sition, and so on, and so that is bound to have some impact. I
don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing when you have a
panel that’s sufficiently balanced in all sorts of ways, including ac-
ademic discipline, areas of expertise, the kind of schools that you
come from, and then the obvious, race, ethnicity, and gender. So I
do think it is important to bring all of those factors into play in
creating the panel, because you aren’t going to be able to get rid
of those influences.Promoting Methodological Pluralism
In defining the qualities of a good panelist, respondents, as we saw,
put a premium on deferring to colleagues’ expertise and sentiments.
They also view disciplinary sovereignty as very important. These im-
peratives point to the value of broad-mindedness and tolerance of
differences in evaluation. Panels are not a forum for challenging
methodological or disciplinary traditions. The rules of the game re-
quire that methodological equality be recognized as a matter of prin-
ciple. Thus panelists are strongly committed to evaluating proposals
according to the epistemological and methodological standards that
prevail in the discipline of the applicant—a principle called “cogni-
tive contextualization.”^28 This principle is summarized by an evalua-
tor as he describes the dynamics of his panel:
[There are] differences between people who work with large data
sets and do quantitative research. And then the very polar oppo-
site, I suppose, folks who are doing community-level studies in
anthropology. There are such different methodologies that it’s
hard to say that there’s a generalizable standard that applies to
both of them. We were all, I think, willing and able to understand
the projects in their own terms, fortunately, and not try to impose
a more general standard, because it would have been extremely132 / Pragmatic Fairness