mensional, traversed by networks and literatures that are not always
bounded by disciplines. The current state of American political sci-
ence is a case in point. And although hiring and promotion decisions
are made within disciplinary cultures, such is not the case for fund-
ing decisions made by multidisciplinary panels, which have to create
shared evaluations across epistemological and other divides. This
context primes academics to make explicit their shared, taken-for-
granted perspectives as well as their differences—which may range,
at the most general level, from the split between humanists and
social scientists regarding the proper place of subjectivity in the pro-
duction of knowledge, to divisions over theory, method, and stan-
dards of evaluation within and across individual disciplines. Panel-
ists’ understandings of the challenges facing their disciplines and
their expectations regarding what is valued in other fields affect the
type of arguments they make for or against proposals. That expecta-
tions for ethnographic research are higher for anthropologists than
for political scientists illustrates this point.
It seems from my study that those panelists most able to form a
consensus about definitions of excellence come from the fields of
history and economics. In history, broad consensus is based on a
shared definition of good craftsmanship in the practice of empirical
research; in economics, consensus results from cognitive consolida-
tion around mathematical tools. While economists are described as
believing that they can clearly distinguish among high-quality pro-
posals, and appear to downplay the role of intersubjectivity in the
identification of excellence (perhaps because of the role of formal-
ization), historians acknowledge the existence of gray areas and the
importance of negotiation and debate in determining excellence.
Having been influenced by post-structuralism, historians, like their
colleagues in English literature, are more likely than economists to
ask “whose criteria get universalized as disciplinary criteria.” As is
also true of English, history is cleaved around the role of theory and
On Disciplinary Cultures / 103