Integrating Diverse Views of the Role of Government

A first path to common ground involves simply rejecting the exclusionary practices of various disciplines. When economists theorize that growth is entirely endogenous to a few variables, we can simply object that various political, social, cultural, and technological factors have a major role to play (as many economists themselves appreciate). Likewise when cultural studies specialists imagine that culture is the prime moving force in human history we can suggest that other phenomea also exert important influences, even on culture itself. With such a simple stratagem we can find that different theories can be treated as complements even though their advocates view them as substitutes. While this first effort is invaluable, interdisciplinary analysis is not so simple, especially in human science. Human science theories often reach substantively different conclusions. That is, the logic of the theories, not just those variables assumed to be unimportant, lead to different conclusions. In such cases, we need to ask why these differing conclusions are reached, and then whether relatively minor adjustments to the assumptions of these theories can allow us to achieve common ground (Szostak 2002, 115). This step has for presentational reasons often been combined with the preceding steps: we spent a great deal of effort, for example, integrating different theories of institutional change in chapter 7.