panelists are most concerned with the theoretical dimension, echo-
ing the assessment of intellectual significance. But here the issue is
typically the presence or absence of a theoretical rationale for case
selection. For instance, a political scientist criticizes a proposal on
the grounds that “it was very unclear why she picked one place ver-
sus another place. The logic didn’t seem to have been worked out.
Reading her proposal you could see she was trying not very convinc-
ingly to respond to those very criticisms that other political scientists
would formulate:... ‘Why should it be a case study if you’re pre-
tending to make more generalizable claims?’”
Some more inductively inclined evaluators do not require a tight
fit between theory and data because they expect the theoretical con-
tribution to emerge in the process of gathering data. “Some people
want a hypothesis before you go in,” a sociologist observes, “[and]
some people are quite prepared to accept that those hypotheses come
out of the work. I thought if [this applicant] went in without it, he
would actually probably get something more interesting.”^21 An econ-
omist expresses the opposite view: “A general argument that people
will make in this debate is, ‘Well, this is an interesting idea and it’s a
bit of a fishing trip and this person will sort things out once they get
there.’... For me, personally, this one was so far wrongheaded at the
start that I didn’t have faith that the person would straighten it out
... If you haven’t got the tools, you’re going to write about some-
thing that’s cool and interesting, but you’re not going to do it in a
scholarly way. That’s a waste of money.”
Panelists’ discussions of the proper articulation of theory and data
reveal differing perceptions concerning how theory should be han-
dled and how much is too much or too little. This is in part a matter
of taste and a response to varying disciplinary sensibilities—to vary-
ing intellectual habitus—as illustrated by a historian who describes
the appropriate use of theory as follows: “There is a kind of high the-
ory that is [in] and of itself beautiful and elegant when it’s done right
Recognizing Various Kinds of Excellence / 183