve been admitted, as I came from an anonymous state school with no connections, no well-placed internships, etc. Any “fix” would probably have excluded me.I’ll probably have more to say about methods and whether there’s a bifurcation of methods and substance, etc. I think that I may have left an impression of my coursework that wasn’t generalizable, perhaps because I think UNC has very good methods training that is theoretically focused and substantively grounded. It might not be the same everywhere, but then I couldn’t possibly know that. I’ll try to clarify later.
I will say that my post seemed to resonate with a number of other grad students and undergrads considering grad school. Professors aren’t the only ones dissatisfied, but they do sometimes seem to be more removed.Â
Disqus sucks. I really did put line breaks in there, I swear.
Yeah, you want us to believe that? ;-)
Notes re: provocative stuff above – (1) a lot of what you say remains convergent with my original post such that the space here is smaller than some might think and (2) any time I title a post with something like “Cage Match!” you can be sure that I’m upping the ante, throwing the gauntlet, aiming the pistol, lowering the lance, and crying havoc whilst letting loose the dogs of war. Or something.
I do disagree that the examples of what you called “important knowledge” are only important to a neopositivist — and that’s okay, as long as one doesn’t claim them to have universal relevance. Notions like “Gaussian distribution” and “real-world variable” are only comprehensible and compelling within a very specific set of philosophical commitments — a point I despair of ever communicating to those neopositivists who seem to think that “selection bias” is a problem for a research design that isn’t aiming to produce nomothetic generalizations. A little philosophy of science goes along way in discussions like that.
I would contest your assertion that there are no jobs out there for people who don’t do neopositivist work, or at least I would amend it to: there are very few, perhaps almost no, jobs out there in highly prestigious institutions in the US in Political Science departments for people who do not neopositivist work on world politics, because IR in the US is largely set up as a subfield of US Political Science. But there are a lot of institutions that aren’t so prestigious by the conventional measures of prestige involving the admonition of other prestigious institutions (the circularity is important here), and an increasing number of programs in International or Global Studies that aren’t Political Science subunits. Plus there’s a rest of the planet out there. The dominance of neopositivism in US IR does not mean the dominance of neopositivism in IR writ large(r), and it does not mean the complete elimination of alternatives.
My objection is and has always been to the forced constraint generated by a methodological monoculture of neopositivism, as though the “alternatives” were large-n, small-n, and “mixed methods.” These are not alternatives in a methodological sense. Graduate training ought to provide students with a broader menu of options than just various flavors of neopositivism, lest there be a lock-in effect whereby neopositivist standards and practices become the de facto baseline against which other ways of producing knowledge are evaluated. That it doesn’t so often in the US is, I would say, tragic.
 It might be worth pointing out that the grad school I’ll be attending this fall, which is among the best in Canada, offers 2 quantitative methods courses in total. While it’s possible, I’m sure, to take more by going into another department, this suggests that the hegemony of hypothesis testing does not even north.
* even extend north, rather.
 Two points:
1) As a graduate student in a program with a similar bent, I can see your point about ‘substantive courses’ since most of the readings have evidence that is highly dependent upon statistical knowledge. That said, it seemed to me that ‘substantive’ courses are designed to a) give you an overview of what is out there on a topic and b) get you to start thinking about what you are interested in. It isn’t that I need to be able to know the ins and outs of the class vs. sector debate on trade policy as a first year grad student so much as know that it is out there and possibly be intrigued by it.
2) I take issue with you characterization of grad school being ‘wasted’ if you do not get a job (or whatever the criterion for success is). As someone who has chosen Dan’s choice #1 from the last post after a long period of deliberation I can say that I chose it knowing a) that a job would be harder but b) That is was the choice that really got me to love my work. If it doesn’t land me a job I dont’ think that I will look back on my time here as a waste but instead as a period of my life where I had the opportunity to explore intellectual topics that I find interesting and invigorating. This isn’t to say that I think those that take the neo-positivist approach are wrong. Many will fine the same satisfaction in these approaches and the fact that I seriously considered it with a topic that I might have chosen kind/sorta in mind means that I can understand and sympathize with the decision. I just dont’ think that it means I have wasted my time here if I have to go into policy/journalism/hoboism. That understanding only comes if the job is front and center in your thinking.
From what I’ve been able to tell – and I certainly can’t claim to have much experience! – a great many of the ‘political science’ scholars trained in what PTJ calls Neopositivism don’t seem particularly conversant in or aware of the deeper metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions that underpin their methods. This doesn’t mean that Neopositivist methods aren’t well suited to certain types of questions, nor that popular alternatives such as critical realism aren’t horrifyingly contentious in their own ways at deep levels (’emergent dualism’ and non-reduction, for example), but it does mean that a large body of scholars aren’t engaged in a deep philosophical critique of their own work.
I’m not suggesting that every academic needs to be a brilliant philosopher, but I can see great benefits in rigour and methodological development to having scholars in the social sciences who can at least systematically outline their positions on action, structure, or intentionality, ground them in some credible position on the origin of the mind and on causality, and defend that as an effective way of doing social science. And while it’s possible to learn much of this on one’s own time, having the benefit of guided training and some kind of didactic engagement is really helpful. And yet, that seems far more common in sociology departments than in polisci ones.
 I think PTJ does a good job in responding to your comments. I would add further that having a mix of epistemological and ontological flavoring actually improves a department and the project of social inquiry. Look at departments monopolized/dominated by neopostivist quant crunchers. Who is going to challenge their assumptions? What interesting, ‘out of the box,’ conversations are they going to engage in that will push them to test their ideas (and test their test of their ideas) in new ways? These departments just end up talking to each other in narrow bandwidths. This isn’t something a PhD candidate can change, but it is not something to just be accepted either. As for your claim that neopositivist work is what policymakers want, well I think maybe James Scott (https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Like-State-Institution-University/dp/0300078153) has something to say about that…
“Who is going to challenge their assumptions?”
Whoever wants to, although other teched-up folks can probably do it best. Â
Again, it’s not clear to me that first and second year grad students would benefit from thinking “out of the box”. Nor are they all James freaking Scott.
“Whoever wants to, although other teched-up folks can probably do it best.”
I speak from experience when I say not necessarily. And you missed the point about Scott which is not that grad students should be James Scott. Instead, it was that perhaps the implicit lessons of Scott about neopositivism in policy are worth keeping in mind.
One other point that you might want to think about Kindred is that not everything you will learn about doing research and not every approach that you eventually end up using in your research is one that you will learn in graduate school. If you finish in your late 20’s, say, and end up teaching until you’re 65, then it’s extremely likely that in the ensuing 40 or so years, there will be developments that grad school either did not teach you or even equip you to begin studying. In my department, I share the research methods classes with a colleague — and we both share the somewhat strange distinction of having done our original research on what was then the Soviet Union. And we both tend to start off our research methods with a story about how much of what we learned in grad school is no longer in fact relevant and some of it is actively discredited. The trick as a grad student is to (as you point out) learn a lot about philosophy of science, so that later you will have the types of skills that enable you to go on beyond what you currently “know” to be correct, and to think about taking the next step in advancing knowledge in the field beyond where it is now. It’ll also help you to think about what you want to keep and what you want to discard as the conversation develops.
I’ve managed to publish in Alternatives, despite the fact that Critical Theory was not even on the horizon when I was finishing up my dissertation. Neither was discourse analysis, certainly none of that neurobiology/do we inherit our beliefs through our DNA stuff was, and I fully expect that in the next 25-30 years the field will morph again at least twice? three times?Â
While you want to be able to sell yourself to an employer by telling them that “I can do this” you also need to think about what you want to be able to do later, and over the long haul throughout your career. (Perhaps in the future your shiny new degree will be as outdated as my skills in Kremlinology — but hopefully you’ll have been cognizant of that possibility and prepared for it).
D.H. –
Alright. I agree that there isn’t tons of space between us but if you’re trying to start something I’ll come back at you when I can carve out some time. Might not be today.
PTJ –
I actually don’t think it takes any philosophical commitment at all to understand what a Gaussian distribution is, any more than it takes a specific philosophical commitment to understand what discursive analysis is. I also don’t think that there’s any less snobbery among the non-neopositivists, whether they work in theory or elsewhere. (I once asked a theorist who was working on something where the use of some descriptive statistics would have greatly improved the set-up of her problematique why she didn’t include them, and she said that she didn’t believe in numbers. Well, I didn’t believe that the problem she had “identified” was really a problem at all and she couldn’t show me that it was. She was assuming what she should have been demonstrating, and it made her work far less compelling.)Â To the extent that “over-professionalization” is the problem we’re discussing, critical theorists can be (and probably are) over-professionalized just as much as neopositivists.
Re: jobs, yes I know that there are places — sometimes in non-Poli Sci departments — where non-neopositivist work is done. There are many, many more places where being good at doing neopositivist social analysis is valued, including other academic departments, non-US schools, and the public and private sectors.Â
I disagree with your use of the word “forced”. I also disagree that grad school should be about learning about the full menu of options. Grad school is long enough and frustrating enough (and incomplete enough) just trying to gain competency in one or two of them. If one wishes to learn more about other approaches — and I think one should — one has the rest of a hopefully-long career for that, as M.M. rightly noted.
It may not take a philosophical commitment to understand what a Gaussian distribution is, but it takes a philosophical commitment to consider it relevant. Ditto discourse analysis. Methods are portable; methodologies are not.
In defense of the theorist to whom you spoke, what she should have said is that “greatly improved” is a methodological matter involving the epistemic status of one’s claims, and if one is not interested in nomothetic generalization, it is arguable that descriptive statistics would not do anything to “greatly improve” the research. There is more than one way to identify a problem as a problem, after all.
There may be more places where neopositivist social science is valued, but would one actually want to work there? Without what Weber might call the “inner feeling” for one’s work, I suspect it would be torture. If you actually have a commitment to neopositivism, more power to you, go forth and hypothesis-test boldly. If not, well, I detect tragedy.
The only way that grad school as something less than the full menu of options makes sense to me is if students have better knowledge about what they are choosing by electing to go to particular PhD programs. Rochester makes no secret of the fact that its students are trained to do particular things and not others; I respect that kind of truth in advertising. What drives me to distraction is the failure to even acknowledge the existence of other ways of proceeding, or — perhaps even worse — to assume that all ways of proceeding are ultimately reconcilable with neopositivism (call this “Laitin-pluralism,” and note that it is not pluralist at all when it comes to anything that matters philosophically or methodologically).
In my experience, over a long career one has the opportunity to misunderstand novel approaches as reflections of one’s own basic assumptions, but rare indeed is the scholar who actually retools in any fundamental way. There’s some path-dependency to early methodological choices, and — I would say — even moreso to the question of whether one is initially socialized with a pluralist sensibility or into a monoculture. I have known very few scholars to move from the latter to the former — except for the Laitin/Keohane faux pluralism of “everyone can play my game, since my game is the only game in town — and surprise, it’s neopositivist hypothesis-testing.”
This Cage Match (or whatever) strikes me as two fighters kicking past each other. In one round we see elaborately detailed knowledge about what is wrong with “neopositivism” pitted against elaborately detailed knowledge about what is right with it. In the next round we see elaborate claims about what is right with non-neopositivism pitted against elaborate claims about what is wrong with it. But the two rounds proceed with different rhetorical techniques and vocabularies. So before we all settle down to “methods” courses and “substantive” courses we need to acquire some philosophy of social science language training so we can understand the various assumptions on which neopositivism and non-neopositivism are based.
I agree with the commenter below who said she and her colleague are now working with methods they did not learn in graduate school. Maybe some of the older wisdom needs to be revived, but on the whole moving on means using better methods. If I were confined to what I did in grad school, I would need to hang myself.
So the key thing to learn in grad school is how to continue your self-training as a scholar.
The problem, though, is that very few people learn how to continue their self-training. “Overprofessionalization” is part of the problem: what people seem to learn in graduate school is how to do what is expected to get a job and then to get tenure. None of which rewards serious study in the philosophy of social science, at least not in the US. That said, I couldn’t agree more that we need more of that sort of study; hence my C of I book, as a contribution to what I think is a more adequate vocabulary in which to have these contentious conversations.
These are great thought-provoking comments. Given how US centric the discussion is overall though, with some exceptions, I’m curious if “overprofessionalization” is a concern among global and European IR theorists and PhD students, albeit from a different standpoint? Granted, my admission is that I will be starting an Mphil/PhD at LSE this fall, and one of the perks that drew me to global IR (and this depends on the institution of course) was the sense of intellectual pluralism I detected. The fact that I could even ponder philosophy of science and philosophy of history questions, or do research that is quite sociologically informed, struck me as something I knew I wouldn’t obtain in top tier US programs (unless one switches from poli sci to sociology per se, and for poli sci US programs, Cornell is an exception among a few others…). Also, the idea of what it takes to even get published in top journals in the US and get tenure seems to paint a tragic picture these days. That said, I am genuinely curious though if European and other PhD students abroad have similar concerns, just not framed within the confines of neopositivism?Â
Second, in response to the comments about non-academic work, what I will say  based upon my short stint working as a researcher for the US government, is that there is definitely a neo-positivist bent. Research that includes quantitative, namely statistical and econometric methods, is highly valued and prioritized. I can almost assure Duck readers that if someone (I don’t fall into this category myself) wanted to pursue a non-academic research career, or if they were unfortunately forced to due to a dire academic job market, in the US at least, they would have a really tough time finding secure employment in research (even for the private sector) without additional training in mathematics, statistics, and/or economics. There are some notable exceptions, like USAID where I work, which actually hires quite a few anthropology PhDs–I believe the most actually, for every major US government agency focusing on foreign policy issues if I’m not mistaken–and regional specialists/linguists. A safeguard if someone is not into neopositivism is to acquire proficiency in a critical language (Arabic, Chinese, Russian, etc.), because there are plenty of media analysis/translation/regional research positions, even with government contractors. Also, in terms of pay scale, this truly ranges. For entry level, it can be the 40s-50s, and for senior research analyst positions, 60s-70s. Private sector of course pays more than the government, but the latter can eventually offer a 6 figure salary if someone is there 6-10 years and with a PhD. Sometimes the private sector though underpays its PhDs too, so that isn’t a sure bet either.Â