have seen their proportional representation decline by a percentage
point or more over the past thirty or so years, largely due to the in-
creased number of science and engineering PhDs.^61
Perhaps owing to their discipline’s epistemological cohesiveness,
economists seem much less concerned with (or even aware of ) the
constructed nature of excellence. Panelists perceive economists as
agreeing more readily on the quality of proposals than is typical of
academics from the humanities and the more humanistic social sci-
ences. They describe economists as behaving as if it were possible to
draw a clear line between proposals. As a historian puts it, they all
agree that “this is an A, this is an A−.” Another, describing history
as “subjective,” differentiates it from economics, where “It’s up or
down.” An economist endorses these views, observing, “I think in
economics we’re fortunate to have a fairly unified view of what is or
is not good research.” A program officer traces this approach to eval-
uation to the more homogeneous culture of the discipline: “I just
find that the training is sort of set up by being a purely internalist
discourse within the discipline. There’s such a strong sort of
epistemological hegemony within the discipline.”
Economists’ standards of evaluation, too, strike panelists as differ-
ing from those used in other disciplines. Historians acknowledge
competing standards and often ask, as the feminist historian Joan
Scott has, “whose standards determine the standards of the disci-
pline.”^62 Economists, in contrast, are seen as considering evaluation
to be a fairly straightforward matter of separating winners from
losers. Compared to most other panel members, they seem much
less concerned with traditional markers of scholarship—contextual
knowledge, linguistic competence, and so on. On one panel, for in-
stance, the economist did not understand why an applicant who
planned to study three countries, including Greece, would not be
funded because she lacked familiarity with the Greek language. He
viewed this objection as a red herring. For their part, noneconomists
On Disciplinary Cultures / 101