awareness has strengthened my view of research as a truly collective
(and intergenerational) endeavor. It is against this background that I
pinpoint some of the weaknesses of the book:
This study concerns only multidisciplinary panels. Our interviewees
suggested that interdisciplinary panels are less contentious than dis-
ciplinary panels, to the extent that panelists tend to be less critical
of proposals that speak to areas of research that they are less famil-
iar with. Moreover, interdisciplinary panels are perceived to be less
stringent from a methodological perspective than disciplinary panels
because of the norm of cognitive contextualization. As a political sci-
entist put it, “the National Science Foundation panel I was on was
very concerned about being good science, being at the cutting edge
of methodology and that was not a criterion for me on the present
panel.” As originally conceived, this book was to compare multi-
disciplinary panels with disciplinary panels. I have tried to take a
stab at the differences between disciplinary and multidisciplinary
panels elsewhere.^7
This study considers only quality as defined in grant peer review panels.
Instead of focusing on the panelists’ representation of quality, I could
have considered the decision-making process in academic hiring and
promotion, peer review in scholarly journals and academic publish-
ing, or historical changes in standards of evaluation. Or I might have
interviewed veteran panelists about their past experience or assem-
bled qualified focus groups to evaluate proposals. I believe the strat-
egy I adopted is preferable for two main reasons: (1) Focusing on na-
tional funding programs, as opposed to local hiring and promotion
decisions, enables greater generalizability of the findings about insti-
tutionalized categories and criteria of evaluation. Moreover, promo-
tion decisions are based on factors such as teaching and service to
the university, and are less exclusively about competing definitions
Appendix / 257