Indiana Jones & the Institutional Review Board: Disciplinary Incentives, Researcher Archetypes & the Pathologies of Knowledge Production

This essay analyzes the institutional management of field-intensive social science research in U.S.-based universities. I argue that administration and mentorship of field-intensive projects at the department and university level encompass well-known perverse incentives, pedagogical pitfalls, risks, and concurrent consequences for knowledge production. I outline three common ideal-typical models: the Indiana Jones model, the legal-securitization model, and the Procrustean design model. Specifically, I elucidate the underlying priorities, the nature of mentorship, the relationship to rules and norms, the approach to ethics, and the systems of administrative power embedded in each. Further, I discuss the consequences that result from the dominance of these three models of scholarship, including the pathologization of particular regions, the sensationalization of particular research topics, and the channeling of knowledge production by external priorities rather than intellectual merit.