When The Twain Shall Meet: Middle East Area Studies And The Discipline of Economics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When the Twain Shall Meet: Middle East Area Studies and the Discipline of EconomicsAn examination of the membership rolls and annual conference programs of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), and of the membership and course offerings of Middle East Studies programs around the United States, yields the impression that economics is not of central importance to the study of this region of the world.By the same token, area studies tend to be undervalued and underrepresented in the typical department of economics.Within academia in the United States, then, the potential for a healthy interaction between these two realms has been limited.Social science disciplines in the United States, economics in particular, have shrunk from contact with area studies, in part because the incentive system for recognition and promotion in US academia has come to be defined increasingly by mathematical modeling and specialized technical proficiency.More profoundly, economists across the methodological spectrum hold a positivistic attitude toward their subject matter.They reject the relativism and policy impotence that derives from the fullest blown forms of cultural studies, preferring a pro-active "scientific" orientation toward issues such as economic growth.Proponents of cultural studies, from their side, tend to follow the lead of Edward Said's landmark critique of orientalism.They find economics, from neoclassical to Marxian, overly focused on data, statistical correlations and abstract models that are naïvely culture-blind in their application to regions like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). 1 Outside the United States, there is a vibrant and growing body of work by an expanding pool of MENA economists, most of them from and/or in the region, directed toward real-world issues of political economy.Since 1990, these economic researchers have become increasingly linked to each other in overlapping international networks.Many of them claim to be multilineal and interdisciplinary in theoretical approach.However, here, as in the United States, there is a deep tension between the abstract epistemology of the discipline and the functioning of existing economies within their local and historical particularities.Economic theory of the region is burdened with the legacies of unilineal modernization theory, state-directed development trajectories and, more recently, neoliberal "reform" programs.The latter programs have been based on the ahistorical and culture-neutral assumption that the canonized western "free-market" model is the universally correct key to growth and development.This paper examines the nature and direction of the relationship between economics and Middle East studies in the United States and in the region, the means by which research output is disseminated, the methods of shaping its production, and the contested boundaries of both theory and method in defining the growing "body of knowledge" so produced.The essay concludes by considering whether the tension between these competing intellectual traditions might be harnessed creatively to generate a new dialectic for understanding societies in this part of the world.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".