addition, their expertise, being more purely interpretative in charac-
ter, does not employ technical black-boxing tools of the types that
Bruno Latour describes inScience in ActionandThe Pasteurization of
France.^34 The production of social science knowledge, in contrast, re-
lies on specific data-collection techniques (surveys, interviews, ob-
servation) and tools for data analysis (qualitative content-analysis
software or statistical analysis packages) to settle controversies.^35
Competition between opposite views of what “excites” and “inter-
ests” thus are perhaps more intense in the humanistic fields.
Panelists in noninterpretative disciplines, however, sometimes are
extremely critical of using “what is interesting” or “cool” as a crite-
rion of evaluation. Suspicious of idiosyncratic tastes, these panelists
try to balance an appreciation of the researcher’s ability with the
project’s intrinsic interest. A historian, for example, wants to couple
appreciation of interest with an evaluation of competence: “Heavily
quantitative proposals with a lot of arcane equations and things like
that in it would have a hard time sparking my interest. I try to over-
come that and make sure it’s not just a matter of taste and try to un-
derstand what it is really that’s being tested and what the chance of a
significant result will be here, even if it’s not my taste.” A sociologist
explicitly subordinates interest to competence. Referring to my own
area of expertise, cultural sociology, he says: “If there [are] some re-
ally fine projects that come along looking for funding you would just
get extremely excited about it at the level of intrinsic interests. But I
might just say, ‘Well you know, here’s another culture project,’ what-
ever. But why should I stand in the way of a really excellent project
because it doesn’t get my blood boiling?”
Moral Qualities of the Applicant
The vernacular of excellence that panelists use is laced with refer-
ences to the moral character of applicants. As my colleagues and I
have argued elsewhere, these references to moral character—particu-
194 / Recognizing Various Kinds of Excellence