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 - 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).