Emergent-cy

One of the neat things to come out of my qualitative research methods class is the idea of emergent or grounded theory.  Now I'm just a novice, but my understanding of the concept is as follows: rather than walking into a situation with a hypothesis to be tested through quantitative data analysis, a qualitative researcher approaches an issue with enough background information to be at least somewhat knowledgeable about it, but no specific theory in mind. 

Instead, the qualitative researcher looks for patterns and processes, notices trends, comes up with a starting theory, and then goes back to collect more data, bouncing back and forth between data collection and theory-crafting until there's nothing more to be learned from the situation, and the researcher has something that does a good job of explaining it.  There's no concern about applicability; as the study progresses the researcher may be able to pull in other work describing similar patterns and behavior, but creating some grand universal theory is less important than one that works for the topic.

Quite different from quantitative work, in other words.  It's slower and meticulous, unconcerned with prediction or prescription.  And perhaps not as attractive to policymakers wanting someone to load some case data into an equation and spit out the odds that Dysfunctionstan is about to explode.

But it made me think about my other course readings, and the names on them - Kupchan, de Mesquita, Svensson, with a few exceptions, the names are all European, Western.  When Morgenthau wrote his realist theory of international relations, the examples he used were from European history, particularly the exciting bits around World War II, or else Western nations' (particularly America) dealings with the rest of the world.  Keohane's book on neorealism isn't much different, and aside from a brief mention of China's warring states period, is based on European history and European theorists. 

And of course this makes a lot of sense, it's going to be a lot more important for a political scientist to study the history and politics of nearby nations, and the West designed and dominates the current world.  And you could argue that a monarchy is a monarchy, a dictator a dictator, whether they're in Paris or Mogadishu or Beijing or Kabul.

But I can't help but think of Marxism, which was devised by a German, then picked up and applied in Russia, Cambodia, China, and too many other places.  And in all cases, the result was an appalling body count and a coercive totalitarian state unlike the happy little dictatorship Marx envisioned.  This is probably a bad example, as Marx couldn't even predict what would happen in his own country, but it reminds me of America's recent difficulties spreading democracy, or the confusion of early Western visitors to Japan who mistook the shogun for an emperor and the emperor for a pope.

In short, I want to see fewer attempts to apply venerable political theories born in the West to any given political development, and more scholars from the rest of the world walking into their studies with an open mind and seeing what they come up with.  If the results turn out identical to those aforementioned Western theories, fantastic, let's give Morgenthau and the others another award.  And if the results are different, we may learn something we didn't know, have a better way at looking at the world, and could even open further research to compare and contrast the new theories with the old ones.

If nothing else, we'd get more diversity on the syllabus.