Beyond Boundaries?

Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies

Edited by Rudra Sil & Eileen M. Doherty

Subjects: International Relations
Series: SUNY series in Global Politics
Paperback : 9780791445983, 278 pages, June 2000
Hardcover : 9780791445976, 278 pages, June 2000

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Table of contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

1. The Questionable Status of Boundaries: The Need for Integration
Rudra Sil

Part One
Constructing Integrative Frameworks

2. Negotiating Across Disciplines: The Implications of Judgment and Decision-Making Research for International Relations Theory
Eileen M. Doherty

3. Contextual Information and the Study of Trade and Conflict: The Utility of an Interdisciplinary Approach
Norrin M. Ripsman and Jean-Marc F. Blanchard

4. Constructing Concepts of Identity: Prospects and Pitfalls of a Sociological Approach to World Politics
Anne L. Clunan

5. Collective Identity as an "Emotional Investment Portfolio": An Economic Analogy to a Psychological Process
Tadashi Anno

Part Two
Reorienting the Foundations?

6. Against Epistemological Absolutism: Toward a "Pragmatic" Center?
Rudra Sil

7. Thresholds in the Evolution of Social Science
Wade L. Huntley

8. The Discipline as Disciplinary Normalization: Networks of Research
Timothy W. Luke

9. Beyond Boundaries? A Tentative Appraisal
Eileen M. Doherty

About the Contributors

Index

Presents a constructively critical reappraisal of the boundaries that define the social scientific analysis of international life.

Description

This book represents a critical yet constructive reappraisal of the role, and the limits, of the boundaries that define and separate disciplines and subfields in the social sciences, as well as the boundaries that divide distinct research traditions or paradigms in the analysis of international life. It provides an integrative and eclectic examination of the virtues of a more flexible division of labor, a division that facilitates more meaningful communication among scholars of different methodological persuasions investigating similar problems in international life.

Part One addresses concrete issues in international studies ranging from international bargaining and interdependence to conceptions of collective identity. The essays therein serve as creative models for integrating concepts and analytic logics from different theoretical frameworks rooted in different disciplines. Part Two shifts the focus to more wide-ranging questions in the philosophy of the social sciences and the organization of social science research in order to shed new light on the value and validity of boundaries currently drawn between different schools, sects, disciplines, and subfields.

Contributors include Tadashi Anno, Jean-Marc F. Blanchard, Anne L. Clunan, Eileen M. Doherty, Wade L. Huntley, Timothy W. Luke, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Rudra Sil.

Rudra Sil is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Rudra Sil is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

"This book offers a variety of fresh perspectives, approaches, and themes on an important topic. I found it provocative." — Susan S. Northcutt, University of South Florida