Paul Secunda has a post entitled To Have a Research Agenda, or Not to Have a Research Agenda: That is the Question at PrawfsBlawg. Here’s a taste:
[R]esearch agendas should not be foisted upon any faculty and to do so was not only harmful to creative scholarship, but was actually counter to what we should be striving for as legal scholars.
For one thing, such agendas needlessly make the process of research and writing unnecessarily boring. After all, who wants to be tied down and creatively suffocated by having to write about the same issues time again and for years on end? Not me. This is not to say that I don’t identify myself as a labor and employment law specialist, but if I had to write about employment discrimination disparate impact theory from five different angles (with apologies to Charlie Sullivan), I might do myself harm.
It seems to me that research agendas can be either broad or narrow, static or evolving, focused or eclectic. But young scholars should not fool themselves–if you write in many different fields, from different perspectives, at an early career stage, you are reducing the chance that you will establish an identity and build networks.