Globalization and Area Studies: When Is Too Broad Too Narrow?

Every era has concepts that capture the public imagination, and "globalization" has recently emerged as one for our time. The term conveys a sense that international forces are driving more and more developments in the world, and thus crystallizes both the hopes of some people that we will finally achieve a global society and the fears of many others that their lives and jobs are threatened by forces beyond their control.

The term is useful in many ways, in many countries. At a recent lecture in Italy, when the leader of the largest federation of Italian unions was peppered with questions from the audience about the Italian government's impending pension reform, he switched the topic instead to the pressures of globalization. As one of our colleagues observed: "He wanted to talk about globalization, because he didn't know what to say about Italy's domestic problems."

For academic policy makers, foundation executives, and researchers, terms such as globalization have a natural allure, offering new mysteries to be unraveled and new ways of packaging or organizing research. In 1993, the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation inaugurated a joint project on globalization, and the Mellon Foundation initiated a program on cross-regional issues. Globalization has been taken up by many institutions -- not least among them the Social Science Research Council. The council's president, Kenneth Prewitt, has argued that its traditional support for area studies -- the field that develops knowledge about specific countries and regions -- must be built on general theoretical frameworks that highlight global trends, such as rising levels of ethnic conflict.

It is true that much may be gained from analyzing global trends. The nations of the world have been growing more interdependent, and the interest that globalization inspires offers opportunities to examine that interdependence more closely. However, there are also dangers implicit in this focus on global trends. Paradoxically, even as it draws attention to the importance of developments around the world, such a focus threatens to undermine America's knowledge about other nations, by diminishing attention to the cultural, historical, and political context of trends in particular regions.

The paradox partly stems from the tendency of many people who are concerned about globalization to assume that international forces are responsible for a growing range of domestic problems. The economist Paul Krugman, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, observed in an article in the International Herald Tribune last year that there is "an odd sort of agreement between the left and the right to pretend that exotic global forces are at work even when the real action is prosaically domestic." Many governments, for example, are inclined to blame rising levels of unemployment on global pressures, even when the difficulties are rooted in structural problems of their domestic economies.

In addition, the allure of globalization has grown just as area-studies programs in many universities have come under pressure from a number of directions. The end of the Cold War precipitated cutbacks in government support for many programs devoted to the study of what was once the Communist bloc and to the parts of the third world that were caught up in it. At the same time, the rise of new academic paradigms that tend to devalue culturally specific knowledge in such disciplines as political science and sociology -- once bastions of area studies -- has offered tempting ways of theorizing about other nations with little need for scholars to develop specific knowledge of regions and countries. For example, claims that rational-choice analysis (which uses econometric models and game theory to study how people make decisions) can explain the behavior of Japanese politicians and bureaucrats without much reference to Japanese culture have ignited a significant debate in political science.

These developments are widening the gap between the social sciences and the humanities. Robert Bates, president of the comparative-politics section of the American Political Science Association, recently observed in the section's newsletter that many political scientists "see area specialists as having defected from the social sciences into the camp of the humanities" by virtue of "their commitment to the study of history, languages, and culture, as well as their engagement with interpretivist approaches to scholarship."

Even in the humanities, however, some universities are considering closing down Russian-language departments in favor of broader "modern literature" programs. In such instances, a focus on globalization seems to offer a way to limit support for area studies, while preserving the appearance of teaching international studies.

Thus, in one of the great ironies of current American scholarship, programs that support our reservoir of knowledge about other countries are being threatened just as Americans have become intensely aware of how closely their own fate is tied to events abroad. Even the Central Intelligence Agency is complaining that it cannot find recruits with an adequate knowledge of other languages or regions of the world.

No wonder that several journals and newsletters in political science have featured debates in recent months about the future of area studies. In essence, the debates are about whether area studies is useful, and, if so, how studies of specific regions or countries should be pursued.

Unfortunately, too often the debate is marked by pervasive ambiguities about the nature of area studies and the alternative forms that internationally oriented social science might take. The concept of area studies has three quite distinctive connotations among scholars. First, it is sometimes used to refer to a detailed description of a nation or region that does not explicitly seek to generalize beyond the specific case.

Second, the term can refer to studies that build on a relatively deep and context-rich knowledge of a specific society or region to develop propositions of more general applicability. The French sociologist Michel Crozier, for instance, used a detailed examination of the ways in which French organizations work to amend Max Weber's classic theory of how bureaucracies operate.

Third, the term can mean interdisciplinary teaching or research by clusters of scholars grouped together in a program focused on a particular region of the world. In this sense, the term refers to the many centers found on American campuses that focus on the study of Latin America, Africa, Europe, or other parts of the world.

The value of area studies to the social sciences depends heavily on which sense of the term one is using.

In our view, even area studies in the first sense has value. Those scholars most committed to the development of "portable truths" must still rely on area-specific information if they are to produce accurate generalizations. The powerful theories of the sociologist Charles Tilly about the development of the state, for instance, draw on the work of many historians, and the sweeping arguments of Donald L. Horowitz, a professor of law at Duke University, about the causes of ethnic conflict build on anthropological work done in many individual cultures.

In political science, sociology, and economics, however, many scholars challenged this type of area studies during the 1950s and 1960s, arguing that research has to be oriented toward generalizations applicable across many societies. As a result, it is area studies in the second sense of the term -- meaning work oriented toward producing general propositions -- that predominates in most social-science fields today. To scholarship in this vein, we owe some of the most fruitful propositions ever to emerge from the social sciences and much of our understanding of nations other than the United States. In recent decades, for example, such work has significantly enhanced our understanding of the conditions necessary for a successful transition from other forms of government to democracy.

Yet much of the debate about area studies today proceeds as if the research of scholars in area studies still focused only on detailed descriptions of individual nations or regions. In the social sciences, the contention that area studies must use knowledge about particular regions to make more broadly applicable generalizations won out 20 years ago. To invoke it again seems little more than a misleading rhetorical exercise. The research of most area specialists today already aims at cross-national generalizations, on such diverse topics as the conditions that precipitate peasant rebellions and the circumstances that encourage women to join the labor force.

The value of area studies in the third sense of the term -- interdisciplinary programs that bring specialists on a particular region of the world together -- is a different issue, because it speaks to the fruitfulness of alternative ways of organizing teaching, research, and intellectual exchange. Because discipline-based departments already exist, the issue here is whether it is useful to provide support for area-studies programs as well. As their critics point out, area centers have financial and intellectual costs. Their central purpose is to enhance interdisciplinary exchange among scholars interested in a specific region of the world, and to the degree that they succeed, the intensity of interchange within individual departments may be diminished.

A number of considerations, however, convince us of the continuing value of area centers. First, much of the most influential work in the social sciences long has been generated by scholars informed by precisely the kind of interdisciplinary exchange that area centers facilitate. For example, the sociologist Barrington Moore's great 1966 book, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, was based on work that he did at the Russian Research Center at Harvard University. Similarly, the political scientist Benedict R. Anderson's inspiring 1983 work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, was written while he was at Cornell University's Southeast Asia Program.

Second, given the strong hold that disciplines already exercise within institutions, the presence of area centers would seem to be a small, yet much-needed, incursion on their control over the organization of knowledge and teaching. Third, the foreign visitors whom area centers attract not only provide students and faculty members with insights about other parts of the world, but also bring American scholars into direct contact with the diverse research agendas and approaches to research being developed elsewhere in the world. It was partly through such contacts, for example, that new approaches used by Latin American scholars to study development -- and the way that third-world countries depend on more-advanced nations -- became influential in the United States.

Some scholars suggest that international studies should concentrate more heavily on comparisons, not just among nations, but among regions. Cross-regional studies are clearly valuable, and we have too few of them. However, that is not a coincidence. Apart from large-scale statistical studies -- which are appropriate for analyzing only such problems as the determinants of economic growth or the bases for demographic changes -- cross-regional comparisons are inordinately expensive and difficult to do with accuracy. Where accurate observations depend on a deep contextual knowledge of the nations at hand, even acquisition of the requisite language skills can be a daunting task. We should encourage the development of cross-regional inquiry, but not press it on everyone interested in international studies.

Moreover, because resources for research are scarce, we need to weigh carefully which regional comparisons would be most fruitful. If key variables in the analysis cannot readily be measured in aggregate terms, or potential causal relationships are not already well known, comparisons of cases found inside one or two nations may yield more-insightful results than comparisons of many nations. The political scientist Harry Eckstein, of the University of California at Irvine, developed a powerful theory about how authority relations in the family influence forms of democracy, based on an intensive study of Norway. Many fruitful theories about the relationship between politics and economic development have been developed through comparisons within one region, such as Africa or Latin America.

Finally, the fate of area studies is especially consequential for graduate training. While it is important that doctoral students whose work focuses on other areas of the world acquire the theoretical and methodological tools central to their disciplines, it is also important that they secure adequate empirical knowledge of the countries about which they write. Pressures to shorten graduate programs and the scarcity of fellowships already threaten the ability of many students to secure the fundamental knowledge of a region on which their future scholarly work will be based. We are at risk of graduating students who know a great deal about the arcane details of their professors' writings but very little about the parts of the world that feature in their own. Area-studies centers have long provided crucial logistical and intellectual support for graduate students seeking to acquire the international knowledge that they need.

The greatest danger in the current debate over area studies is that, in the name of studying global trends or advancing overarching theories about them, the next generation of internationally oriented social-science researchers will give short shrift to area-based empirical knowledge. Driven by shifts in the incentives that foundations offer and discouraged by tight university budgets, graduate students may find themselves echoing the Italian labor leader who tried to dodge domestic issues: They may turn to globalization because they don't know what to say about the internal complexities of the societies they are studying.

Peter A. Hall is a professor of government at Harvard University. Sidney Tarrow is a professor of government at Cornell University and, this year, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in Stanford, Cal.