Academic Detective Work #1: Writing About the Origins of a Model
Academic Detective Work: Writing About the Origins of a Model
Recently the anniversary of the start of our MSU/Great Lakes Institutional Econ project came and went, with little fanfare other than a brief review of the past year's accomplishments during my annual review. It has always been a little weird to me to see days or months of work summarized in a few bullet points or publications. This got me thinking about all the hours researchers and academics in general can put in to even the most straight-forward seeming pieces. We call it "research", but some of the time our searching takes us well beyond the usual academic channels and requires some TV-montage-worthy sleuthing. In sub-fields like economic history or institutional economics, this is more obvious. In these fields, the ability to do some academic detective work outside of scholarly journals is a large determinant of success in the job. When writing about the origins of a model or of some line of thought, this is particularly apparent.
Eric Scorsone and I were recently asked to contribute a book chapter that partly involves detailing the origins of Al Schmid's SSP (Situation, Structure, Performance) model for institutional analysis. Given how closely this aligns with our current work, it was an easy project to take on, but has been uniquely challenging. Using an established model (especially if already widely accepted and understood) in applied work is very different from stepping back and explaining where it came from. There is a tendency in academic writing to state that "X model emerged to address y problem" and call it a day. This is sufficient for most applied papers. But when reading an economic history paper, a book, or writing a chapter about a particular model, it's necessary to dig deeper. For this project, and our larger IE project, we've looked at:
- letters
- hand-written notations in books
- blog posts
- unpublished materials hosted on defunct faculty pages
- copies of notes (some hand written!) from classes
- type-written notes by Schmid and related parties
- anything we could dig up
I've been referring to this as my "academic detective work". As I work on this project, I've started compiling a few important points to think about while doing academic detective work.
A Few Thoughts on Uncovering the Origins of a Model:
1) Models evolve over time. While this fact is much of the reason we were asked to write this paper in the first place, identifying a starting point can be difficult. Short of one individual or group of individuals conceiving of the majority of the ground-breaking parts or pieces of a model, and then writing about how it came together, we rarely get all of the details. When the model in question grows over the course of an entire career, and not in the span of a year or two (and was undoubtedly influenced by countless individuals along the way), this task becomes even greater.
In the case of SSP, Schmid spent the majority of his career building and refining his model. Going back to his time as an undergraduate, it is clear that Schmid had an interest in human interdependence (central to the model), though he did not use that word explicitly in the beginning. During his graduate training and subsequent publications, we see patterns of analysis and emphasis on distributional impacts through policy decisions. Yet none of this really becomes a formal model (meaning in the literature) until the publication of Property, Power, and Public Choice well into his career, though we know he was drafting this book and talking about this model in early forms well before this.
Speaking of evolving....
2) Models are influenced by what currently is, as well as what has come before. This includes both ideas and people. The more you know about the subject(s) surrounding the topic, the more you'll be able to make connections.
This is perhaps the biggest challenge I faced on this project and where a lot of the aforementioned "sleuthing" came in. Schmid had decades of experience in the field and interacted with many individuals working on and talking about similar ideas throughout his career. While some were cited by him, I continue to be surprised at the connections I discover as I research his work and that of those working with him or whom he studied with or under. For instance, most notably for me has been learning about his connections with the Ostroms and the beginnings of the Bloomington School, leading into my next point....
3) Certain ideas are "in the air". Certain research questions or topics of interest tend to be emergent across academic communities/schools at the same time, for a number of environmental and institutional reasons.
There were many individuals attempting to create new or better models for analyzing how institutions related to the economy around the time Schmid was developing his model (starting in the 70s). Short of an author writing about or citing influences in their published works (or unpublished works we are lucky enough to find), this creates the perfect environment for numerous "red herrings" on the search for a model's origins. This seems especially true pre-internet, when much less was recorded in a way that's accessible or searchable now.
Clearly, tracking the origins of ideas or theory requires an intricate level of background research that is not always intuitive to the applied economist. That these are not skills often formally considered or taught in economics training, but rather picked up on the job, is another challenge worth writing about. So far, I have been lucky in my work. Schmid was a prolific and engaging writer, and wrote multiple papers detailing his career prior to and upon his retirement. He even started a blog! Nevertheless, since he is no longer around to interview, I have more academic detective work before me as I continue working with this model. I'll undoubtedly need to add to this list throughout the process.
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