The Enterprise of Political Science: The Multiple Communities of Political Science

Abstract

Political science is not what the political scientist does. While the political scientist brings to a subject many orientations that create scholarship, what makes such work political science is its being embedded in a framed set of relationships that define disciplinary practice. These relationships involve institutions and networks that I characterize as an enterprise community. This paper explores characteristics of this enterprise community of political science and shows how it integrates with intellectual and geographic communities in the discipline. These ideas are applied to an understanding of the state of research on women and politics, and on the status of women in the discipline.