the ‘american’ school of ipe

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PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE This article was downloaded by: [University of Liverpool] On: 3 November 2009 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 915529998] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Review of International Political Economy Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713393878 The 'American' school of IPE? A dissenting view Randall D. Germain a a Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada Online Publication Date: 01 February 2009 To cite this Article Germain, Randall D.(2009)'The 'American' school of IPE? A dissenting view',Review of International Political Economy,16:1,95 — 105 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09692290802524133 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09692290802524133 Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

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Page 1: The ‘American’ school of IPE

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

This article was downloaded by: [University of Liverpool]On: 3 November 2009Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 915529998]Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Review of International Political EconomyPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713393878

The 'American' school of IPE? A dissenting viewRandall D. Germain a

a Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Online Publication Date: 01 February 2009

To cite this Article Germain, Randall D.(2009)'The 'American' school of IPE? A dissenting view',Review of International PoliticalEconomy,16:1,95 — 105

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09692290802524133

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09692290802524133

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial orsystematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug dosesshould be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directlyor indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

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Review of International Political Economy 16:1 February 2009: 95–105

The ‘American’ school of IPE?A dissenting viewRandall D. Germain

Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

ABSTRACT

This article challenges three aspects of the ‘American’ school of internationalpolitical economy (IPE) as presented by Benjamin Cohen and further elab-orated by Dan Maliniak and Michael Tierney in this special issue. First, Iquestion whether their depiction of the field is accurate. What they describeis not so much the ‘American’ school of IPE, but the ‘Harvard’ school. IPE inAmerica is a rich and varied enterprise; not so the ‘Harvard’ school. Second,and unfortunately, IPE in America is also highly centralized and hierarchical,and this gives the ‘Harvard’ school enormous latitude to influence the self-depiction of the field and in some ways also its trajectory. This is not healthy,either for IPE scholarship in America or beyond. Finally, notwithstanding thepower and authority of the ‘Harvard’ school, we outside of America cannotabandon IPE to its grip. My suggested course of action is to continue engag-ing with those of our colleagues (both within and outside of this school) whoare receptive to the wide-ranging pursuit of knowledge and who recognizethat IPE is a field defined by its subject matter rather than by its commitmentto a particular methodology.

KEYWORDS

American school; data construction; Harvard school.

What is at stake in a name? Plenty, apparently. Benjamin Cohen’s (2008)depiction of the differences between what he calls the ‘American’ and‘British’ schools of international political economy (IPE) seems to have pro-voked a mini bout of introspection over the disciplinary organization ofIPE. This can only be helpful, if for no other reason than to make those whoconsider themselves to be IPE scholars more self-conscious about what it isthey do and how they are organized to do it. The real value-added aspectof Cohen’s work – in contrast to some recent attempts to chart the state ofthe discipline but which really are advancing a particular conception of IPE

Review of International Political EconomyISSN 0969-2290 print/ISSN 1466-4526 online C© 2009 Taylor & Francis

http://www.informaworld.comDOI: 10.1080/09692290802524133

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(Lake, 2006; see also Lake’s contribution to this special issue) – is that heat least attempts to bring together research agendas that do not alwaysspeak to each other as clearly as they might. If this debate makes more ofus aware of the richness and variety of IPE on offer, it will be a win–windebate for the field as a whole.

Many of the features of ‘American’ IPE described by Dan Maliniak andMichael Tierney in this volume clearly resonate with those of us who prac-tice IPE outside of America. In this short contribution I focus on threeaspects of this debate that strike me as particularly interesting. First, andmost importantly, I do not think it is ‘American’ IPE that Maliniak and Tier-ney (and Cohen) describe; it is a truncated and rather introverted slice ofIPE in the American academy that they mistakenly equate with ‘American’IPE. Unpacking this mistake demonstrates the great care we need to takewhen manufacturing data, whether about the real world or the academy.Second, what I believe Maliniak and Tierney do reveal is the astonishingconcentration of disciplinary power within an important segment of IPEin America. This concentration – where power and authority truly meet –is also part of the story that Cohen tells, although he seems peculiarly shyabout commenting on its implications. I am not so shy. And finally, I arguethat those of us who ply our trade outside of America need to engage morefulsomely with ‘American’ IPE, although we may take or leave (followingour personal preferences) the version Maliniak and Tierney outline. Theissues and problems that have generated an interest in IPE are serious af-fairs, and future generations would rightly chastise us were we to abandonthis field of study to what I will call, following an earlier critique motivatedby different concerns, the ‘Harvard’ school of IPE (Long, 1995).

DATA, CITATIONS AND FIELDS: IPE ANDTHE ‘DIRTY DOZEN’

In his determination to demonstrate the existence of important cleavagesbetween the ‘American’ and ‘British’ schools, Cohen (2008) focuses on theuse of systematic empirical data as a critical point of distinction betweenthe two: one school engages in the systematic testing of hypotheses againstevidence to accumulate knowledge, while the other is led by its criticalnormative stance to reflect on individual case studies that make it difficultto accumulate generalizable knowledge.1 Maliniak and Tierney follow inthe tradition of ‘American’ IPE by gathering data mined from the Teaching,Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey in order to map its salientcharacteristics. Using this data they confirm many of Cohen’s suppositionsabout the ‘American’ school.

But is the field that Maliniak and Tierney (and Cohen) map really thefield of IPE as it is actually constituted in America? This is not an unimportantquestion, for if their map is deficient or distorted, the manner in which we

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outside of America engage with our colleagues within America becomesopen for recalibration. I argue that because of the particular way in whichthey construe their data, what they purport to ‘map’ is a narrow slice ofIPE that cannot be considered to be the field as a whole. Most critically, byrelying on what respondents perceive to be good scholarship, rather thanwhat they actually use or where they publish, we get a good picture of howsome scholars would like to think of themselves, but a distorted picture ofwhat they actually are and do. Making data in this way compromises theinferences that Maliniak and Tierney are able to draw, most importantly interms of the theoretical axes of the field. To pursue this claim, which I canonly do suggestively given the space provided, I focus on two parts of theTRIP survey: the choice of journals to constitute the ‘field’, and the codingof paradigms. Together, I argue that these data mislead us as to what isactually going on within IPE in America.

Following Garand and Giles (2003), Maliniak and Tierney choose whatthey describe as the 12 leading journals that publish IPE research to act asa proxy for the field; that is, for the purposes of this exercise these journalsmark the field’s boundaries. But this is problematic, not perhaps in termsof measuring the ‘impact’ that some journals reputedly possess – althoughas we will see this also may be contentious – but as a measure of the field’sexistence: for what this list ‘measures’ is desire rather than accomplish-ment. It is a list of journals compiled from a survey of scholars asking themboth what journals they are familiar with and to which they would liketo submit their work.2 The critical point here – the point where data getmade – is that this list privileges self-perception rather than actual practice.3

Another way of phrasing this is to say that it does not measure actual mate-rial reality, which in this case is where scholars really do publish their work(and not just those scholars who respond to surveys). The material domainof the field of IPE can only be the actual sum total of its scholarly outputand not the self-perception of where scholars would like to publish if givenhalf a chance; this is perhaps better rendered as its ideational domain. If thefield were mapped as it actually exists – that is to say, where the ideationaland material are joined and fused organically – then the work publishedin these journals would be easily identified for what it is: a small partof the overall effort to accumulate knowledge through the publication ofscholarly research. We can only turn the publications contained in these 12journals – the ‘dirty dozen’ – into the ‘American’ school of IPE by simplyignoring in excess of 95% of the actual published work of IPE scholars,spread as it is among so many other journal outlets (not to mention otherformats such as monographs, which might be, by some measures, the true‘research’ anchors for the ‘field’).4

Yet, Maliniak and Tierney, along with Garand and Giles and tenure andpromotion committees everywhere, are rightfully allowed to discriminatewithin the actual universe of published scholarship, and indeed they do so

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by considering the impact scores which journals now cultivate assiduously.However, here again we must be careful to consider how such data aremade, for impact scores reflect not only the actual influence of particu-lar journal articles in the accumulation of knowledge sweepstakes, butalso (partly? mostly? entirely?) the desire to locate scholarship, broadcastpedigree and (if successful) ingratiate oneself into a particular school ofscholarship.5 And here the nature of data becomes crucial, for if citationsare about allowing others to locate scholarship and trumpet pedigrees,then the inferences we make about citations – including their supposedimpact – must be suspect. In the end, my hypothesis would be that theso-called ‘top’ IPE journals in the United States – International Organization(IO), World Politics and International Studies Quaterly (ISQ), not to mentionAmerican Political Science Review (APSR) and American Journal of PoliticalScience (AJPS) – are used heavily by scholars for tenure and promotionpurposes, but rather less so for the mundane purposes associated with theactual accumulation of knowledge. My point here is not to denigrate thesejournals – I too put them at the top of my wish-list for where I would liketo publish my ‘best’ work in the TRIP survey (and who wouldn’t, sincedoing otherwise would contravene our most cherished self-perceptions)– but rather to suggest that data made in a certain way do not always re-flect what we actually do as scholars. Acknowledging this of course begsthe question of how in fact we are to portray our field. I would humblysuggest that our answer not include citation indices or very limited (andnon-random) representations of journal universes. These may have theirplace in measuring the ‘importance’ of journals, but not in defining fields.

Such a pinched portrayal of IPE in America can also be seen at work inthe way in which Maliniak and Tierney portray the weight of the field’smain theoretical paradigms. One of their most interesting findings is thatmarxism and constructivism are poorly represented in ‘American’ IPE. I,along with McNamara and others in this special issue, also find this odd,as there are entire journals devoted to marxist and historical materialistthemes, and one does not have to look too hard to uncover panels, con-ferences, entire research programs and even whole institutes open to andengaged with this form of scholarship.6 Only when we mistakenly portraya field can such an abundance of scholarship be overlooked. The absence ofan ideational turn, however, is more perplexing, since this is the most sig-nificant new development in ‘American’ IR since the advent of neo-realism.Authorities no less than Katzenstein et al. (1998: 683), after all, end their IOversion of IPE’s history with the claim that rationalism and constructivismnow benchmark the field’s most promising analytical orientations.

Again, it seems to me that we have a problem of data construction. Forexample, in order to map the weight of constructivism in IPE, Maliniak andTierney scan their journal universe for the variable ‘international norms’

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as the key indicator of a constructivist paradigm at work, and can barelydiscern its presence. Part of the explanation of course is the admittedlynarrow database they use, which must raise questions about the robustnessof their findings. For example, as McNamara suggests elsewhere in thisvolume, much of this research is now published in book form by majoruniversity presses. But also at work here are the catchwords they use asproxies to represent this type of research. Ideas and norms, for example,have long been a staple of much radical scholarship in political economy,but they have been rendered as ‘ideology’ or inter-subjective frameworksrather than as ‘international norms’: do a citation search for ‘neo-liberalism’and you can read for years. But if we only look for the term ‘internationalnorms’, we will miss much of the actual research on ideas and norms thathas suffused the field for decades. Ruggie and Kratochwil (1986) warnedus about such cognitive dissonance over 20 years ago, but their line ofcritique seems to have been conveniently forgotten amid the rush for socialscientific refinement.

The problem of data construction also appears in the way in whichthe TRIP survey codes the paradigms that scholars use to frame their re-search. TRIP’s codebook variable #10, which describes how paradigms arecoded, stipulates that articles are read for their content and not for the self-confessed theoretical predispositions of their authors. In other words, it isthe coders rather than the authors who determine what kind of paradigmis being deployed; indeed, it is the coders who define the paradigms inadvance of the coding (so that they can recognize the paradigms in thefirst place). Thus, Alex Wendt may be coded as a realist if he discusses thecauses of war in terms of a distribution of power, or as a constructivist if heemphasizes the role of ideas. That Wendt could be coded as a realist andas a constructivist (or should that be scientific realist?) is certainly an inter-esting proposition.7 More importantly, it means that the role of the ‘coders’becomes crucial for determining the paradigmatic contours of the field: itis they rather than the research community more generally who outline thetheoretical paradigms we use and develop, and they may well make erro-neous or contentious judgments. For example, David Campbell will be verysurprised to learn that he is now a ‘British constructivist’ (Cohen, 2008: 174).For my money, the most egregious claim is made on behalf of those whoare clamoring to rearrange international relations (IR) into the contrastingcamps of rationalism and constructivism: how can they insist that someoneas fully engaged with historical materialism as Robert Cox now be consid-ered a constructivist (Adler, 2002: 88)?8 While I can appreciate the desire bysome to make and remake data like this, I am unsure whether the rest of usshould acquiesce so easily. Once again, how data are made becomes crucial,which I suppose means that there is in fact plenty at stake in the practice ofnaming.

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HIERARCHY AND POWER

Even though I am unconvinced by Maliniak and Tierney’s (as well asCohen’s) claim that there is an ‘American’ school of IPE, I am astonishedand concerned at the high degree of hierarchy within IPE in America thattheir work reveals. Anyone in education of course is fully aware of thehierarchy at work in scholarship and academia, but that it should be ex-posed so baldly by the TRIP survey must give pause for thought. Moreover,if this survey were to be extended to enquire into the distribution of re-search funding in America, I suspect that even stronger inferences couldbe made about this hierarchy. What the TRIP survey does reveal is thatnearly 45% of IPE scholars in America are trained at fewer than 12 institu-tions, which is about 1% of the higher education institutions in the country.And approximately 30% of published output in the ‘dirty dozen’ comesfrom faculty based more or less in the same institutions. I wonder whatthe Anti-Trust Division in the Department of Justice would say about thestate of competition in such an ‘industry’.

But in one important way it is even worse. Cohen’s very readable andinformative intellectual history of the field makes abundantly clear thecentral role played by the journal IO (cf. Katzenstein et al., 1998; Murphyand Nelson, 2001; and indeed Keohane’s contribution to this special issue).This is partly why it can lay claim to being the premier journal in the field.But it is astonishing how many of its editors are Harvard graduates; indeed,between 1972 and 2006, Harvard-trained scholars were at the editorial helmof IO for the entire period except for one four-year stint in the mid-1990s.Even Cohen’s ‘Magnificent Seven’ – and they truly are magnificent, asmuch for their ambitions and leadership as for their scholarship – comedisproportionately on the American side from Harvard. Only Kindlebergerand Gilpin are non-Harvard graduates, and both came to be intimatelyinvolved in the scholarly network that grew around Harvard from the late1960s onwards (as was true for Cohen himself). This is why I think evenMurphy and Nelson (2001) mischaracterize the nature of the ‘American’school when they call it the ‘IO’ school. In reality, it appears much more to bea ‘Harvard’ school of IPE, dominated by Harvard graduates and teachers,radiating outwards to populate American universities and journals withits products and progeny.

Should we worry about this seeming concentration of academic influ-ence within IPE in America? I think so, for at least two reasons. The firstis that such a degree of concentration promotes group think and herdbehaviour. Many of us have marveled at the frankly bizarre herding ofa sizable chunk of our American colleagues into and out of debates thatmight fairly be described as narrow, myopic and almost narcissistic. Cohensympathetically lays to rest the enormous literature on hegemonic stabilityand international regimes that was sprung on us by a very small band of

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Harvard-trained faculty, but which yielded so little fruit; my own personalfavourite is the neo-institutional/neo-realist debate which threatened toderail energies and efforts for a decade, but which thankfully fizzled afteronly a few years. Why the rest of us should be held hostage to these fine-grained and detailed internal debates between scholars who train together,organize workshops and debates together and of course publish togetheris beyond me. But then, I am outside the ‘Harvard’ school and thus haveonly my own common sense and intimations of rationality to guide me.Or rather, I have the rest of the world for solace and inspiration, which israther a good thing given some of the debates promoted over the years bythe ‘Harvard’ school.

However, there is another reason for worry, and it follows from thepropensity of members of the ‘Harvard’ school to become involved withAmerican government policy: both Joseph Nye Jr and Stephen Krasner,for example, have held relatively senior posts in recent American admin-istrations. Now, while this may have salutary effects on American foreignpolicy – who after all would not have given up their first-born child to havehad Joseph Nye Jr in the Bush Administration to at least put forward thecase for a multilateral foreign policy? – I believe it has a malign effect on theconstitution of the field, precisely because it too easily allows the ‘Harvard’school to equate IPE with what Susan Strange (1988: 12) long ago identifiedas the politics of international economic relations (PIER). I do not believethat we can allow IPE to become only or even primarily about foreigneconomic policy, much less American foreign economic policy. Yet, this isexactly what the subtext of the ‘Harvard’ school implies: IPE is about un-derstanding how the interests and preferences of individual actors supportand/or constrain the global economy, and how optimal equilibria amongthese interests and preferences can be molded and directed.9 And while Iadmire the normative stance of many ‘Harvard’ school scholars, this nar-rows the universe of questions so palpably that if you are not interestedin the first instance in America and its stake in the contemporary globalpolitical economy, then IPE will not be your field of choice. When combinedwith the predilection towards tightly controlled internalized debates, suchacademic closure to the outside world needs to be resisted.

RESISTANCE AND ENGAGEMENT

And so we come finally to the nub of the issue: how to rescue the depictionof IPE in America as being constituted by the ‘Harvard’ school? My adviceis to take two tracks. One is to press Maliniak and Tierney to include intheir survey meaningful questions about what IPE scholars actually do –how they fund and conduct their research, where they actually publish,and crucially what research they genuinely use in their own work thatadds to our common stock of knowledge. It would also be very interesting

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to learn what knowledge, if any, we as scholars think has been accumu-lated since the rebirth of IPE some 40 years ago. These kinds of questionswould, I think, provide a more complete and accurate map of the uni-verse of scholarship from which we could begin to make robust inferencesabout the state of the field. They may also wish to revisit how they codethe paradigms researchers use to bring a greater degree of critical sensi-bility to their survey. I agree with them that we need good information onthe boundaries and contours of our field, but I disagree that we get thisby asking questions based on what scholars wish they could do (or be)rather than what they actually do (and therefore are). For the purposesof tenure and promotion – as well perhaps as somehow measuring schol-arly reputations – we may always need to rely on citation indices and aninformed profile of publication esteem indicators. However, where ourpurpose is to measure entire scholarly fields and ascertain their organiza-tional, demographic and operational dynamics, we need to consider thewhole ‘universe’ in which the production of knowledge takes place ratherthan just its most visible so-called ‘top’ tier. This is akin to measuring themass of an iceberg based on the bit that sticks out of the water. Askingquestions on the TRIP survey that plumb the depths of the field, alongwith a more refined coding framework, would I believe elicit a portrayalof IPE in America that is much richer, more variegated and above all moreaccurate than the truncated snapshot currently on offer. This field is trulyworth engaging with.

The second track is for the rest of us to pick up on Cohen’s exhortationto build bridges where possible by engaging with scholarship that crossesboundaries and is itself open to the critical interchange of claim and evi-dence. Higgott and Watson (2008), in a rather churlish rejoinder to Cohenin a previous issue of Review of International Political Economy (RIPE), cor-rectly argue that IPE is not a field identified by its method; but neither isit, as they insist, a field defined by some kind of conceptual core. There isno standardized conceptual core to IPE, nor can there be, because IPE is afield of inquiry that spans very many competing and sometimes conflict-ing analytical traditions. This is why citation indices are not useful ways ofgauging impact on the field as a whole: we read, respond and contribute tomany kinds of debates organized around a myriad of competing problemslocated in very distinct analytical traditions. But this does not mean IPE isa non-field. Rather, it means that it can (should?) be defined by its subjectmatter, which in this case is an integrated global political economy thatis now several centuries old and is organized around a myriad compet-ing and cross-cutting political, economic, social and cultural frameworks.How to investigate that subject depends upon a number of factors, includ-ing the particular problem that marks the entry point of investigation, theconception of knowledge used to apprehend that problem, the ontologicalpredispositions of the scholar and the analytical traditions he or she works

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within. None of these can be determined in advance, and none certainly cancome to be defined by the field or agreed upon as a consensus, at least be-yond a small and limited cohort such as that represented by the ‘Harvard’school. Liberals, realists, rationalists, constructivists, marxists along withmany others10 all have their place within actually existing IPE in America(and beyond), precisely because they all have something to contribute toour knowledge about how this global political economy is historically andactually organized. And long may it continue to be the case.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Michael Williams, Herman Schwartz, Adam Morton andCraig Murphy for helpful comments on an initial draft, as well as theeditors of RIPE both for the invitation to contribute to this issue and fortheir critical feedback. I of course bear full responsibility for the viewsexpressed in this article.

NOTES

1 Interestingly, this bifurcation parallels many of the distinctions between theIR disciplines as organized and practiced in Britain and the United States (cf.Schmidt, 2008).

2 As Giles and Garand (2007: 742) describe the process, they adapted earliersurveys of reputational indices and consulted colleagues as to the status ofvarious journals, thereby arriving at an initial universe of 115 journals.

3 I will ignore for the purpose at hand the interesting question of impact. How-ever, it is an open question as to the import of citation impact scores: if theaverage IO article is cited 6.24 times over a two-year period within a journaluniverse of 90 journals (Giles and Garand 2007: 742), what are we to make ofthe fact that it is, for the most part, ignored by the vast majority of publicationsin its domain? To put this another way, if just over six of the approximately 2000articles published by these journals during this period cite an IO article, howexactly should we evaluate its ‘impact’? And this of course ignores the practiceof ‘citation-pumping’, in which authors (increasingly it seems encouraged byjournal editors) cite articles in their journal of publication in order to purposelymassage the citation impact scores.

4 This point is also made in a slightly different manner by McNamara et al. in thisspecial issue. It would be an interesting exercise to map the universe of journalsto which IPE scholars submit their work and in which they get published.Garand and Giles began their list (from which Maliniak and Tierney culled the‘dirty dozen’) with 115 journals, but these were only journals in Political Science.As McNamara, Wade and Phillips correctly indicate, the journal universe forIPE is much larger and more variegated, precisely because IPE has not yetbeen sanctified as a stand-alone field. Its potential journal universe crossesdisciplinary boundaries, and is quite possibly three or four times the size ofGarand and Giles’s initial list. Thus, my claim that the research published inthe ‘dirty dozen’ represents at best 5% of IPE scholarship probably comes in atthe top end; it is perhaps nearer to 1%.

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5 I am reminded here of Robert Cox’s (1996: 178–79) discussion of the sociology ofgroupies, gatekeepers and loners. For him, graduate school seems more or lessdesigned to produce groupies who can perpetuate and extend the dominanceof gatekeepers.

6 In America, journals such as Monthly Review, Science and Society and Rethink-ing Marxism, are dedicated to ongoing debates within Marxist or historicalmaterialist scholarship, while institutes such as the Fernand Braudel Centerat SUNY-Binghamton and the Institute for Research on World-Systems at UCRiverside are very open to historical materialist and Marxist-inspired research.The number of conferences devoted to themes that resonate with such scholar-ship is not trivial. With respect to research programs connected to individualscholars, one need only point to the work of William Robinson, David Harveyand Mark Rupert for vibrant examples of this tradition of political economy atplay today. And of course, Americans are frequent contributors to establishedleft-inspired journals in Britain such as New Left Review, Capital & Class, andHistorical Materialism.

7 Part of the reason for this seems to be the introductory textbook style of theparadigm-signifiers deployed by the coders. They are quite elementary, as ofcourse they must be in order to accentuate the distinctions they are meant touncover. Thus, again does data get made.

8 For Cox’s own confessions as to his theoretical lineage, see Cox (1996: Chs. 2and 6, esp. pp. 58 and 416).

9 This subtext comes through very clearly in the TRIP survey, where scholarsare asked to comment on and rank important foreign policy issues in terms oftheir significance for the United States. As a Canadian answering this survey Ifelt distinctly queasy about this section, partly because I am not American butmore critically because of the underlying assumption of how scholarship canor should be enlisted in the service of public policy. I can only hope that thequestions in this section will be substantially revised for the European version.

10 ‘Other’ theoretical traditions open to the aspirant IPE scholar include numer-ous feminist, post-modern and post-structural traditions, as well as severalhistorical traditions of political economy – which is where I would locate myown work. Of course, they are not really ‘other’ traditions at all; rather, theyare equal component parts of the organic tradition of political economy thatcomprises the theoretical universe out of which our knowledge of the world isfashioned.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR

Randall D. Germain is Professor of Political Science at Carleton University, Canada.He is the author of The International Organization of Credit: States and Global Financein the World-Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1997), editor of Globalizationand Its Critics: Perspectives from Political Economy (Macmillan Press, 2000), and co-editor with Michael Kenny of The Idea of Global Civil Society: Politics and Ethics in aGlobalizing Era (Routledge, 2005).

REFERENCES

Adler, E. (2002) ‘Constructivism and International Relations’, in W. Carlsnaes, T.Risse and B. Simmons (eds) Handbook of International Relations, London: SagePublications, pp. 95–118.

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Cohen, B. J. (2008) International Political Economy: An Intellectual History, Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cox, R. W. (1996) Approaches to World Order, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress.

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