When a layperson asks scholars and theorists of international relations “What do you do?” the answer is more likely to puzzle than to enlighten. The idea that there are big pictures to describe, generalizations to establish, and essential characteristics to discover, explain, and debate eludes those who are more likely to see the field as one involving expertise on the latest world crisis. Even media people, when telephoning to ask an academic if they will comment on the new crisis in Bhutan or Tuvalu, are not easily put off by the answer that the “expert” knows nothing more about those places than is already available in a reasonably competent newspaper. An expert in International Relations is supposed to know everything about everywhere in the immediate sense. Theory simply will not do because it does not explain or provide adequate background to a series of events in location a at time b. Few laypeople are interested in questions about relative gains, international norms, the construction and change of identities, prisoner's dilemmas, agent–structure debates, and the like.

However, when the question of change comes into the discussion, everyone has opinions and immediately the conversation between the layperson and the theorist becomes engaged. One conversation might go as follows: