The GMU Program is a label that I used for a line of research that links theory and practice in the appropriate manner. It comes from the work that is done by a mix of Austrians, quasi-Austrians and fellow travellers at the George Mason University, though it is also proceeding at other places, so it is a bit unfair to call it GMU.
Thanks to the Wall Street Journal, Peter Boettke has become the most visible GMU person right now, and this has triggered some angst in other parts of the Austrian empire. I don’t want to puruse that (nothing new there), instead I want to compare the GMU program with another line of work described and promoted by a really brilliant and ambitious scholar named Jeffrey C Alexander.
The bottom line of the story is that brilliance does not aways bring home the bacon, and I suspect that Alexander’s legacy will practically die with him because for all his brilliance and hard work he backed the wrong theoretical horses. This is the argument that leads to that conclusion and I will just sketch a summary here. BTW that link comes up on the first page if you google Jeffrey C Alexander, but it never gets any hits! Maybe today!
Alexander (1947 – ) is a sociologist, currently at Yale. He wanted to get the methodology right, so he started with a study of the philosophy of science, positivism, neo-positivism, Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn etc. Then he proceeded to pull together the threads of theory, based on Weber, Durkheim and Parsons to generate a robust theoretical plaftorm for applied research.
His theoretical program ended up as the “strong program in cultural studies“, drawing off almost every strand of though in the social sciences except the Austrians and CR!
His program aims to sponsor research studies that cast light on the way the social world works. Theoretical work, empirical studies and praxis should proceed in concert. In his view the most developed research programs sponsored by neofunctionalism could be found in the areas of social change, cultural studies, economic sociology, politics, mass communication, feminism and the sociology of the professions. Unfortunately in his survey he did not expand on the work in economic sociology and there was no mention of the problems of developing countries; these are two areas where comparison would be interesting with the George Mason research program.
