Rudra Sil
Rudra Sil is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), where he is also the SAS Director of the Huntsman Program in International Studies & Business. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and has been teaching at Penn since 1996. His research and teaching interests encompass comparative politics, Russian/post-communist studies, Asian studies, the politics of labor, international development, international relations theory, qualitative methodology, and the philosophy of the social sciences. He is author, coauthor or coeditor of seven books. His two monographs are Managing ‘Modernity’: Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia (University of Michigan Press, 2002) and Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010), coauthored with Peter Katzenstein. The latter book was honored as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in 2011. His coedited anthologies include The Politics of Labor in a Global Age (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Comparative Area Studies: Methodological Rationales and Cross-Regional Applicatons (Oxford University Press, 2018). Prof. Sil is also author of three dozen articles and book chapters. His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals, including Perspectives on Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Journal of Industrial Relations, Studies in Comparative International Development, Economy and Society, Europe-Asia Studies, and Post-Soviet Affairs. He also serves on the editorial boards of two journals, Comparative Political Studies and Russian Politics, and is an elected board member of the Committee on Concepts and Methods of the International Political Science Association (2016-19). His latest article on labor – coauthored with former Penn Ph.D. student, Dr. Allison Evans and published in Comparative Political Studies – was awarded the 2019 Dorothy Day Award for Outstanding Labor Scholarship. Prof.Sil is also the winner of the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching at Penn's School of Arts & Sciences.
Favorite quote -- Albert Hirschman: "I am always more interested in widening the area of the POSSIBLE, of what MAY happen, rather than in prediction, on the basis of statistical reasoning, of what WILL actually happen."
Address: Dept of Political Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6215
USA
Favorite quote -- Albert Hirschman: "I am always more interested in widening the area of the POSSIBLE, of what MAY happen, rather than in prediction, on the basis of statistical reasoning, of what WILL actually happen."
Address: Dept of Political Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6215
USA
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BOOKS by Rudra Sil
PRAISE:
"This is the future of political science. Sil and Katzenstein convincingly demonstrate that drawing on an eclectic mix of causal mechanisms provides stronger explanations, more policy-relevant scholarship, and closer connections to other disciplines." —Andrew Bennett, Georgetown University
“For international relations scholars, methodologists, and social scientists more broadly, this is a treasure trove of bold and lucid arguments. The question: How to overcome compartmentalization in international relations scholarship? The strategy: incorporate ideas and analytic tools from seemingly incommensurable research traditions. The reward: a richer interpretive and explanatory understanding of today’s world.” —David Collier and Ron E. Hassner, University of California, Berkeley
“An exceptional book that should be read by every serious student of world politics. For researchers already combining elements from different approaches with neither roadmap nor rationale, it fills a long-standing lacuna. Even those who disagree with such a research strategy will benefit greatly from engaging with its thoughtful arguments and impressive range of examples.” —Colin Elman, Maxwell School of Syracuse University
"A giant step forward for those of us who span the boundaries between theory and practice. The singular contribution of this important volume is to show how “analytical eclecticism,” as Sil and Katzenstein call it, can be systematized and does not need to rely upon individual intuition or shared folk tales. It will deservedly have an enormous impact on the study of world politics." —John Gerard Ruggie, Harvard University and United Nations
"For two decades, the field of international relations has been a prisoner of the misconceived notion that good scholarship falls neatly into incompatible paradigms. Sil and Katzenstein cogently document the value of eclectic work that borrows from more than one paradigm but remains analytically rigorous. Our conceptual jail has no locks, and if we refuse to exit, we have only ourselves to blame." —Robert O. Keohane, Princeton University
PRAISE:
"Rudra Sil's Managing "Modernity" is a tour de force. This powerful, detailed, and nuanced analysis of the process of institution building in Russia and Japan ... is a superb example of the power of careful historical comparative analysis for exploring large and important questions, without losing sight of the subtleties of the particular cases he examines."
---Sven Steinmo, University of Colorado & European University Institute
"In this analytic masterpiece, Rudra Sil provides a sophisticated analysis of how elites in these two states [Russia and Japan] attempted to "manage modernity" and came out with very different results… The analysis demonstrates Sil's competence in both Japanese and Russian area studies … It is rare that one book makes contributions to so many different and usually unrelated disciplines and fields.” --- Aron Tannenbaum, book review in Perspectives on Politics (June 2003).
"In Managing 'Modernity,' Sil attempts nothing less than a thorough rethinking of ... the transition from agrarian to industrial society in light both of new historical evidence and of contemporary social theory. Thus, Sil's comparison of Japanese and Russian labor organization takes into account the entire historical period from feudalism, to the emergence of state-led industrialization, to the development of an urbanized, 'modern' society in each case. Sil's book forces us to look in a new way at old questions raised by classic social theorists such as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. . . . none will fail to be engaged, provoked, and inspired by his analysis."
---Stephen E. Hanson, Harvard University and College of William & Mary
"Located at the intersection of sociology, history, and organizational analysis, this study provides a sophisticated analysis of the institutions of work in two key 'late industrializing' nations. Sil's stylized interpretation of the historical experiences of particular actors and regions is designed to generate middle-range hypotheses that may be used in searching for explanations for the paths non-Western late industrializers take."
--- John Bendix, editor of Reinhard Bendix 's Unsettled Affinities.
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BOOKS - Edited Volumes by Rudra Sil
The remainder of the volume is divided into two parts. The first part of the volume considers - from different vantage points - the epistemological, methodological and practical issues underlying CAS and cross-regional comparative research. While acknowledging the challenges and risks involved, the authors emphasize the distinctive gains from extending one's field of vision beyond one’s primary area of expertise. The second part of the volume presents studies that demonstrate how creatively designed contextualized comparisons across two or more regions can produce novel insights into research questions ranging from protests and rebellions to anti-corruption campaigns, resource booms, and the organization of production. A final chapter recasts the significance of CAS in light of current methodological debates over the role and utility of qualitative research, suggesting that contextualized comparison across regions can partly compensate for some of the blind spots in the most common forms of qualitative and mixed-method research. As a whole, the volume demonstrates that the pursuit of area expertise and the search for social scientific knowledge need not be a zero-sum game as long as we make a conscious effort to connect scholarly debates taking place within separate area studies communities to each other and to theoretical debates unfolding in social science disciplines.
PRAISE:
"Candland and Sil's edited collection is not simply a timely contribution to understanding how, and to what extent, labour institutions are being transformed by globalisation and political reforms. It also provides desperately needed research into both late-industrializing (Mexico, India, Brazil...) and post-socialist economies (China, Russia... Central Europe), and thus makes another small step to rebalancing scholarship away from the advanced capitalist world; and it also demonstrates how outcomes for labour institutions are not determined by top-down, outside-in processes, but instead result form the dialectical interplay between competing social forces and their interaction with existing social structures, norms and institutional arrangements." --- Stuart Hodkinson (book review in Political Studies).
PRAISE:
“This is a timely book. It has long been an open secret that the wave of new institutionalist analyses have begun to founder on the problem of how to explain change. Stuck in a language of constraint, institutionalism often looks on silently as actors redesign the rules that are intended to constrain them. Galvan, Sil and their collaborators present here an extremely innovative solution to this problem in the form of "syncretism". Emphasizing creative agency and focusing on processes of institutional recomposition in a broad array of both developing and developed country contexts, this volume makes great strides toward the development of an alternative, constructivist, and open-ended form of institutional analysis. Highly recommended for anyone interested in problems of development and change.”
--Gary Herrigel, Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago
“Dennis Galvan and Rudra Sil have assembled an exceptionally fine volume. Reconfiguring Institutions Across Time and Space is thoughtful, well-written and down-right interesting. Their focus on 'Institutional Syncretism' makes a significant advance in our understandings of institutional change, just as each of the substantive chapters gives us remarkably deep analyses of particular countries undergoing institutional transformation. I highly recommend this book.”
--Sven Steinmo, European University Institute (EUI)
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PRAISE:
"The book has a high degree of coherence and makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of European communist systems and successor regimes." --- Richard Sakwa (book review in The Russian Review).
ARTICLES & CHAPTERS by Rudra Sil