“Dan Drezner”:http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=21330 in _The National Interest_ as an aside to a broader argument about IR and policy relevance.
bq. To borrow from Isaiah Berlin, academic scholars of international relations are rewarded for being hedgehogs—i.e., knowing one big thing. Scholarship is thought to be “interesting” when an academic generates a really big and provocative idea that challenges conventional understandings of big questions about international relations. The incentive structure of the academy also rewards the academic for repeating and rewriting their big idea as often as possible. Are these big ideas right? That’s almost beside the point. As long as their progenitors are alive, ideas never die in international-relations theory (when they do die, someone will eventually dust it off and repackage the idea under their name).
bq. Collectively, the field can operate like this because these big ideas can lead to productive debates about the nature of world politics. The effect on individual academics is less salutary. International-relations theory is by and large a solitary enterprise. Success comes from loudly proclaiming the rightness of one’s own views and tearing down alternative ideas. The best of the best usually leave the grubby work of empirical testing to others.
There’s surely something to this, but I’m not sure that the incentives are aligned quite as unambiguously in favour of hedgehogs as that. If you look, say, at Stephen Walt’s “list”:http://books.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/10/recommended_reading_from_stephen_m_walt of the top ten IR books that every student should read, I would count six of the ten as having been written by foxes (Diamond, Schelling, Scott, Halberstam, Jervis, Gellner), and one of the remaining was by a toad. This list was clearly chosen to suggest (rightly) to IR scholars that there is a lot of good stuff written by people outside their corner of the academy and by complete non-academics. But if one looks at the “TRIP survey”:http://irtheoryandpractice.wm.edu/projects/trip/Final_Trip_Report_2009.pdf of IR academics, five of the top ten look to me like foxes (Fearon, Nye, Huntingdon, Katzenstein and Jervis). So the evidence suggests that both smart hedgehogs and smart foxes can prosper at the top of the field
And there is a second aspect to this. IR is notoriously a magpie discipline. Many, perhaps most of the big ideas of the last couple of decades (functional accounts of institutions, rational choice etc, sociology) have lent heavily on the core arguments of other closely related fields such as economics and sociology. This kind of intellectual borrowing is at least somewhat foxlike behaviour, and it is rewarded well when it’s done astutely. When you can’t be creative (and none of us can all the time), reading across different fields can be an excellent substitute for creativity.