Over at Teekay’s

I wrote about “tools of the trade” in previous installments. But what’s the trade I’m talking about?

In my line of work — and I fully count my academic work here too, even though I’m not a traditional academic insofar as I don’t teach — most time is spent on rephrasing and recoding stuff that’s already there. (By recoding I mean a conceptually coherent rephrasing, a rephrasing based on some theory or approach or at least jargon. Take a historical record and feed it into a rational choice model — that’s recoding.)

“Stuff” can really be all sorts of things. Rarely do we “produce” anything new, other than the “new” character of a specific conceptual configuration that may not have existed before.
I don’t think this is a problem, but I guess it could freak out some people.

How this thread really started: I read this terrific quote from Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society over at This Academic Life (sorry, I don’t have the link to this particular post, but you should check out this dude’s blog anyway for some pretty interesting methodological stuff, especially on IR):

The search for conclusions that can be presented as “solutions” or “practical advice” is a corrupting element in the contemporary study of world politics, which properly understood is an intellectual activity and not a practical one. Such conclusions are advanced less because there is any solid basis for them than because there is a demand for them that it is profitable to satisfy. The fact is that while there is a great desire to know what the future of world politics will bring, and also to know how we should behave in it, we have to grope about in the dark with respect to the one as much as respect to the other. It is better to recognize that we are in darkness than to pretend that we can see the light.

I remembered this quote only vaguely and had frankly forgotten how well it captured the strange position of academic disciplines that happen to deal with “real stuff” that’s “out there,” especially political science, where the demands on applicability or relevance are always higher than in seemingly more arcane pursuits. (This Academic Life has interesting thoughts on this topic too — about the pressure from the administration and students alike to provide “tools” for a career in international affairs instead of purely “academic” debates in the classroom. Check out this post in particular.)

No punch line coming here, I’m just reacting to something I read.