Still notable: Reassessing theoretical “exceptions” in Canadian foreign policy literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article revisits our 1993 field analysis of the theoretical condition of Canadian foreign policy (CFP) literature, which was in turn a response to Maureen Molot's 1990 argument that said literature had “been captured by its own preoccupations and ha[d], therefore, remained highly descriptive.” In our analysis, we found the field to be marked by promising yet exceptional and arrested theoretical openings and a lack of cumulation, broadly understood. We are struck today by the degree to which our core assessment still holds. In this article, we return to the arguments advanced in 1993 as the foundation for evaluating some key theoretical developments in the intervening years. We focus on the “critical turn” in CFP, the contributions of feminist scholars, and the rise of mainstream social science or “problem-solving” approaches, which we see as the most explicitly and self-consciously “theorized” approaches within the field. We conclude by looking afresh at the question of cumulation and reflecting on the fluidity of who and what constitutes the field today.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.031 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.064 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".