Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Methodological Individualism and Microfoundations

    A recent post at Understanding Society gives a very nice introduction to methodological individualism (MI) in the social sciences (see also this introduction at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, also linked in the post). The heart of the argument is about what sorts of causal arguments and explanations MI does and does not preclude:

    …to concede that x’s are composed of y’s does not entail the need for any kind of reductionism from x to y. And this extends to the idea of explanatory reduction as well. So methodological individualism does not create valid limits on the structure of social explanations, and meso-level explanations are not excluded.

    This point has broader implications for political science. To say that social entities are composed of individuals, and that political outcomes are the results of individual actions, does not entail that we must to look for individual-level evidence or explanations for these outcomes. This is related to some comments I’ve made here on  Microfoundations for Political Science, which brings a skeptical perspective to the quest for microfoundations for every political science research topic, as if the research topics can never be properly understood unless we gin up some microfoundations (or microdata, or whatever) to test them.

    One somewhat related observation. When I introduce MI to graduate students as a framework for doing comparative politics, I go back to Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation:

    The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning of it is often lost. When it has a meaning, it is this. The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is, what?—the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.

    This is not methodological individualism as Weber meant it. But the links should be apparent. It introduces the ontological position on collectives which is so critical for MI; it also reveals the link between MI and the various traditions that are lumped together as “rational choice theory.”

  • Academic Job Market Notes (Followup)

    A scan of my web stats shows that my recent Academic Job Market Notes post has already received more traffic than any other single post in the past 12 months, and almost twice as many pageviews as its closest competitor. Wow. This leads me to wonder if there any other advice that I ought to share.

    The truth is, most everything that really matters and which is generally applicable to just about everybody has been covered already by Chris Blattman’s original post on the academic job market. I wholeheartedly endorse all of this, especially the parts about increasing returns for the main chapter/paper and the absurdity of concept of the “limited market” or “going selectively on the job market.” I applied to more than 100 jobs the first time around.

    That said, I can think of two additional, disconnected points that probably deserve separate emphasis.

    Practicing the Job Talk

    Your file gets you an interview, but your job talk is the single most important part of the interview. Lots of things can prevent a fly-out from turning into an offer (your competition, search committee/department politics, funding, etc.), but your talk is one that you can control. I advise students to practice delivering the complete talk at least once a day, every day starting September 15.  Do it on skype with your friends or family, or in front of a mirror, or just sitting at your computer. Note what that means: you should have your talk to be ready by September 15 so that you can practice it. I’d advise even earlier. Shoot for Labor Day.

    Once a day for at least a month probably seems extreme for many readers, but I stand by it. Here is personal note to explain why. I practiced my talk in 2007 at least 50 times before the first time that I delivered it “live” in an interview. I practiced it so much because when I was younger I struggled with stuttering, and in high pressure situations my stutter returns. Now that I’ve had years of lectures and conferences and presentations in other languages, it doesn’t bother me so much, but I am positive that having practiced my talk dozens of times made it easier for me to deliver, even if practicing was nothing more than a psychological crutch. I don’t regret for one second the time that I invested in practicing that talk.

    Now, most people don’t stutter, but my advice still stands. The broader point is that you want to be so familiar with your presentation that you can move fluently through it, especially when you are presenting anything complicated (which you almost certainly are). Fluid delivery projects confidence and comfort, with your work and with yourself. It puts the audience at ease and helps them to focus on you, which is exactly what you want your talk to do.

    The Variety of Academic Jobs

    The more “job market advice” that I read, the more I realize how little I know. Most advice targets tenure-track jobs at the most research intensive, PhD-granting departments. That’s the advice that I’m qualified (I guess) to provide. From time to time I see advice from other types of academic jobs: community colleges, liberal arts colleges, departments that offer a master’s degree but no PhD, public policy schools, interdisciplinary departments, plus the global academic marketplace (a PhD granting department in the U.S. looks very different than one in England, to say nothing of Europe or emerging Asia). PhD candidates on the market ought to know that people like me are not the best people to provide advice on applying to those kinds of jobs.

    Postscript

    Here are the Top 10 Indolaysia posts between 10/30/2011 and 10/29/2012:

    1. Indolaysia
    2. Academic Job Market Notes
    3. If It Rains Tomorrow, I Save
    4. Identification is Neither Necessary nor Sufficient for Policy Relevance
    5. OMFG Exogenous Variation! Or, Can You Find Good Nails When You Find an Indonesian Politics Hammer
    6. Graduate Study in Southeast Asian Politics at Cornell: Advice for Prospective Applicants
    7. Chinese Indonesians, Then and Now
    8. Methodology in Southeast Asian Studies (Part 2 of 2)
    9. About the Author
    10. About Indolaysia

    Also interesting are the top ten sources of web traffic, by city: Ithaca, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Unknown, Singapore, New York, Washington, London, Oxford, and Cambridge (MA).