OECD Proceedings

Re-inventing the Social Sciences

ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT

FOREWORD

This report presents the views of high level experts and policy makers on the very challenging theme “Re-inventing the Social Sciences”. The report is based on the contributions presented at a workshop held in Lisbon on 8-9 November 2001. The following themes are included:

• Social sciences and social change

• Changing the role of social sciences

• What can public policies do? The Lisbon workshop was the fourth and last in a series of international workshops on the future of the social sciences organised under the auspices of the OECD Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy (CSTP). It was co-organized by the International Office of International Relations for Science and Higher Education of Portugal and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian with the support of the OECD. The first workshop (Ottawa, 6-8 October 1999) focused on the infrastructure requirements of the social sciences. The second (Bruges, 26-28 June 2000) addressed the contribution of the social sciences to knowledge and decision making. The third workshop focused on the role of the social sciences for innovation. The Lisbon workshop addressed more general themes on the challenges associated with the re-invention of the social sciences. In the scope of the discussions that have been undertaken in this last workshop, some participants proposed and supported the Lisbon Declaration included in these proceedings. © OECD 2004.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Part 1: Social sciences and social change Chapter 1. Understanding and coping with change Joao Caraça Chapter 2. Social sciences in society: a new partnership Hans van Ginkel Part 2: Changing the role of social sciences Chapter 3. The changing role of the social sciences – an action-theoretical perspective Hans Joas Chapter 4. Ethology and development of peoples – challenges for social sciences Jean-Eric Aubert Chapter 5. The three meanings of “discipline” Immanuel Wallerstein Chapter 6. Beyond the two cultures – two case studies Jean-Pierre Dupuy Part 3: What can public policies do? Chapter 7. Re-inventing the social sciences – what can public policies do? Enric Banda Chapter 8. What can public policies do? Norman M. Bradburn Chapter 9. What are the conditions of appropriate public policies for social sciences? Ali Kazancigil Chapter 10. Challenges facing social sciences in EU science policy Teresa Patrício

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Part 4: Conclusions Chapter 11. From opening to rethinking the social sciences Luk Van Langenhove Chapter 12. Lisbon Declaration – Social sciences: a new partnership

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Part 1

SOCIAL SCIENCES AND SOCIAL CHANGE

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Chapter 1

UNDERSTANDING AND COPING WITH CHANGE

by

JOÃO CARAÇA Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

Through its programmes the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation seeks to support reflections and endeavours on issues of a global nature and on crucial problems to the collective search of a better future for society. In this context the Foundation created in 1993 the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, with Professor Immanuel Wallerstein as its chair, which produced the report “Open the Social Sciences”, a serious, generous, and provocative book (translated now in more than 20 languages worldwide) aiming at overcoming the existing disciplinary structure constraining the further development of the social sciences. Naturally, the Foundation considered the OECD project of organising a series of international workshops on the future of social sciences as an initiative of great importance, and was eager to host this final session. In fact, the rate of change and the volume of communication in today’s life have no parallel in any period of the history of mankind. The growing development of industries and services based on information technologies and the increasing weight of intangible investments show that the nature of the regulating processes of social activity is being profoundly modified. Science is about understanding and coping with change in the natural world; social science is concerned with change in society. The last 50 years witnessed a growing importance of science and technology to unprecedented levels in human history, and with impacts at all levels of society. We know today that it is not possible to isolate research activities from the social context in which they are conducted; this is reflected in the growing scientific basis of the culture of contemporary societies, as well as by the increasing societal involvement of researchers and their organizations. Knowledge and learning are the central resources and mechanisms of the new nations, communities, and organizations. Thus, science and technology policy will have to be closely integrated into policies encompassing all fields of knowledge, from the cognitive and social sciences to the arts and humanities. Further, implications of the free circulation of knowledge will have to be fully recognized: disciplinary knowledge can only evolve in the context of a strong communicative framework which enables the understanding of meanings and values so that these can bear their true potential. The relations of science with technology, specialised

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crafts, laws and regulations, business management and the fine arts, will need special attention in terms of the diffusion of new learning abilities throughout civil society, leading to the build-up of more adequate competences. Thus, a crucial historical role has to be played by the social sciences in the 21st century. The capacity to articulate relevant policies for knowledge stems from the ability of the social sciences to reinvent and redefine the 19th century framework on which the construction of nation-states was based. Learning is essential for understanding and coping with change in our societies. New collective behaviour, or innovations, are emergent properties of socio-economic structures, in their unfolding through time. Policies are powerful social adaptation mechanisms, revealing an awareness of change, and a capacity for social adjustment to change, leading into learning how to perform under the new conditions. The times of learning will set the pace of novelty and success of our common future.

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Chapter 2

SOCIAL SCIENCES IN SOCIETY: A NEW PARTNERSHIP

by

Hans van Ginkel

United Nations University Tokyo

We live an increasingly complex and interconnected, rapidly changing world. Progress in information and communications technology has made it possible to share news and messages in a split second with counterparts at the other side of the world. Speed, volume and frequency of exchange and interaction, including trade and money-transfers, have grown beyond imagination. Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days” looks like a prehistoric adventure at a time in which one can circle the world in less than a day. Yet in many ways humankind and society have not yet adapted to these conditions of life. We are surprised, not so much that people move for holidays and work, but that they often decide to move and stay: to improve their lives. We do not know how to cope with this phenomenon. Our productivity has grown in many parts of the world and in many sectors enormously. Yet, we have not developed ways to share our knowledge and the fruits of our work more evenly. We live in a world continuously endangered by large-scale abject poverty. We live in a world in which we are so successful increasing productivity that we cannot maintain the idea of full-employment for all. Many strategies are being applied to reduce the labour force: low women participation, shortening the working hours, early retirement schemes – including “golden handshakes”, increased use of health insurance schemes to get rid of the least productive. Yet we have not balanced our views on how to share income, working hours, and time-off. We are not very good in addressing multi-dimensional, complex phenomena. There is, for instance, wide scale concern with regard to the process of ageing. Many are arguing that more flexible migration policies will be necessary in order to bring young workers from foreign countries to replace the retiring workers. Now, it is important to introduce more flexible migration policies, but not for this reason. Because when the life expectancy is increasing, the retirement age must also be reconsidered. Policies focusing on making multiple careers possible, as well as to make stepwise the present generations of workers responsible for their own future pensions, will become indispensable. Complex solutions for complex problems are demanded.

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We have developed an impressive array of ways to spend our free time during the holidays, as well as the ever longer week-ends and the time-off during the working week. We have reduced our working hours, but assume in our education systems that our children still make the same hours in school and homework like a century ago. Yet, we are still surprised that many citizens are not well prepared for the knowledge-based, globalizing society in which we already live. Another remark I would like to make here, is to point at the high average level of education we have achieved in many countries. We have many well-educated people with enough time, who want to contribute to society. This matches with new approaches in governance, in which we try to make a productive use of involvement of both experts on the issues at stake, as well as of the population at large. The design of such processes of public involvement needs extreme care. Practice shows examples of failures, because of badly designed processes, wrong expectations developed and inadequate information. There is a major disjuncture between Social Sciences and Society. This, indeed, is a time for a new partnership: for Social Sciences in Society, not just Social Sciences on Society! As in a good partnership the partners must respect each other, because they need each other. This meeting, small as it is, brings together social scientists, with OECD, UNESCO, EU, Portuguese Ministry of Science and Technology, ISSC, the UNU and a leading foundation: Gulbenkian. This should be the start of a blossoming, towards a partnership to benefit all humankind.

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Part 2

CHANGING THE ROLE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

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Chapter 3

THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AN ACTION-THEORETHICAL PERSPECTIVE

by

Hans Joas Freie Universität Berlin

In the first part of my contribution I discussed the well-known report of the Gulbentian Commission. I criticized some aspects of its presentation of the history of the social sciences, particularly the assumption that the social sciences followed the so-called nomothetical model more and more in the course of the 20th century. In the second part I developed an alternative reading focussing on the understanding of action in different social-scientific disciplines. From this alternative reading a contemporary agenda for the social sciences can be developed - both on the institutional and on the substantive level. On the institutional level I followed more or less Donald Levine's proposals as developed in his "Visions of the Sociological Tradition". My points on the substantive level were:

1. An adequate conceptualization and understanding of what human action is constitutes one of the crucial axes of interdisciplinary work in the social sciences. This has nothing to do with an activist or voluntarist bias; the emphasis on action is not a counterposition to an emphasis on structural forces and restrictions. All social theories contain, implicitly or explicitly, assumptions both about human action and about social order. I am not arguing in favor of one against the other, but in favor of an adequate conception of action that can serve as a foundation for the elaboration of adequate conceptions of sociality, types of social order, structure or system, and dynamics of social change. Not "society," but "social action" and the emerging types of social order are the object of sociology. 2. For one of the points on the Gulbenkian agenda, namely the critique of Cartesian dichotomies and of biological reductionism or genetic determinism, this elaboration of an adequate anthropological conception of action is absolutely crucial. The notion of "action" as such does not fall under the Cartesian distinction; it is always already an integration of "physical" and "mental" dimensions. The notion of action, if we take it seriously as the basic category of the social sciences, makes genetic determinism unthinkable. Among the pragmatists of the 19th century and the social phenomenologists and philosophical anthropologists of mid-20th century and among contemporary thinkers we already find a rich material for such an approach, but it is clearly time to rearticulate this position in view of current advancements of biological knowledge.

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3. Whereas all rationalistic approaches either exclude the normative dimension from the scientific domain proper or severely restrict the meaning of an originally normative term (as it happens to "rationality" in "rational action") I think that the social sciences have to integrate the normative dimension into their own area again. Otherwise they leave to a revitalized, but empirically uninformed moral philosophy and political theory what has originally been one of the main impulses behind the social science project. This reinterpretation of the normative dimension corresponds to the item "universalism and particularism" on the Gulbenkian agenda. I do think that a whole set of important empirical questions, particularly concerning the history of the emergence and dissemination of the human rights/human dignity value complex come up if we translate these normative questions into an empirical research agenda about fundamental traits of contemporary societies. 4. During the last twenty years the social sciences have partly been replaced by an interdisciplinary (or non-disciplinary) complex called "cultural studies." Moreover, these cultural studies have become the domain of a specific intellectual orientation, i.e. a sort of radical and comprehensive "social constructionism." I think it is time for a sort of counter-offensive from the side of the social sciences. In this counter-offensive the "constructionist" and "discursive" aspect should not be denied; it is rather one of the strengths of the social-scientific tradition that it has always itself contributed to an analysis of such social construction, but it had not done this in the relativist and irrationalist way in which poststructuralist cultural studies tend to do it. For such a counter-offensive we need the integration of the discursive dimension into the social-scientific analysis of macro-social processes. 5. Against the evolutionism of the modernization-theoretical paradigm and against the latent or manifest teleological character of Marxism we need a more contingency-oriented understanding of social change. War and violence and the totalitarianism of the 20th century should not be seen as mere deviations from an otherwise almost linear and positive process of on-going modernization. Violence mostly leads into cycles of revenge; wars constitute new forms of orientation and social order; and totalitarianism is not a thing of the past, but a constant threat. 6. For the first time we experience successful modernization today outside of the world of the Judeo-Christian tradition. While the notion of "globalization" is in my eyes not very helpful in illuminating these processes, the serious study of "multiple modernities," the new perspectives on Western modernization in its internal plurality and of new forms of a post-Hobbesian order as in European "unification" in the light of this multiplicity of modernities is.

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Chapter 4

ETHOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT OF PEOPLES - CHALLENGES FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES

by

Jean-Eric Aubert

World Bank Giving a hand in development processes of peoples: this seems to be one of the most, if not the most, important tasks of social sciences. By “peoples”, we understand nations, as well as civilizations at a supra national level, and regions at the infra national level. By “development” we mean evolution in a broader sense, going beyond simple “quantitative” measures of development. Our considerations apply to the “developed” world as well as the “developing” one. For helping efficiently in peoples’ development processes, there is a need, in my view, to deal with their ethos -- understood in the sense of mind and behaviour patterns. In this perspective, challenges for social sciences are multiple. We will first discuss the need for going beyond economics, which has demonstrated obvious limits as the major discipline so far used for helping societies to develop. We will then discuss the approach of socio-cultures which give to peoples their identities and forge their ethos. We will give some indications on the nature of the work to be made to better understand this ethos and make them evolve. We will conclude by evoking the development of “peoples’ ethology” as a new discipline of social science. The recent tragic events of world-wide and long lasting significance have, among other things, made clear the urgency of such a task. Going beyond economics

Narrow economic approaches to development processes have clearly demonstrated their limits. This is blatant when looking around the world and notably at the Southern part of it. It has resisted to narrow minded transplantations of economic recipes from the North, due to the in-adaptation of institutions and mindsets. Even worse, civilizations that used to have a certain equilibrium have lost it and have been de-structured with dramatic consequences.

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The Northern part of the world so called “in transition”, from the planning economy regime to the market economy one, has also suffered from simplistic economical approaches, such as “big-bang” policies indistinctly applied and leading too painful and long lasting de-structuring. Lately it has been recognized that it would have been useful helping in cultural change and building institutional capabilities prior to embarking in quick and brutal transitions. Economics appears also short to understand the bases of development of Asian countries in the “Eastern” part of the world. Their rapid growth has been clearly rooted in deep socio-cultural features, as well as the financial crisis experienced some years ago by the Newly Industrialized Economies or the durable stagnation in which Japan seems to be stuck. The “West” itself cannot approach its long term development in pure economics terms. Economic growth (currently stopped in any event) appears no longer sustainable, neither environmentally – with the exhausting of natural resources, nor socially – with increasing inequalities. The same judgment applies to the world as a whole. In short, economics, as a “science” and an ideology, has shown obvious limits --- both on efficiency and ethics grounds. This does not mean that we have to ignore what economics has taught us, and throw the baby with the bath water. All the more that the principles laid out by both the economic experience and theory (the fundamental role of the “market”, the need for “good governance”, etc.) remain perfectly valid, and, in fact, they are the only way to get societies growing, innovating, etc. But we must go beyond economics and integrate it in a broader understanding of development processes, drawing upon other social and human sciences, such as cultural anthropology, history, psychology, etc. This first challenge should not be minimized, as economics remains the dominant force forging the “world-thoughts” of the public at large as well as of policy makers. Moreover, most of economists do not consider their discipline as part of the “social sciences” and generally hold “social scientists” in poor esteem, criticizing -- not without reasons -- their lack of methodological rigor and operational capability. This is creating strong resistance to any efforts of interdisciplinary integration and cross fertilization. Dealing with socio-cultures

Thus “culture matters”1, as it is increasingly felt by informed (and less informed) communities. The recognition of the cultural dimension in development processes has been flawed in the past by fears of racial connotations, and now it might well be flawed by the debate around the “clash of civilizations”. Overcoming this type of issues constitutes another important challenge for social sciences.

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1 In the words of the title of a book publishing the proceedings of an important international conference held in 1999 at Harvard (edited by Harrison and Huntington).

Culture can be defined in scientific terms as “shared patterns of acquired behaviour”2. This neutral understanding of the notion of “culture” should help in its analysis and use. Then the following questions arise: how are cultures shaped and how does this shaping influence peoples’ development processes? Taking stock of works and observations made in diverse disciplines, we are far from being short for responding to such questions. Basic to culture shaping are the anthropological “fundamentals”: the place of the Individual and the State into societies, underlying community and family structures, religious beliefs and even linguistics backgrounds. Such anthropological factors form systems in the sense they form coherent wholes which determine -- or express -- specific modes of insertion into the “world” (by world, I mean the “reality” or the “environment”). Anthropological systems of major civilizations are outlined in Table 1. They explain differentiated “aptitudes” to economic development as well as differentiated “forms” taken by this development. As convincingly demonstrated by a recent study3 looking back to the Neolithic times, the formation of these differentiated aptitudes and forms owes much to the climatic and geo-morphological conditions prevailing then in different parts of the world and has nothing to do with racial differences, although there are obvious indirect coincidences. The conditions of meeting or confrontation with the “West” have added other elements in development processes and made them more complex or problematic, affecting civilizations in their inner identity. Anthropological backgrounds differ among sub-civilizations and differentiated effects can be observed too at this level. This holds for Western sub-civilizations which present important contrasts between them. This is reflected in the nature and functioning of economies, institutions and in many walks of life (see Table 2). At the nation level, historical experiences, which have forged the representations that countries make of themselves, play a crucial role in capabilities of adaptation and modalities of reaction to a changing environment. Combining effects of historical experiences with those brought about by anthropological characters, it becomes possible to cast some light on typical development trajectories (see Table 3). At the sub-national level (regions, localities), the conditions experienced in the industrialization process play a capital role, while historical and political modalities of insertion of regions into the nation provide them with framework conditions to adapting to changing environments. Dealing with cultures means accepting the fact that in general, change will be slow since the underlying anthropological and related factors cannot change overnight. For this reason, it is in the inner nature of behaviours of peoples to be persisting and recurrent. This being said, cultures are not immutable. They evolve. Learning processes take place and blending with other cultures operates. All the more at a time of accelerated globalization. 2 Marvin Donald, the Origin of Human Mind

153 Jarrid Diamond, Germs, Guns and Steel, The Fate of Human Societies

Moreover certain cultural traits which have constituted an obstacle to development may not do so with the evolution of technology. This point is illustrated by Africa which is much less handicapped today than it has been in the past centuries by its oral culture, thanks to the telecommunications revolution. Examples abound of positive impact on governance, trade, etc. brought about by the use of mobile phones and other telecommunications means spreading throughout the continent. Dealing with socio-cultures means recognizing their inner specificities, with their strengths and their weaknesses, and designing policies in consequence. In other words it is essential to search for customized approaches in place of projecting the so called “best practices”. One has to build on the true specificities of a civilization, nation, region, etc. to make possible the development process. To pursue on the example of Africa, it is only in working through local communities – and traditional power structures -- that success stories take shape, be in health care, trade, agriculture, etc. as observed today by international development communities4. Working on mindsets and behaviours

It is vital to develop our understanding of the ways by which peoples’ mentalities and related behaviours are shaped and evolve, as illustrated by the following examples. In the case of Islam, it is of utmost importance to understand the mental mechanisms by which individuals, with a religion which inculcates deeply, since the early childhood, the feeling of being part of a broader community – the Umma, do not acquire a sense of self identity (in a western sense) with all political, economical and other consequences one can imagine. Understanding this can lead to efficient educational programs, which have already proved in some countries to introduce broad mental change in only one generation, without undermining the most valuable elements of the said religion. In a similar vein, taking the case of Japan, it would be useful for better coping with current difficulties to understand the mental mechanisms and related behaviours which prevent Japanese people to make most needed reforms. Such mechanisms lie in a culture of the “otherness”, making difficult innovative individual initiatives at all levels, from those to be taken at the basic local communities up to those that the country as a whole could take in the broader world community. The building of the European Union would benefit greatly from work on ethos of the very complex mosaic of peoples which constitute it or are going to join it. This would help in designing appropriate policies, treaties, etc. The conditions of blending or coexistence of all different cultures down to the level of regions will determine the future of the Union.

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4 See for instance the case studies accumulated by the World Bank (Africa Region) on the diffusion of indigenous knowledge and related change (WB web site).

In order to progress in the mental and behavioural analysis of societies, we need to depict -- much more than it has been done so far -- motivations for change. First at the level of individuals and institutions: those motivations relate to the nature and intensity of pressures put on them (monetary ones in particular), as well as to the gratifications which they feel either in staying in a given situation or in changing. Then at community or country-wide level, we need to analyze mechanisms by which behavioural and mind change is propagated, for instance what mechanisms facilitate confidence building processes or on the contrary confidence deteriorating (panic generating) ones. Depending on the nature of change involved, the time factor will not be the same. This requires developing appropriate monitoring capabilities. New methods of observation and new statistics should be established. Based on such monitoring, policies should be adjusted, making them better tuned to concrete situations they have to deal with. New methods of intervention should also be developed, which would facilitate a self analysis process by concerned organizations and communities. This self analysis implies that they see – literally – their behaviours to become more conscious about them and the underlying cultural factors5. In this perspective there is a need to expand the use of videos and new media and to organize structured discussions around related shows. This ethnographic approach demonstrates increasingly its utility at firm and organizational level. It needs to be expanded and used at a country-wide level, with necessary ethics for avoiding undue mind manipulations. Dealing with mindsets and behaviours requires also the development of a serious and creative research effort of categorization and formalization. Again we are not short of ideas for this. Ethnology and related disciplines point towards a number of epistemological avenues to be further explored: the coherence of mind sets, the pervasiveness of related world-thoughts, the stability and recurrence of behaviours, the formation of “meaning” in cultures, etc. 6 Appropriate mathematics such as those derived from the fractal methodology – particularly well adapted to the modelling of morphological pervasiveness and replication, can help in formalizing and representing phenomena at work7. Psychology, of course, is another important discipline to be enrolled. It would be useful for instance to draw upon those studies – now broadly applied worldwide for making tests of personality --, which characterize individuals according to three basic criteria: the capability to

5 A kind of psycho-analytical process at collective level. The French anthropologist and historian E. Todd speaks of cultures as the “unconscious” part of societies. 6 In line with concepts put forward by the Functionalist school (Mauss, Malinovski, etc). To my knowledge, in recent times, the most remarkable work of categorization of cultural pervasiveness and coherence is due to the late Japanese anthropologist Magoroh Maruyama, who has proposed four basic “mindscapes” to be found in various proportions in all cultures (according to him). Maruyama had published a considerable number of articles illustrating his ideas in different fields (management, economy, urban planning, etc). See notably issues of the review Technological Forecasting and Social Change published in the eighties.

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7Fractal theory due to the French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, extensively used now in computer-based modelling.

explore newness, the search for gratification and the avoidance of pain8. Ways in which these characters are combined are likely to be influenced by the cultures in which individuals are growing and evolving. We can also count on the help of neurosciences. Understanding how the brain works, and notably the influence of emotions on intellectual and behavioural patterns, would help considerably. It is today no more a matter of science fiction, and the use of new techniques such as those of brain imaging opens mind-boggling perspectives. Peoples’ ethology as a new social science

We can give the name of “peoples’ ethology” to this new social science dealing with peoples’ mind and behaviour. Ethos in English means behavioural structures when applied to animals. It means mental patterns or moral guiding principles when applied to humans. Ethology is the knowledge of ethos, although it used to be principally employed for animal-related study. The term “ethologie” in French applies to the study of both animal and human ethos. Challenges to be faced by the development of such a new discipline are numerous. First, as is clear from the above-said, there is a need to integrate several established disciplines, dispersed generally not only in the social science and humanities departments – such as cultural anthropology, ethnology, history, political science, economics… but also throughout the whole academic spectrum – psychology, neuro-sciences, media and communications sciences, and mathematics. Possibly, established academic groups or departments dealing with ethology (if understood in a broad sense) can offer institutional platforms for localizing such work. The best way would be to start with some experimental programmes, supported by appropriate funding from governments or foundations. Such experimental approach would help in defining the corpus of disciplines to be integrated and the ways they should be integrated in structured training and research programs. A first task of this new discipline will be to train agents of change. These can be consultants called upon to intervene in different contexts and organizations (e.g. international institutions). These can also be people employed in government agencies, local authorities, media, etc. as well as in business enterprises, which become more and more concerned by the cultural specificities of countries in which they operate and invest. Training programs would concretize in delivering diplomas in human ethology specialized in culture analysis and intervention. Orientations of research programs have been given above, from most applied issues to most theoretical ones. An important question will be to build the bridge between micro-ethology and macro-ethology. How mindset and behavioural features observed at the level of individuals replicate and propagate at the level of broader communities, from the most close to individuals up to the most distant ones. It might well be that this micro-macro bridge will appear more easy

188 An analytical framework proposed by R. Klovinger (University of Chicago).

to formalize and observe than in economics, due to the fractal nature of peoples’ ethos. With a view to stimulating and federating research in peoples’ ethology an international review could be launched. In parallel there is a need to increase current capabilities of monitoring behavioural and mind changes, both at national, international and infra national level. In fact there are already considerable amounts of data collected in all sorts of domains. In first instance, the point might not well be to make new surveys and statistics, but to assemble most relevant ones in order to arrive to coherent perspectives. Comparative data gathering and analysis is essential. International organizations such as the OECD or the World Bank – which are already depository of considerable information (statistics, case studies, etc) – have a key role to play for this. Benchmarking data bases, such as those made by the Global Economic Forum, give useful indications too, providing they are not used to define models to follow systematically or to organize simplistic “beauty contests” – which in such matters prove to be counter-productive. Let’s conclude in repeating that, at the dawn of this new century, the demand seems to be growing rapidly for some form of “peoples’ ethology”. The sooner we built it, the better it is.

Table 1. Anthropological systems of selected civilizations Civilization Linguistics

bases Family structures

State positioning

Religious background

Insertion in reality

Primitive Oral Integrated in society

Non state society

Animist Participation

West Alphabetic Nuclear Controlled by society

Monotheist (transcendental)

Distancing

East Ideogram-based

Communitarian Dominating society

Ethics (immanent)

Immersion

Other major civilizations can be considered as variants or combinations of these forms.

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Table 2. Selected Western Cultures: Elements of Anthropological and Economical Systems

* (Non) equalitarian relations between children, (Non) authoritarian relations between parents and children, concepts due to Emmanuel Todd who has systematically (and fruitfully) exploited them in studies of political and economical systems

Societal/Ethol. context

Relation to reality

Religious background

Family structures*

Language characteristics

Anglo-Saxon

Exposed individualism

Empirical/ Concrete

Protestantism Non Equal/Non Authorit,

Highly diversified

Latin/ Mediter.

Protected individualism

Theoretical/ Abstracting

Catholicism E/NA Moderately diversified

Rhine/ German

Cooperative individualism

Systematic Concrete/abstract

Mixed NE/A (Semi) Agglutinating

Table 3. Country development trajectories in recent decades -- Selected scenarios and underlying factors Economy Industry Finance Education Science AS Market-

oriented HT/Resource based Dynamic NTBF

Stock exchange, Shareholders’ governance

Attitude or., Wealth-based selectivity

High productivity & diversity

L State- dominated

HT public goods /Traditional industry

Mixed financing bank/stock exchange

Skills or., “Democratic” selectivity

Moderate productivitymath/phy/ch

G Social-Market Economy

Basic/infrastructure industries SME/GE integration

Bank/industry system

Dual system, moderate selectivity

Med-high product. Engineering

Success stories: US, Finland, Ireland, Singapore

• Successful blending of cultures • Clear adoption of market economy rules • Technological inclination • Island positioning • Identity affirmation (de-colonisation)

Recovery courses: UK, India

• Triggering events (financial troubles) • Opening up

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• Ordered government withdrawing • Individualistic societies • Exploitation of long lasting advantages • Self confidence process

Compromise trends: China, France

• Long lasting presence of the State • Agricultural tradition • Structuring thought • Transcendent religion • Mix of individualist/communitarian societies • Connection-based economies

Erratic processes: Russia, Brazil

• Societies and mindsets in need for structuring • Authoritarian power tradition • Tradition of borrowing foreign institutions • Economic autarchy past • Strong decentralization forces

Outlier positions: Israel, Denmark

• “Essentialist” mindsets • “Associationist” societies • Feeling of territory shrinking

Pathological drives: Yugoslavia, Algeria, Rwanda

• Loss of references • Ethnic tensions • Long lasting disconnections from realities • Authoritarian powers • De-colonization not well assumed

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Chapter 5

THE THREE MEANINGS OF "DISCIPLINE"9

by

Immanuel Wallerstein Binghamton University

The term discipline, as used in university parlance, actually describes three quite separate phenomena. It is meant primarily to describe an intellectual circumscription of knowledge, a set of topics and methods designed to discuss a delimited range of phenomena of the real world. Since the nineteenth century, it has been customary to denote the totality of the realms of know-ledge, or at least of "pure" knowledge, by some such term as "arts and sciences" and then to subdivide this totality into two or three superdisciplines. The two most common are the "natural sciences" and the "humanities" (although these names vary from language zone to language zone). Quite frequently, a third superdiscipline is distinguished from these two and called the "social sciences." The "social sciences" in turn are usually divided into a series of specific "disciplines" - such as economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology. The list varies according to the country, the moment in time, and the person making the list. Furthermore, whether a particular discipline is located in one or another superdiscipline is often a matter of debate. Is "history" part of the "social sciences" or part of the "humanities"? Is "psychology" part of the "social sciences" or part of the "natural sciences"? The "disciplines" are however not merely an intellectual construct. They are also an "organizational" container. Since the nineteenth century, the modern university has, in most places, been divided not only into faculties (superdisciplines) but into departments (disciplines). From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, there came to be considerable convergence in the organizational structuring of universities throughout the world. Considerable, however, does not at all mean total. I would estimate that there is a 75% overlap in the names of departments. I would also estimate that the variation diminished between 1850 and 1950 and that, since circa 1950, this variation has been increasing. There is no solid data available on these statistical estimates. Departments are containers with resources and power. They have therefore sought to define ever more clearly the intellectual content of the "discipline" they contain. One way to do this has been 9 Remarks at the OECD Workshop, "Re-inventing the social sciences,", Lisbon, Nov. 8-9, 2001. Further development of many of the themes adumbrated here briefly can be found in I. Waller-stein et al., Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996 (which text has been translated into some 24 languages).

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for prominent persons in the field to write methodological treatises defining what is "inside" and what is "outside" the scope of the discipline. A second way to do this is for the faculty at particular universities to define the "curriculum" of their courses. It is important to note that departments have professors assigned to them, students who "major in" or "read" their disciplines, and receive degrees on which the "discipline" is often noted (especially so-called graduate degrees). Generally speaking, if one wishes to be a professor in a given department, one is expected to have earned a degree bearing the name of the discipline the department is supposed to represent. Furthermore, scholarly journals tend to have the name of the "discipline" somewhere in their title. And professors are expected to publish and students to read primarily in journals bearing the names of their discipline. Quite frequently, intellectual concerns lead scholars and students to stray from their discipline into topics associated with (assigned to?) other disciplines. This is often called being "interdisciplinary" or some kindred term. This practice is frowned upon by some but also in recent years encouraged by others. It is again important to note that intellectual "interdisciplinari-ty" is far more frequent than organizational "interdisciplinarity" and that the lower frequency of the latter serves as a material constraint on the former. So "disciplines" are both intellectual constructs and organizational containers. They are also cultural communities. Because the intellectual training tends to favour certain kinds of research, certain kinds of methods, and certain shared reading and because time is inherently limited, over time there arise "cultural" differences between practitioners of different disciplines which regularly are visible within any organizational situation that brings together persons from different disciplines. A preference for close hewing to empirical data or a preference for modeling or a preference for large-scale generalizations often marks one out as belonging to (and emotionally responding to) a particular cultural community, and to making the assertion that a particular set of practices is the one appropriate to practitioners of a particular intellectual construct or members of a particular organizational container. Two obvious things follow from this. The first is that while disciplines - as intellectual constructs, or as organizational containers, or as cultural communities - can be described, the descriptions apply only to the majority of persons within them, never to the totality of persons within them. The second is that since the concept of discipline in fact applies to three different phenomena, it is possible that the presumed correlation between the three phenomena is less than perfect, and even more important, that the trend of the relation could be divergent over time. The latter is, I believe, the most important thing that has been happening since the 1960s. The intellectual distinctions of the disciplines have in many ways gotten blurred (as compared to what they were before), whereas the organizational containers have been relatively resistant to redefinition. As for the cultural communities, they are for the most part subconscious and they are feeling strongly the impact of the divergence between the intellectual constructs and the organizational containers.

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There is a further problem in this divergence. If one looks at how the social sciences were constructed intellectually in the nineteenth century (and therefore into what organizational con-tainers the disciplines were put), one sees two things. First of all, the "construction" was overwhelmingly done by scholars located in only five countries: Great Britain, France, the Germanies, Italy, and the United States. Secondly, one of the basic features of the construction, at least up to the 1950s, was that it divided the social world into two arenas. The first was the "modern" world - industrialized, secularized (or rational), urbanized, that is, civilized. The second was the "rest" of the world - traditional, less "rational," rural, that is, "primitive" or at best "civilized" in another (less modern) way. Each of these two arenas had appropriate "disciplines" to deal with it. The basic logic of this polarization of the objectives of social science knowledge was that it reflected the geopolitical reality of "European" domination of the world arena. As the geo-political reality changed after 1945 (decolonization, the rise of the "Third World"), the patterns that had been institutionalized in the university systems both came under attack and were slowly (or not so slowly) revised from within. Today, the geographical scope of the disciplines as laid out in the pre-1945 era has crumbled almost completely. But with it, the logic of the intellectual constructs has been enormously weakened and the scope of the organizational contained has been stretched. The cultural communities are no longer so clearly etched, and new competing ones have come to exist. The story of the social sciences during the last fifty years is one of increasing complexity, increasing confusion, increasing self-doubt. And at this point we must intrude one further vari-able. Since 1945, there is another major change in the context within which the disciplines must operate. There has been an incredible expansion of the world university system - numbers of universities, professors, students, books published, journals in which to publish, national and international conferences. This expansion has not only been intensive but also extensive geo-graphically. Such a rapid expansion of so large a multiplier added inevitably to the complexity, the confusion, and yes, the self-doubt.

In addition, however, it was expensive. The amount of money - in absolute terms, in relative terms - expended on higher education (instruction, research, publication) has grown hyperbolic-ally. Inevitably, therefore, public authorities have become concerned with the costs, and are thinking of ways to limit them. In such a situation, the complexity, confusion, and self-doubt of the practitioners have not made the public authorities feel sympathy for the idea that decisions about the systems of knowledge should best be left in the hands of the scholars. They have shown an increasing tendency to intrude their control of financial resources and use it in order to change the systems of knowledge, to "rationalize" them. Of course, for public authorities, ratio-nalization often means primarily cost control, which may not be useful in terms of restructuring the systems of knowledge to enable us to understand social reality more thoroughly, more effec-tively, more usefully. One way to define the present situation in higher education worldwide is to see it as a race in the twenty-first century between the administrators and the scholars as to who will have the larger say in the intellectual restructuring of the systems of knowledge that were constructed essentially in the nineteenth century.

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A second way to define the present situation is to ask whether the universities (and their "departments") will continue to be the principal organizational container of the systems of knowledge. It was not always so, and it may not continue to be so. The expansion of the universities (particularly the ever larger percentage of the age cohorts who attend the universities) has had the effect of making their modes of operation closer to that of secondary schools than they were previously. And this has the effect of leading some, perhaps many, of the best and most important scholars to leave the university systems - going to institutes of advanced study, to research structures (autonomous, governmental, and intergovernmental), to niches within megacorporations, and even back to independent scholarship (subsidized by inherited wealth, free lance work, or patrons). Such a shift may weaken enormously the organizational containers and increase the freedom to make new intellectual constructs (or remake old ones), or even make the cultural communities the most important emotional affiliation. Were we to move more swiftly and more radically in this direction, it is quite unsure what would be the consequences. But it would certainly be unlikely to leave the present structures largely in place.

We are, it seems to me quite clear, at a bifurcation point in our existing systems of knowledge. The present structures almost certainly cannot hold. But where we are heading is most uncertain.

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Chapter 6

BEYOND THE TWO CULTURES TWO CASE STUDIES

by

Jean-Pierre Dupuy CREA, Ecole Polytechnique

Stanford University

"A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized accomplishment.

And whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, ... may as well stay away from science".

Max Weber, Science as vocation

My contribution to our debates purports to be a personal illustration of several points made by Professor Wallerstein in his UNESCO report, "Social Sciences in the Twenty-first Century". I am especially thinking of his cogent observations on the epistemological divide between science and philosophy and the fate of the social sciences, "as a domain of knowledge 'in-between' the humanities and the natural sciences and profoundly split between the 'two cultures'." Professor Wallerstein explains that "the social sciences have … been affected by the fact that the trimodal division of knowledge into the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences has come under attack. There have been two main new knowledge movements involved, and neither of them originated from within the social sciences. One is what has come to be called "complexity studies" (originating in the natural sciences) and the other "cultural studies" (originating in the humanities). In reality, starting from quite different standpoints, both of these movements have taken as their target of attack the same object, the dominant mode of natural science since the seventeenth century, that is, that form of science which is that based on Newtonian mechanics." Professor Wallerstein is not especially optimistic as regards the possibility of "overcoming the two cultures." "The major problem these two movements have at present", he explains, is "the fact that each movement has concentrated on pursuing the legitimacy of its critique against the prevailing, and previously little questioned, orthodoxy. Neither complexity studies nor cultural studies has spent much time on trying to see if and how it could come to terms with the other, and work out together a

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genuinely new epistemology, one that is neither nomothetic nor idiographic, neither universalist nor particularist, neither determinist nor relativist." "The relative lack of contact between the two movements is not only an organizational problem", Professor Wallerstein concludes, "it also reflects an intellectual difference. Complexity studies still wishes to be science. Cultural studies still wishes to be humanistic. Neither has yet totally abandoned the distinction between science and philosophy. There is a long way to go before the two convergent intellectual trends might actually meet and establish a common language." I fully share Professor Wallerstein's reasoned pessimism, and I think I am in a position to do it. Indeed, I want to describe what it is like to be divided between two worlds. The division in my case is geographical, since I commute between California and France; but it is also cultural, since even at Stanford I find myself straddling the humanities, dominated by French poststructuralism, and philosophy and social science, dominated by American neopositivism. More fundamentally, I find myself divided, indeed torn, between a number of conflicting allegiances:

- between my background in logic, mathematics and physics, and my identity as a philosopher committed to the human sciences;

- between my need to think in terms of formal models and my deeply held conviction that literature is a superior form of knowledge to science;

- between the two ways of doing philosophy today: "Continental" philosophy (one should rather say: phenomenology), profound, rich, meaningful, but too often wilfully obscure, elitist and, at times, dishonest; and "Anglosaxon" philosophy (or rather: analytic), rigorous, egalitarian, democratic, but too often shallow and tedious. This division reproduces or reflects the chasm between the so-called two cultures: Phenomenology points toward literature, analytic philosophy toward science;

- and, finally, between the narrow professionalism of American academics - who devote themselves to knowing everything about 'fields' so restricted that they border on nothingness (the "hidebound savants"); and the distinguished dilettantism of many French intellectuals, who tend to know almost nothing about everything (the "foggy froggies", or "cultured ignorami"). Though I am torn, I refuse to be forced to choose between the Scylla of French intellectualism and the Charybdis of American academicism. From the unusual and rather uncomfortable vantage point I occupy on an American university campus, I observe the following oddity: on the one hand, students of literature are initiated into the mysteries of French-style 'deconstruction', taught to celebrate the death of the human subject and to repeat ad nauseam that man is not his own master and that such awareness as he may have of his own affairs is severely limited by a sort of tyranny of the unconscious; while at the same time their fellow students in the economic, political, and cognitive sciences learn to systematically reduce social institutions to voluntary agreements between fully conscious and free individuals. It is fortunate for the stability of the system that these students practically never talk to each other - no more often, in fact, than do their professors. Opposing the rationalist individualism of the American human and social sciences, including cognitive science, to the deconstruction of metaphysical humanism that animates the humanities in France and the so-called 'cultural studies' in America runs

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the risk of combining the worst aspects of French and American thought. Even if it is institutionally embedded in the heart of the American academy – and the latter may be unique in this respect -, such a distinction is not tenable, either philosophically or scientifically. I cannot aim at establishing this in the present context10 and I will content myself with presenting two case studies. 1. Tangled Logics: Rationality or Irrationality? In his book Gödel, Escher, and Bach, Douglas Hofstadter has introduced a very interesting notion: that of "tangled hierarchy". A relevant illustration is Escher's celebrated "Drawing Hands".

Drawing Hands - M.C.Escher

It turns out that I have encountered the logical form of tangled hierarchy three times in the course of my intellectual career. The problem is that the semantic associations of the concept differ radically from one incarnation to the next. In the first case, tangled hierarchy characterizes the autonomy of a self that is "always already" constituted; in the second, it is invoked to assert the impossibility of an autonomous 10 As far as the role of cognitive science is concerned, see my article The Mechanization of the Mind. On the Origins of Cognitive Science, Princeton University Press, 2000

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self; in the third, it is the form of the morphogenetic process by which an autonomous totality constitutes itself. The three incarnations in question are the concept of "hierarchy" in the work of the sociologist and anthropologist Louis Dumont; the "logic of the supplement" in the writings of Derrida; and the concept of self-organizing system in biology and cognitive science. On the stage we therefore have the three actors described by Professor Wallerstein: social science, the humanities, and natural science (in the form of the science of the living and of the artefact). Louis Dumont is one of France's major proponents of sociological holism. Holism has it that the social totality is always logically and ontologically prior to its constitutive parts. Dumont characterizes the relation between a whole and an element of that whole as being a hierarchical relation. But he uses the word "hierarchy" in a special sense which must not be confused with its meaning in the military, for instance. It is not a linear relation of mere superiority, but instead a relation of "hierarchical opposition" between the encompassing (the whole) and the encompassed (the element). Dumont shows that in holistic societies, like India, there is always a reversal of the hierarchy within the hierarchy. Take the brahmin and the king, for instance: the brahmin represents the sacred, the encompassing level, and is hierarchically superior to the king. But in certain domaines to which the social hierarchy assigns an inferior rank, the hierarchy is reversed and the king stands above the brahmin. As Dumont puts it, the brahmin is above the king because it is only at inferior levels that the king is above the brahmin. Exactly the same abstract form and the same terms "reversal of a hierarchical opposition" serve to describe the "logic of the supplement" in Derrida. That is an amazing fact because, if in Dumont this form characterizes the preeminence of a social totality always already there (in keeping with the structuralist creed), for Deconstruction it bears witness to the self-destruction of every totality, it seals the impossibility of conceiving or achieving any autonomous totality at all. This opposition has important political implications. Take the case of the traditional hierarchical relation between man and woman. For Dumont, the reversal of this hierarchy is part and parcel of the hierarchical relation, it is the sign of the totality, the unified whole constituted by the couple. As he puts it, "the mother of the family (an Indian family, for example), inferior though she may be made by her sex in some respects nonetheless dominates the relationships within the family". For the Derridians, on the other hand, reversal of the hierarchy is a major deconstructionist task. From Dumont's viewpoint, it is equality which is the major threat to hierarchy; for the Derridians, as Jonathan Culler puts it, "it does not suffice to deny a hierarchical relation" in the name of equality, "it does little good simply to claim equality ... for woman against man... Affirmations of equality will not disrupt the hierarchy. Only if it includes an inversion or reversal does a deconstruction have a chance of dislocating the hierarchical structure". What Derrida calls the "logic of the supplement" is obviously the logic of tangled hierarchy. Let us recall. Every time that a term supposed to belong to the rational Logos appears in a philosophical or theoretical text as self-contained, self-sufficient, present to itself (for example: Nature, Speech, Origin, Meaning, etc.), a vicious logic is set in motion, Derrida sets out to show, which undermines this pretention to autonomy. A secondary term (for example: Culture, Writing, Supplement, Form, etc.), which in principle should be no more than a simple derivation, complication,

29

manifestation or negation of the primary term, turns out to be indispensable to the constitution of the latter. The origin wishes itself to be full and pure, yet it would lose its consistency without the supplement that derives from it. The logic of the supplement can then be represented as assuming the following general form, where we recognize a tangled hierarchy:

Origin Supplementwriting, sign, logos, speech, difference,…presence,…

Derivation, manifestation, negation

Now I would like to introduce rapidly the third term of my trilogy: the concept of a self-organizing (autopoietic, autonomous) system. It was forged by biologists belonging to the cybernetic tradition, in their attempt to characterize what it is for a system to be endowed with autonomy. Dissatisfied by the dominant metaphor in molecular biology, the metaphor of the genetic program, they asserted that it made it impossible to conceive the autonomy of the living organism. Now, it is well known - and molecular biologists were the first to recognize this - that if one takes the metaphor of the genetic program seriously, one runs immediately into a strange paradox: one has to admit that this program is a self-programming program, or rather, a program requiring the outputs of its execution in order to be executed: the operators which perform the transcription and the translation of DNA into proteins are themselves proteins. They are coded within the DNA in such a way that in order for the translation to be possible it has "always already" to have taken place. This paradox can be depicted as follows:

Programme Products

and one recognizes here the very form that Derrida calls the logic of the supplement.

30

Now, the amazing fact is the following: it is this very same tangled logic which has

ake someone who came across what I have just covered. She might be shocked and

he idea might dawn on her that what this figure tells us is that order contains its

ut let us not dream. That person does not exist and cannot exist in the present state

. Social Opacity: Rationality or Irrationality?

he confrontation takes place here between two entirely disjoint sets of theories. On the right hand side, we have one of the constitutive debates of the French "Sciences de

been taken by the theoreticians of autonomous systems as the distinctive characteristic of what they call autonomy. On the other hand, the same logic is the Derridians' major weapon for the deconstruction of any pretension to autonomy or self-sufficiency. And for holistic sociology, it characterizes an always already constituted totality. As long as academic compartmentalization keeps these groups in total ignorance of one another, the oppositions of interpretations can continue for a long time to come. Nobody will ever care, and all will be content. Tthink that a conceptual clarification was in order. Being shocked is what often triggers a thinking process that may lead to a discovery. She might pause and take a good look at this other graphic representation of a tangled hierarchy:

I 1

2

II 2 1

Tpossible reversal, negation, violation, destruction. The verb "contains" here should be construed in its twofold meaning: to contain is to have within oneself, but also to keep in check. Suppose one could show that the mechanisms of the constitution of order are the same as those of its decomposition. Our hypothetical scholar would then perhaps apprehend the symmetrical blindspots in the visions of Dumont and Derrida: Dumont sees only order, Derrida sees only the crisis that lurks beneath, with both of them missing the key point that order contains the crisis that undermines it. Bof the university system. She would have to come, say, from cognitive science or theoretical biology, since it was there that the notion of tangled hierarchy appeared. She would then be a rationalist, and remain blind to the real deconstructive power of the notion. On the other hand, an encounter between her and these outposts of irrationalist thinking that are structuralism and its deconstruction would be very unlikely. Everyone will continue to have a clear conscience, everyone will keep doing their jobs professionally, safely protected within the closed walls of their respective fields... You can see that I am even more pessimistic than Professor Wallerstein. 2 T

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l'homme": the rupture introduced by the structuralist school in the Durkheimian tradition on the issue of reciprocity. At the core of this debate, we find the obscure but "very French" notion of "social hypocrisy" or "collective self-deception". On the left, we have the logical concept of "Common Knowledge", a joint production of the Philosophy of Mind (David K.Lewis), Pragmatics (S. Schiffer), Game Theory (R. Aumann), Cognitive Science and Epistemic Logic (J.Barwise) - a full-blown "Anglo-Saxon" set of "fields". It is most unlikely that the representatives of the two sides have ever met, or ever will. Two separate worlds. And however... I'll start out with the concept of Common Knowledge (henceforth CK), and the role it

lays in Game Theory and Rational Choice Theory.

Theory in which the following olds true. A desirable state of affairs may obtain if everyone knows a certain harmful

hink of those rules that are formulated in rigid fashion even though veryone knows not only that they can be transgressed, but that efficiency demands

rs' rationality. ore precisely, the fact itself need not be harmful, but CK of it would be. Such is the

has in a sense to mimic irrationality - more recisely, the kind of irrationality that is best for everyone (since rationality is bad for

eason, refutes itself. There is no valid account of rationality here: the sheer existence of it in the world remains a "paradox" (Cf. "The

p There seems to be a number of situations in Gamehfact, even if everyone knows that everyone knows it, even if everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows it, etc. etc., but not if that harmful fact is CK, i.e. this iteration is pushed to infinity. Short of CK, everything is ok, the harmful fact can be studiously overlooked by everybody even though it is perfectly well known to everybody. Example: Tethat they be transgressed, as long as nothing is said about it. Think of the airport check-in deadline set by airlines. Yet it is hard to see how the company could make a public announcement to the effect that the rule was made to be broken. In Game Theory, it often happens that the harmful fact is the playeMcase in the celebrated Prisoner's Dilemma (PD), or more precisely the finitely repeated PD. If there is CK that all the players are rational, then social cooperation is impossible, even though cooperation is to everyone's benefit. It can be shown however that cooperation becomes possible, and can emerge spontaneously, as long as one falls short of CK - i.e. in a situation in which there is mutual knowledge of some given order that all players are rational, but not CK (i.e. everyone is rational, everyone knows that, everyone knows that everyone knows that, etc., up to a certain finite number of such recursive steps). Therefore, in order to be rational onepeveryone: that's the gist of PD). The rational agents, one might say, "disguise" themselves as irrational: they make believe they are crazy, thus forcing the other player to play accordingly (to everyone's benefit). However this way of speaking is not rigorous, since what appeared to be irrational (cooperating in PD) turns out to be rational, once the global analysis has been completed. There is no real ruse here, no trick, no deception: just the lack of transparency, or lack of reflexivity, or opacity, implied by falling short of CK. Irrationality, being a ruse of Rir

32

Paradox of Irrationality" by D. Davidson). This powerlessness to explicate irrationality is the hallmark of any rationalistic thinking. Let us now move to the three-tier debate that was triggered by the celebrated work of

arcel Mauss, Essay on the Gift, published in 1924. Mauss observes that in a good

e of this "obligation"? Mauss, having once posed the question, dds, as though he were merely repeating the same question in another form: "What

auss" - a xt which many take to be the founding chart of French structuralism - reproaches

nces Lévi-trauss's "objectivist error": "Even if reciprocity is the objective truth of the discrete

ligation to make a return or what is received. Taken together in the theoretical schema of reciprocity, they lead

tes the logic of this contradiction with the logic of lying to oneself, or elf-deception. A paradoxical notion indeed, but which is made even more

Mmany archaic societies, "contracts are fulfilled and exchanges of goods are made by means of gifts. In theory such gifts are voluntary but in fact they are given and repaid under obligation". He insists on the prestations' having a "voluntary character, so to speak, apparently free and without cost, and yet constrained and interested... They are endowed nearly always with the form of a present, of a gift generously offered even when in the gesture which accompanies the transaction there is only a fiction, formalism and social deception, and when there is, at bottom, obligation and economic interest". What then is the naturaforce is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return?" The native informant will soon convince him that "in the things exchanged... there is a certain power which forces them to circulate, to be given away and repaid". In 1950, Lévi-Strauss, in his famous "Introduction to the work of Marcel MteMauss with allowing himself to be "mystified by the native". Mauss's error is to have stayed at the level of a phenomenological apprehension that breaks exchange down into its different moments, creating the need for an operator of integration to reconstruct the whole - which is where the "soul of things" comes in, providentially filling this very role. But that's going at the problem from the wrong end, asserts Lévi-Strauss, because "Exchange is not a complex edifice, constructed from the obligations to give, to receive and to make return with the help of an emotional and mystical cement. It is a synthesis immediately given to, and by, symbolic thought..." Third tier: in 1972, Bourdieu, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice, denouSacts which ordinary experience knows in discrete form and calls gift exchanges", Bourdieu affirms, "it is not the whole truth of a practice which could not exist if it were consciously perceived in accordance with the model." Let us consider in effect the obligation to receive and the obfto a contradiction. For he who returns without delay the very object that is given to him has in fact refused to receive. The exchange of gifts can therefore only function as an exchange of gifts on condition that it disimulates the reciprocity that is its objective truth. All the space, or rather the time, of practice is needed to undo this contradiction. Bourdieu equasparadoxical by the context in which it is stated. A subject capable of deceiving itself already constitutes a philosophical challenge, but here, the entity capable of that feat is not even a subject, since it is the "collective" (French thinkers love to make

33

adjectives into substantives, and that's very telling). The discourse of the French Sciences of Man is crammed with predicates of agency, but there is no agency: "strategies", yes, but no strategists. We are left with this notion of "social self-deception", which points towards an extreme form of irrationality, but in an altogether obscure way. What Bourdieu has in mind becomes much more clear, though, when he takes the xample of a Kabyle worker who proclaimed the convertibility of the meal

ret is that there is no secret, it is an open or public cret, etc. All these oxymorons point to the same structure, the very structure that the

the case that our two sides talk about the same object after all. But they give f it two radically different interpretations. The one dissolves irrationality, the other

re be no misunderstanding, though. I am not advocating a form of vague cumenism, or soft consensus, or even positive collaboration between the two worlds.

etraditionally given at the end of the job into money, with which he demanded to be paid instead: the worker was only "betraying the best-kept and worst-kept secret: the one that is in everyone's keeping". A very fine formula indeed: the secse"Anglo-Saxon" side characterizes as some proposition being mutual knowledge, but not CK. It may beoaccounts for it irrationally. But the theory of the triangle need not be triangular. Suppose we had no other choice than between these two camps. We would then face a dilemma. Either we renounce the vocabulary of deception, lie, ruse, lure, etc.; or we stick to it but there is no agency to which it can be applied. There may be a way out, however: what if mutual deception and self-deception were not the product of a single mind's strategies, but the result of a collective enterprise - a form of negative collaboration? It is not the object of this communication to solve the problem at hand. My aim is much more modest: it is to stress that it is very unlikely that the problem will be solved as long as the confrontation between the two worlds does not take place. Let theeQuite the opposite. My point is this: only if each world accepts to be challenged by the other will something new occur. But in the current organization of our university systems this is very unlikely to happen.

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Part 3

WHAT CAN PUBLIC POLICIES DO?

35

Chapter 7 REINVENTING THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: WHAT CAN PUBLIC POLICIES

DO?

by

Enric Banda European Science Foundation

Let me start by thanking the organisers for inviting me to talk in this important event. Let me also point to the risk taken by them in inviting a non-social scientist. I developed my scientific career as a scientist in the field of physics, more specifically geophysics. Then, some 8 years ago I turned into science management, science policy and some politics. With that background, how can I contribute to today's topic, given its scope and complexity? Fortunately, some issues seem to be invariant under different disciplines. I will draw on this in two respects. First, as a researcher, I tried to understand the dynamics of the earth. Difficult as it may seem, I am sure it is not as difficult as understanding the dynamics of social processes and human behaviour, not to mention the dynamics of policies that may affect them all. But my 'professional sensitivity' to dynamic aspects of the matters being under consideration turns my attention to the crucial, in my view, observation on the static nature of the policies (as the cause of their failure). More precisely, to the issue of how to make them more dynamic, at each stage of the policy process (design, implementation, and evaluation). Second, having been close to “public policies” even if it is in the narrow sector of science and innovation, I guess you will allow me to “bend the title”. As you may expect, this will be done along my professional bias to 'concretise' the topic. I will do that with regard to three different aspects. Research priority setting. This is a long lasting debate. I will not dwell on this, rather I will expose a few statements on the dominating approaches -- as they are being formulated by different schools of thinking. I claim no authorship and I admit I take the extreme cases. • Scientists are the only ones that can set up the priorities - this might be called a

'pan-scientism' approach • Industry knows the needs and, accordingly, should set the priorities -- which

might be called 'pan-marketism' approach • Policy-makers, science policy practitioners and managers must prioritise societal

needs and define target goals - I would be willing to call this approach 'interactive'

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All three statements/approaches are normative (although not to the same extent), as they call for some underlying values -- such as science itself; or market as the best mechanism to achieve a socially desired 'state of the things'; or believe in a best practise-based or learning-process-oriented rationality. Whatever position you might like to take in predicting, or arguing for an 'optimal' allocation of budget resources, what is happening today is that governments label research spending items in their budget plans. Why? Based on what? As a science policy practitioner, I am concerned about this issue. I sympathise with the third approach which would, I believe, allow to integrate different stages of policy process and to sort out 'what works' for further implementation. But, taking into account the existing institutional arrangements and constraints, that is, without calling for a revolution, how should the priorities be set up? Here is where, I believe, social sciences should help. That is, from a non-social scientist's point of view, it seems reasonable to expect that social sciences should be able to not only describe but to explain group and individual behaviour. Equipped with the advanced theories and techniques, are social scientists prepared to face the challenge of determining “societal needs and goals? Increasing economic well-being and quality-of-life, does not provide a good enough answer. In other words, why do governments prioritise other topics which I, personally, do not perceive as “societal needs”? To me, the driving force is strictly of economic nature, and results from the prevailing influence of business- or industry-like groups of interest that are lobbying for particular social choices. Whether or not such a choice leads to only a 'local optimum' in the social space (that is, is beneficial for some segments of the society only) or is pareto-efficient (when at least someone is better-off without worsening anyone else's position) may not be a rhetorical question. I wonder if we are, as taxpayers, happy with that, and how can the social sciences be instrumental in the face of this problem? However, I am aware that the enormous impact that social sciences can acquire on the social reality is significantly restricted by uncertainty that always surrounds the conclusions of social research. In particular, by the results of policy analysis confronted with sometimes unpredictable (or adverse) reactions of social actors (although 'behavioural response' factor is often recognised by policy analysts). Public understanding of science. Despite the efforts made, social scientists have still a lot to do in the domain of science and citizens’ relationship and co-operation within the decision-making domain. Learning from each other, including other countries and different groups in society, is a must. However, results of several studies tell us that the general public does not want to take decisions in the place of policy-makers (parliamentarians and governments), rather it wants to be correctly informed. For this reason the role of the media and scientists themselves in 'popularisation' of knowledge is essential.11

11 Philippe Roqueplo quoted in IPTS, No 55-JCR-Seville (June 2001).

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Many of us here today would like to see some progress in this topic. Some countries have spent sizeable amounts of money in it. Yet, we seem to be stuck. I am sure there are policies that can help. But beyond diverting all responsibility to education in schools, could we find other ways to help? Science policy incidence. You will not be surprised if I come up with the subjects such as: genetically modified foods, bovine spongiform encephalopaty, foot and mouth disease and therapeutic cloning. What is there in common in most of these subjects? Recent experience has shown that there has been a damage to trust in science, or should I rather say to the reputation of several sectoral policies, including science policy? The latter would bring the issue of responsibility closer to us - science policy designers and practitioners. Are we in a position to foresee such situations while drafting science policy programs? Could transparency and other remedies that have already been widely invoked be more effective? Again, it would be social science to which I would turn for a help. Perhaps, before asking social scientists "are you ready?" for such a task we should ask ourselves - representatives from both design and implementation/managerial sides of the science policy - "are we ready?", and to what extent, to have science policy processes funded primarily on the social sciences?. Whatever the view would be, the major challenge remains for the social sciences, anyway. I believe it corresponds to the social sciences' vision as to do research, either disciplinary-driven or problem-driven: • towards the appropriate theory, i.e., one that has explanatory power and is

testifiable, and • generating and employing reliable data, conducting robust and policy-relevant

analyses and modelling I told you in the beginning that I would “bend the title” of the session. However, I have, after all stuck to the title of the workshop, reinventing social sciences, to which I may not have contributed, but I have, at least, given you a candid view, and some concrete expectations, from a non-social scientist.

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Chapter 8

WHAT CAN PUBLIC POLICIES DO?

by

Norman M. Bradburn U.S. National Science Foundation

I take this assignment as an opportunity to reflect on the interplay between social science theory and research and the formulation and implementation of public policies. What are can public policies realistically do about producing changes in society that they are intended to accomplish and what can the social sciences contribute to formulation and successful implementation of these policies? These are extremely complex questions, and I can only scratch the surface in the time allotted. Let me start by giving you a bit of my experience with these issues. I am a social psychologist by training and my career has been largely spent as an empirical social scientist involved partly in the evaluation of U.S. governmental social programs during the 1960s and 70s, a period in the U.S. of great experimentation with social policies to solve social problems. I have not, until recently, been involved in policy making, but I am quite familiar with the implementation of many of the most important social policies in the U.S. over the past 4 decades. I want to make two points in this talk. The first is that policies are formulated as essentially static instruments; that is, they assume a set of conditions and change one or two of the parameters of that set. Frequently the perception of the initial set of conditions is faulty due to lack of data or good analysis, and may be dominated by views of a modal case, which might not, in fact, be reflective of the underlying distribution of conditions. Governmental policies are blunt instruments to bring about social change. They almost never consider the dynamics put in motion by those changes. Thus, they inevitably suffer from unintended consequences. These unintended consequences are often large enough to nullify the positive effects of the policies or, even, to produce the opposite effect from that intended. Second, the implementation of governmental policies often falls far short of that envisioned by the designers of the policies either because they are underfunded or, in order to be successfully implemented, they require bureaucratic changes that do not occur or both. In the U.S. at least, the costs of policies are projected through economic models used by budget planners in the administration and in the Congress. These models often do not agree, may severely under- or overestimate the true cost of the programs, and larger budget considerations may affect the actual funding levels for programs. In program evaluation, the first, and, too frequently the only thing we can ascertain, is whether the program ever got implemented at all, and, if it did, how closely did it resemble its original design.

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In order to make these points more vivid, I will give you two brief examples. I start with a small, some might say trivial, policy change implemented in the 1970s after the oil embargo. The problem was an acute shortage of oil, and a number of policies to deal with the situation were implemented quickly. One of them was changing to year-round daylight savings (summer) time in order to save electricity. As you know, the U.S. is a large country spanning 4 time zones. The variance in hours of daylight over the year is also sensitive to how far north one is, with much greater variance for the northern than for the southern parts of the country. In addition, for economic reasons, some areas near the edge of a time zone had opted years before to join the time zone to the west of them, so that they were in effect already on perpetual summer time. Demographic analysis easily showed that the conditions that gave rise to the particular setting of the times had changed–-the time zones were established when the country was largely agricultural–-and that the present geographic distribution of the population and time distribution of work hours made it sensible to adjust the clocks by one hour throughout the year to increase the hours of daylight, on average, when the population was awake and needed them. Positive popular support for the policy was confirmed by public opinion surveys, although it was noted that there was a minority of the population that was adamantly opposed to the policy. While the policy achieved what it was designed to do in the aggregate, several areas of the country were adversely affected by the policy for geographical reasons or, because they had already opted for the policy (but under a different name), the policy in their areas did not have the desired effect. In one of the areas, Southwestern Georgia, the consequence of the new policy was that school children in rural areas, where they had to take a bus to school, had to wait for the bus in the dark during the winter. Parents complained that the children were in danger of being hit by cars in the dark and, a few weeks into the new policy, indeed a child waiting for a bus in the early morning was hit and killed by a car. This event was given great play by the mass media and support for the policy evaporated almost overnight. The policy was repealed the next spring. This example illustrates my point about the bluntness of policy instruments and unintended consequences. While the policy did produce the effect it wanted and, for the vast majority of the population, did increase the useful hours of daylight in the winter, the policy could not, because of geographical reasons, and did not, because of historical reasons, produce the same effect for everyone. For complex reasons related to American politics, those who were adversely affected in this case, although a minority of the population, were able to exercise veto power over the policy. (As an aside, later analysis of data on traffic accidents showed that the very slight increase in deaths in the early morning was off set by a decrease in deaths from traffic accidents in the afternoon when it stayed light longer). My second example is much more important one and one with which social science research has been heavily involved. This is the policy related to racial segregation of public schools in the U.S. Social science research on the effects of racial segregation on individuals had been a potent force in the Supreme Court decision declaring the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional, and led to the dismantling of legally backed segregation of public facilities including schools. The implementation of this decision, which challenged long standing mores, habits and social organization, particularly in the south, was openly resisted and, on occasion, required the use of

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force to implement the policy. School integration has been one of the most contentious issues in the U.S. Social science analysis had indicated that school integration was perhaps the most important instrument for long term change in social relations between the races as well as for improving the economic condition of African-Americans. Even after the end of legal segregation, the historical and economic effects of residential segregation meant that many schools, which had local attendance areas, continued in effect to be de facto segregated. A famous and influential study by the sociologist James Coleman found that educational achievement was as much a consequence of familial conditions as it was of the schools. One of the most important findings was that in classrooms that were racially mixed (and in effect economically mixed) the African-American children did better than comparable children in segregated schools and the white children did not do any worse. This study was interpreted as a call for intervention by the government into the principle of local attendance areas and led in many cities to a court-ordered program of busing children out of their local attendance areas to schools in other areas in order to achieve racial balance and the presumed effects on achievement of racial integration. This policy has proven to be one of the most politically sensitive policies pursued by the U.S. government in the past few decades. It has been attacked and defended using social science analysis and empirical studies of the effects of busing. For the purposes of this discussion, I would like to point out a few features of the issue that illustrate my main points. First, the policy of busing students was a policy that changed one element of a complex system; one that arguably did not follow from the Coleman report. The Coleman Report was based on comparison of classrooms that had been voluntarily integrated as a result of a large set of circumstances, many of which were not measured in his study. To generalize the finding to conditions in which the integration was produced by external policies took a leap of faith and had to be based on social theories coming from more general social science analysis. Second, the policy was static in that it failed to take into account the reaction of parents whose children were subjected to busing (mostly white children being bused into predominately black schools) or whose schools were affected by busing in children from out of the area (predominately black children from inner city areas being bused into predominately white schools in middle class areas of a city). The consequence was a large scale movement of white families from the central cities to the suburbs, a phenomenon that was referred to as “white flight.” Over a decade or so, there was a vast change in the racial composition of urban schools and a greater segregation than before the policy was instituted because the proportion of white children in the cities declined markedly. While Coleman initially supported busing, he quickly saw the unintended consequences of the policy and became one of its leading opponents. The policy was also never fully or thoroughly implemented. For many years, busing was restricted to the schools in one school district, and there was no busing across district lines. Busing is costly and, in many cases, school districts lacked funds to implement the policy unless specifically forced to do so by suits brought by parents who supported busing. After the effects of “white flight” became clear so that it was impossible to achieve integration within a single district, courts began to order busing

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across district lines. This resulted in considerable litigation, but perhaps more importantly required longer bus rides for the children and support for the policy declined among parents of all races. Attention shifted to efforts to improve the schools regardless of their racial composition. Social scientists are now deeply involved in advising school districts and legislators on policies to improve the achievement of children in all schools. As is probably obvious from the examples I have chosen, I approach these issues from the perspective of a social systems theorist and fault applications of social science analysis and research that fail to think through the dynamics of social systems and to pursue research that enables us to model more completely the effects of policy changes. I do not underestimate the difficulty of this task, but it is the direction that I think social sciences must be going. This requires new theories, new tools and new data. The development of economic theory and modeling has improved our understanding of the dynamics of economic systems and the probable effects of economic policies, although we obviously have a long way to go before we understand things fully. I believe that there are promising new techniques, such as stochastic modeling of social interactions, that can lead to better understanding of the dynamics of social systems at both the micro and macro levels. We also have powerful new computational tools that enable us to build more realistic models. The data to support these models, however, are often insufficient to support them. I am less sure how much progress we will be making on that front in the near future. In sum, I see a re-invented social science as more concerned with formal theory building using dynamic models, closely coupled with empirical testing of the theories and requiring larger and better data bases to provide adequate data for testing those theories. Such a future also requires changes in our training of social scientists so that they will have the skills necessary to carry out this program. Whether we are up to the challenge remains to be seen.

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Chapter 9

WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS OF APPROPRIATE PUBLIC POLICIES FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES?

by

Ali Kazancigil

UNESCO, MOST Programme In UNESCO's World Social Science Report 1999, taking stock of the remarkable development of the field during the previous hundred years, Peter Wagner argues that "the twentieth century …. (is) one of the emergence and breakthrough of social science"12. Concerning their performance in the twenty-first century, he maintains that "it depends on the reflexive self-awareness and sound judgement of current and future scholars to build on … experiences (of the previous period) for another century of work in the attempt to make the social world as intelligible as it can be"13. In the same volume, discussing the future of the social sciences in the twenty-first century, Immanuel Wallerstein predicts that " …. social science will be an intellectually exciting arena, a socially important one, and undoubtedly a very contentious one"14. These are views from social scientists. How about policy-makers? Do they share a similar representation - making the world more intelligible and being socially important - of these disciplines? I have no international survey in hand on the issue, but amongst those who have the decision-making responsibility in public policy-making, the answer would probably be in the negative for a large majority of them. At best, it would be a selectively and restrictively positive one: amongst the participants in the April 1998 OECD Workshop on social sciences, in Paris, of which the current Lisbon Workshop is a follow-up, two views emerged regarding the influence of the social sciences: the absolute sceptics according to whom they are not of much use in policy-making and problem-solving; and the relative sceptics, who grant that certain disciplines, such as economics and management, have a considerable, but diffuse, influence15.

12 World Social Science Report 1999, Paris, UNESCO/Elsevier, 1999 (edited by Ali Kazancigil and David Makinson), p. 16. 13 Idem, p. 39. 14 Idem, p. 49. 15 Van Langenhove, Luk. "Can the social sciences act as an agent of change in society?", Social Sciences for Knowledge and Decision-making, Paris, OECD, 2001, p. 15.

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The gap between social scientists and policy-makers There is comprehensive literature on social science-policy relations, and some international programmes working in this area, such as the one I created at UNESCO, on the Management of Social Transformations (MOST), the over-arching goal of which is to contribute such linkages, by studying their conditions and modalities and making proposals for their improvement16. One of the workshops of the OECD series, in June 2001 in Bruges, was devoted to the issue of social sciences and decision-making. The dichotomies which oppose researchers and policy-makers are well-known: different professional cultures, time frames, paces, languages, rationalities. Also rather familiar by now are the recommendations to narrow the gap, adressed to:

a) The social scientists: do interdisciplinary, policy relevant team work, rather than individual disciplinary research; respond more enthousiastically to demands from government, society and markets; re-write and re-package research results for policy-makers; be available to meet and work with them frequently, and integrate their needs and views in research designs.

b) The policy-makers: address demands for input to researchers in the early stages of the policy process and not as an after-thought, or only for legitimation purposes; establish mechanisms for meeting researchers and engaging with them in learning processes; support social science infrastructures with decent funding.

The naturalistic model of social sciences The foregoing is fine and may be useful. Still, even if such recommendations were properly implemented, there is a probability that obstacles to a wider use of social sciences in public policy-making would not be easily removed, unless root causes of these difficulties is acknowledged and coped with. One such cause is discussed here. The case may be construed as follows: the whole question of social science knowledge/policy-making relations is set in a paradigm, which is shared by quite a lot of social scientists, as well as a majority of policy-makers. This paradigm can be dubbed the naturalistic view of the social sciences17, as well as their relations with policy-makers. The excellent analysis, made in the Gulbenkian Report, of the historical developments of the social sciences shows how the latter were constructed along the Newtonian model of natural sciences18. A proper understanding by the policy-makers of the problems created for the social sciences by the naturalistic model is necessary, if the negative representation of these disciplines as "underdeveloped

16 By way of example, let me quote the MOST project on knowledge use: "Factors that improve the use of research in social policy", under which comparative case studies are implemented in some 40 countries from various regions of the world, on the basis of a research design prepared by Prof. Carol H. Weiss, from Harvard University. See also the chapter by Carol H. Weiss, "Research-policy linkages: how much influence does social science research has?", World Social Science Report 1999, op. cit., pp. 194-205. 17 Phillips, D.C., The Social Scientist's bestiary: a guide to fabled threats to, and defences of, naturalistic social sciences, Oxford, U.K., Pergamon Press, 1992. 18 Wallerstein, Immanuel, et. al. Open the social sciences. Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the restructuring of the social sciences, Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 60-69

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natural sciences" is to change. Such a shift in the external image of the social sciences is a condition for generating adequate public policies to their advantage.

The naturalistic conception of social sciences is not altogether wrong, but it is reductionist. Indeed, an important part of the social sciences are close to natural sciences, in terms of their concepts, theories and empirical data-based, quantified methods and research techniques. However, that is only a part of the field: the social sciences also stretch towards the humanities, cultural studies and philosophy. Empirical as well as hermeneutic paradigms constitute the field. The real value-added of the social sciences, in terms of understanding the world, as well as responding to demands from policy-makers lies precisely in their capacity to be at once critical/reflexive and realistic/utilitarian19. The natural sciences are also critical, but only about their own scientific results, and not at all on the social conditions of their profession. As regards the critical capabilities of the social sciences, the picture is different: they go beyond their own work, to also cover their relations to society and to policy-making (they perform this fonction as regards the natural science-society/policy interface, as well). They have the conceptual and methodological tools to do so.

Therefore, the social sciences must be assessed in their own right, and not in comparison to natural sciences: they are at once contextual and universal. They cannot be expected to produce social engineering, offering ready-made formulas and solutions for application in all settings and circumstances. Their observations and findings cannot be replicated, given the enormous quantity of variables and their combinations, which are more complex than in natural phenomena, many of them not being quantifiable. This situation, however, does not invalidate their scientific nature, nor their capacity to be policy-relevant. It is not the uncertainties of the subject-matter of a discipline which determine its scientific or non-scientific nature. If this were the case, climate science would not be scientific either.

The social sciences are thus characterized by two appartently contradictory poles: one is the requirement to be closer to the inner features and historical trajectories of the social formation under study, which introduces an inevitable fragmentation, but which is necessary to understanding the context and formulating workable and effective public policies. The other is the requirement of universality, mainly through international and intercultural comparisons. The two together define their scientific nature and value-added. None of the two is to be sacrified to the other.

The natural sciences, which so powerfully influenced the social sciences both conceptually and organisationally, have been undergoing an epistemological shift, away from the Newtonian paradigm, as discussed in the Gulbenkian Report: the positivistic epistemology on which they grew is being replaced by one based complexity and such factors as irreversibility and non replicability, observed in certain natural phenomena, and the quest for a less mechanical definition of the concept of nature20. These developments not only bring natural and social sciences closer, but also question the mechanistic theories and methods, which the social

19 Delanty, Gerard. Social Science: Beyond Constructivism and Realism, Buckingham, U.K., Open University Press, 1997. 20 Op. cit., p. 61.

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sciences generated in their urge to imitate the older and better established branch of science.

The foregoing considerations have implications for the re-structuration of the social sciences, as well as the introduction of different criteria for the evaluation of social science programmes and research results.

They also have implications for social science-policy linkages and the kind of public policies that should be introduced in support of social sciences.

As regards social science/policy-making linkages, much of the dichotomies between these two professional cultures, which become obstacles to a broader use of social science knowledge in policy would have a diminishing influence, if the specific nature of the social sciences and the kind of goods it can deliver were acknowledged by policy-making communities. Such an understanding would dissipate the mechanistic, linear illusion that the analyses and knowledge produced by the social sciences can have a direct and readily measurable influence on public policy formulation. Political decision-making is a complex, deliberative, interactive and impredictible process, in which the supposedly objective "scientific truth" is at best a very small input, the bulk of it being subjective perceptions and calculations of the decision-maker. This may be an explanation of the current crisis of scientific and technological expertise, which has difficulties in coping with the increasing uncertainties and risks21. Contrary to "hard" science-based expertise, social science-based expertise can be more successful in such configurations, having the tools to analyze and render intelligible certain subjective or idiosynchratic factors of policy-making, by combining quantitative as well as qualitative methods and indicators.

Some prescriptions for effective public policies for social sciences

On the basis of the above analysis, an attempt can be made to formulate certain prescriptions addressed to policy-makers, on how to produce relevant public policies for supporting social sciences and their role in society:

1. Put high on the policy agenda the question of how to make an optimal

use of the inputs the social sciences can make to public policy-making, with their specific features, and not as ancillary disciplines of natural sciences and technologies.

2. Acquire a correct knowledge of the nature of the social sciences and what they can deliver as inputs for policy-making.

3. In the light of the above learning process, develop a proper understanding of what such notions as research-policy linkages, knowledge transfer, valorisation, mean in the case of the social science.

4. Remember that the interface between scientific knowledge and public policy functions on the basis of social science concepts and tools

21 Cf. on the crisis of scientific expertise in relation to governance: Kazancigil, Ali, "Governance and Science: market-like modes of managing society and producing knowledge", International Social Science Journal, Nº 155, March 1998, pp. 69-79.

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5. On the basis of political will and proper understanding of their nature, formulate and implement effective public policies for social sciences, in two directions: a) provide adequate funding for data infrastructures and research

facilities; offer strong incentive: to international and interdisciplinary research, as well as to re-structuring social science teaching, curricula and degrees; up-grade the teaching of the social sciences at the secondary school level;

b) accompany the above supportive measures and incentives in favour of autonomous, long-term social science, by well-endowed, large policy-oriented social science research programmes, in strategic issues, defined in a way to allow these disciplines to use all their potential.

Need for global advocacy in support of the social sciences Since there is no reason to believe that public policy-makers would spontaneously adhere to the above prescriptive recommendations and consider social sciences more positively and seriously, some initiatives must be introduced to persuade them to do so.

I'd like to conclude by mentionning such an initiative which is being planned. It has been conceived as a follow-up to the OECD Roundtable Series and to the Lisbon Declaration (see Chapter 12).

The initiative, introduced by UNESCO's Management of Social Transformations (MOST) Programme, together with the United Nations University and its newly established Research and Training Programme on Comparative Regional Integration Studies, UNU/CRIS, in Bruges, aims at establishing a "Global Coalition for the Social Sciences in the 21st Century".

This broad, inclusive, flexible and cost-effective Coalition would serve as a forum for advocacy vis-à-vis political, social and economic actors, design of policies and actions, as well as exchange of views and experiences towards strengthening the role of the social sciences in society and in public policy-making, and their contributions to understanding and coping with the increasing complexities, uncertainties, risks, as well as opportunities of modern societies and economies in all regions of the world, so as to advance towards the goals of sustainable development, human security and welfare and democratic governance.

Currenty there is no equivalent mechanism, which is very much needed. All relevant partners ready to participate will be welcome, such as the European Commission, OECD, various UN bodies, the World Bank, regional IGOs, national research councils, governmental bodies, universities, private foundations, international social science organizations, such as the International Social Science Council, the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences, and regional ones such as CODESRIA in Africa, CLACSO and FLACSO in Latin America, AASSREC in Asia, European Science Foundation.

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The list is an open-ended one. We hope to start the Global Coalition in 2002. The International Conference on "Social Sciences in the 21st Century", which the International Social Science Council and UNESCO are organizing in the autumn of 2002, in Vienna, will be a significant occasion to make progress on this Global Coalition

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Chapter 10

CHALLENGES FACING SOCIAL SCIENCES IN EU SCIENCE POLICY

by

Teresa Patrício ISCTE – Instituo Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa, Lisboa

In 1996, the Gulbenkian Commission on Restructuring of the Social Sciences organised and published a report entitled “Open the Social Sciences”, encouraging theoretical reflection on its future role within a multidisciplinary perspective. In 1997, the Portuguese Ministry of Science and Technology organised a meeting with European Ministers of Research and published “The Social Science Bridge” which contributed towards the establishment of funding social science research in the European Union Fifth Framework Programme of Research and Technological Development. In complementary ways, both events and the subsequent publications contributed toward promoting general reflection on the role of the social sciences in responding to demands beyond the national level. The OECD provided impetus by organising – together with Member countries - four international workshops, including the present one. The workshops spanned several continents and covered various themes – infrastructures and databases, knowledge-production, decision-making and innovation. This workshop is the fourth and final workshop on the theme of “Re-inventing the Social Sciences”, thereby closing a cycle that began in Ottawa, then moved to Bruges, then Tokyo and finally here, to Lisbon. The workshops sought to strengthen the social sciences so that a robust problem-solving approach was achieved. At the same time, the discussion on global concerns was prominent. This workshop is another step in the process of reflection and analyses of what role the social sciences should play in a problem-solving, interdisciplinary approach to the production of knowledge. Moreover the role of expert knowledge in public involvement procedures and in public policy and decision-making is a central and crucial issue. Presently the challenges facing the social sciences are varied. Some of the more easily identifiable challenges arise from the social and political changes resulting from information and communication technology, from the search for a sustainable production and development, from the process of globalisation and geo-political issues, from public concerns with security and quality of life, and with living with ever-increasing levels of risk. With pressure increasing from policy-makers in the search for answers, social scientists face mounting challenges to provide “solutions”. Confronted with such different challenges, how should social scientists respond? Undoubtedly, theoretical questions - basic from the origins of the social sciences - will remain seminal to the progress and influence of the social sciences. High

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standards of research are achieved through constant scrutiny of publication through the peer review process and will remain the basis for intervention of social sciences in society. Moreover, disciplinary work as well as the advances and contributions achieved in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research is likely to continue to be based on sound disciplinary practices. The search for objectivity underlies the promise, the task and the challenge confronting the social sciences. Not all challenges, however, are new issues in the social science milieu. C. Wright Mills in “The Sociological Imagination” (1959) expressed the apprehension of social scientists with the results of their work. “Just now, among social scientists, there is a widespread uneasiness, both intellectual and moral, about the direction their chosen studies seem to be taking. This uneasiness, as well as the unfortunate tendencies that contribute to it, are, I suppose, part of the general malaise of contemporary intellectual life. Yet perhaps the uneasiness is more acute among social scientists, if only because of the larger promise that has guided much earlier work in their fields, the nature of the subject work which they deal, and the urgent need for significant work today.” (1959) For Mills, affirmation of personal biases is required so that social problems can be confronted as public issues. Epitomising this question Mills states – No one is “outside society”; the question is where each stands within it. From a similar perspective John Ziman confronts the old adage of objectivity. In “Human Brickwork in the Social Science Bridge (1998), Ziman looks at objectivity as a social virtue, and concludes that the social and human scientist is under the influence of a diversity of interests and values, where the ideal of social objectivity is unattainable in principle. The task of the social scientist is to define reality and discern meanings within a comparative understanding of past and existing social structures. Social sciences can be used or abused. Social sciences can serve many functions and different masters. Questions of interest, influence, contracts - commercial or government, are the present social science environment. While certain challenges seem to have been around for some time, the question is are there new challenges facing social scientists and if so, how should they prepare themselves to contribute to the resolution. Michael Gibbons et al. (1994) in the seminal work “The New Mode of Production” attribute the changes of science and research in contemporary society to a Mode 2 type of production where knowledge is created in broader, transdisciplinary social and economic contexts. This new context of knowledge production increases the concern of scientists and technologists to the implications of their work. Thereby the concerns with social accountability are increased and incorporated from the beginning in the work of the researchers. Gibbons et al. refer to the general context of knowledge production but the ramifications for social scientists are compelling. Moreover, the authors predict the changing and far more open institutional contexts of knowledge production. Social scientists need to be attuned to these new developments and prepared for the new demands, tasks and responsibilities that arise for them. These include defining and solving problems as well as evaluating their performance and the results. These new tasks also include pressing considerations of timing with regard to problem solving. Social scientists can also play a role in helping to determine and set policy agendas and ensuring public debate.

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Some feel that the social sciences are confronting a contemporary crisis as they have failed to live up to their task of being socially and politically useful. Others see the social sciences as not contributing enough towards developing society and solving social problems as a result of budgetary constraints, institutional problems, disciplinary boundaries and the gap between knowledge and practice (UNESCO Social Sciences World Report, 1999). The increased complexity of the science and technology production system – referred to as the knowledge-based economy (OECD, 1996), or the learning society (Lundvall and Johnson, 1994) or the “new” economy – indeed provides a series of new challenges for the social sciences. Without attempting to be exhaustive, some of these challenges include the selection of criteria to establish research priorities, the search for excellence and ways of ascertaining excellence, network research, resolution of scientific controversies, the involvement of users, and the general contribution of the social sciences to policy decisions. While all these topics merit extensive analysis, in this paper I will examine the new challenges faced by social scientists in their relationship to policy makers within the context of the European Union’s science and technology policy. The study of the relationship between science and politics is not new. Since the post-war period, following Vannevar Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier (1945) the literature on science policy has been abundant. While much of the earlier literature focused on linear relationships between science, technology, innovation, and economic development, more recently the relationship has been deemed of greater complexity. Nearly fifty years later the European Commission published Society: The Endless Frontier (1998) by Caracostas and Muldur, while the title clearly shows tribute to Vannevar Bush’s work, the adopted perspective is an alternative to the linear techno-determinist vision of innovation. The European Commission’s proposal of science and technology policy is centred within a social framework of innovation. A closer relationship to society is advocated – encouraging public-private partnerships, creating advisory boards representing diversity of interests, bringing together and involving the various agents of change in society. What role can the social sciences play in this perspective? The proposal is clear. Social sciences are connected to the multidisciplinary paradigm of “socio-technical” action and the creation of new “socio-industrial complexes” based on the Scandinavian model of meeting social needs. In other words, the proposed path for the social science is through joint efforts with the “hard” sciences and technology and engineering fields to promote innovation as well as economic and technological growth. The direct implications for social science research funding were not immediately drawn until social scientists realised that at the European level, funding would only be made available for joint multidisciplinary projects with the “hard” or “exact” sciences. Overall, many of the policy objectives were social – sustainable development, job creation, social cohesion, improved quality of life – but the means to achieve them were defined through a scientific and technological base. In short, the social sciences by themselves were just not “applied” enough and therefore their contribution fell short in the drive to achieve an industrially competitive and technologically innovative Europe.

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Consequently, the Commission’s initial proposal for the 5th Framework Programme did not include a separate social science research programme. Instead social scientists were to be encouraged to collaborate with their colleagues in the natural and engineering sciences, thereby advancing multidisciplinary work within a problem-solving approach. This was an enormous challenge for European social scientists with little experience in multidisciplinary work. On the other hand, it implied abandoning the short-lived social science programme developed during the previous 4th Framework Programme. The TSER - Targeted Socio-Economic Research programme had been introduced in the mid 1990s with a budget of 147Meuros. It should be noted that the collaborative research projects developed between European social scientists were an important first step and it was critical to not lose the momentum created by the TSER programme. It was within this context that the discussion of the future of the social sciences centred upon bridging some of the gap between social scientists and policy-makers. Some of the themes raised were the economic, political and social questions associated with the European Union construction process such as enlargement, the role of democratic institutions, and the impact of the euro. Other relevant themes associated with the problems accruing from large-scale migration processes, the changing family structure, socialisation and religion, labour and employment conditions, defining scientific and technological priorities; promoting a closer understanding of the public to science and technology; and the contribution to science policy. Not all these potential research areas of social sciences were to see the light of day in the 5th Framework Programme. After a prolonged and rather difficult negotiation period, the end result was the creation of a “key action” (not a full research programme) on the socio-economic knowledge-based society within the Human Potential and Mobility Programme with a budget of 190Meuros. Among the areas of research included were societal trends and structural changes; technology, society and employment; governance and citizenship; and new development models fostering growth and employment. Thus, social scientists in Europe were given a lifeline to continue the collaboration begun under TSER. Multidisciplinary work between the “soft” and the “hard” sciences would also be encouraged as the general objectives of the research and technological development policy were to create employment, improve social cohesion and promote sustainable development. Between 1998 and 2002 almost 300 projects were financed and the average size of a project corresponded to .55Meuros. When the fifth framework programme came to an end (2002) the Commission embarked upon the uncertain venture of evaluating the influence and impact of the socio-economic research in the activities of the different thematic programmes. In other words, was multidisciplinary research a reality at the European level? And how could this be measured? The report “The overall socio-economic dimension of community research in the fifth European Framework Programme” (European Commission, 2003), candidly acknowledges encountering “difficulties, lack of commonly agreed definitions, consistent datasets and robust assessment methods”. The conclusions express reserved optimism regarding the European collaboration of the social sciences as well as their possibility for future participation “…in the field of social sciences and humanities,

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the research is largely carried out at the national level, often by individual researchers. Thus, the scientific community in social sciences and humanities has limited experience in entering into partnerships within large consortia and, consequently, in the perspective of Framework Programme 6, the challenges for social sciences and humanities to use new instruments (integrated projects and networks of excellence) will, in principle, be greater than for other sciences.” (2003) The relationship of social scientists and policymakers received an unexpected impulse when in January 2000 the Commission adopted a Communication proposing the creation of a European Research Area. This project essentially aims at “creating favourable conditions to increase the impact of research efforts by strengthening the coherence of research activities and policies conducted in Europe”. At the Lisbon European Council on 23-24 March, the Heads of State or Government endorsed this project and set a series of objectives and an implementation timetable. Subsequently, the Research Council resolution adopted in June 2000 called on the Commission, in close co-operation with the Member States, to present to the Council objectives and a methodology with a view to mapping excellence in all Member States, to benchmarking research and technological activities and to co-ordinate science policy. In parallel to the objectives of establishing the ERA, mounting concerns with the future of the EU institutions and the involvement of its citizenry and the process of enlargement were evident. The reform of the European political context of governance, as proposed by Romano Prodi, is an attempt to modernise the European Union’s political structure, bringing the Union closer to its citizens. The challenge of effective governance created by the enlargement of the European Union would require innovative and creative solutions – (clearly a role for political scientists). The EU White Paper on Governance (2001) identifies the need of changes in modern society and the effects of globalisation and scientific expertise on the democratic process. The discussion on science and governance can establish forms of confidence centred on the scientific and technological system. Increasingly, politicians and policy-makers rely on scientific and technological expertise for their decisions. And yet, experts do not always speak with a single voice of authority. The question of personal biases and values is once again raised. Nonetheless, the EU has identified the need to develop a system of scientific advice and expertise with regard to the formulation and use of scientific advice both in support of EU policy design and implementation. Questions about ethical scientific conduct by scientists and ethical political conduct and dilemmas faced by policymakers in science and technology are more and more frequent. One can make the case that both the European Research Area communication and the EU White Paper on Governance could provide the necessary new fertile ground for a budding relationship between social scientists and policymakers. On a more traditional footing, the Sixth Framework Programme of Research and Technological Development (2002-2006) contemplated a thematic priority area on the social sciences with a budget of 355Meuros, as well as a new innovative programme called “Science and Society”, which considers ways of overcoming the separation of science and society and provides mechanisms for European policy contributions. European funding programmes help establish co-operation among social scientists and contributes to a European dimension of public policies. Overall, the European

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Union construction process led to new questions confronting policy makers to which social and political scientists could effectively contribute. The preparatory documents and the subsequent Science and Society Action Plan support a general approach to questions of concern to society such as ethical questions of bioresearch, transparency of research and risk management, the role of expertise and foresight studies, the precautionary principle, science and governance, public understanding of science, scientific information system, attractiveness of science and science careers and women and science. The issues promoted by Science and Society Action Plan can all serve as potential policy tools for implementation at the European and the national level. The question posed by Science and Society requires discussion and debate as well as research and analyses on the policy proposals for implementation at the European level. The timing of this debate coincides with calling into question the way decision-making powers are exercised in the European Union. The search for a research policy agenda that addresses the promotion of a better understanding of science and technology by the public and promotes a dialogue between scientists, industrialists, policy-makers and citizens is a promising area of research for social scientists. Science policy studies often rely upon attitudes, opinions and the general public understanding of science. Attitude surveys on science and technology are conducted in several countries at different times and these can play an important role on controversial policy decisions such as providing federal funds for stem cell research, conducting scientific experiments on animals or supporting math or science programmes in education establishments. Policymakers may also want to encourage public debate and discussions on many of these controversial topics (the experience with consensus conferences in Denmark are one seemingly successful example). In the United States the National Science Foundation Science and Engineering Report (2002) states with characteristic openness the difficulties encountered of getting Americans to understand science. In fact, it seems Americans are highly supportive of science and technology but lack knowledge of them. Americans in general, the report continues, have the ability to think critically and manifest problem-solving skills. This together with a general public confidence in the scientific community makes the US society highly supportive of science and technology. Is trust of science particular to the US society? Contrasting with the NSF Report of public attitudes and understanding of science, the UK Select Committee on Science and Technology – Third Report (2000) approaches the crisis of the loss of public confidence in scientific advice to government. The UK S&T - Third Report follows in the wake of the BSE crisis and public policy priorities are directed at addressing the public uproar and scare. The BSE scare and other controversies such as GM foods and crops, the management of nuclear waste have affected the public and society. The distrust is manifested on the scientific information on science-related policy issues. The UK Report raises the context within which science and scientific advice is produced – whether it is associated with government or industry – and thereby raises questions as to its “independence”. The values and the uncertainties of scientists

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should be declared and expressed openly. A crisis of trust is the result of uncertainty and disagreement among experts. The loss of confidence in science and the corresponding belief in increasing risk society led to recommendations of stipulated guidelines on scientific advise on how risk information will be received by the public. Simultaneously the Report proposes improving dialogue and communication between scientists and the public and through the public understanding of science. Facilitating communication among scientists, policy-makers and the public on a wide variety of topics that affect people could serve to increase trust and confidence in science and would promote more effective policy-making. Workshops and programmes promoting an informed dialogue between scientists, engineers, industrialists, policy-makers and students could be developed. Scientists should be encouraged to visit schools as a general form of communication and dialogue. New forms of communication need to be tried. In this regard, the role of the media in the promotion of scientific and technological awareness and in promoting dialogue has not been sufficiently explored. In the scope of the information and knowledge-society new forms and means of attraction can and should be utilised. But there are numerous other actions that can be developed. A better understanding of risks affecting society requires further research in particular in the area of public understanding of science and technology and in science and education and in science communication. Much can be done in this field to promote a better understanding and to bridge the lack of trust between scientists, including social and human scientists, and policy-makers. One recent example of an attempt to bridge the gap between scientists and policymakers can be found in the United States. Subscribing to the motto of “less science and more policy” the Howard Hughes Medical Centre and the Centre for Strategic International Studies entered an agreement to advice policymakers on matters where science and policy intersect. Subsequent development of the social sciences at the European level can to a large extent be ascertained by the de facto contribution and participation of the social sciences to the Fifth and Sixth Framework Programmes. Together with the problem-solving approach social scientists are called upon to help resolve societal problems in a wide-range of fields – health sciences, environment, user-friendly information society, energy, sustainable development, including the more “traditional” societal problems such as employment, industrial competitiveness, immigration policy, and changing family structure. The problem-solving approach has attempted to bridge the separation between the social sciences and the natural or exact sciences. No longer seen as a difference between the soft and the hard sciences, both work within the range of probabilistics. Social sciences work with probabilities, not certainties, and many of the natural sciences also are within the realm of the probabilistic. The global warming of the earth’s atmosphere is a case where scientists work under the probabilistic. The present threats to science lies in the disenchantment of the public to science, from the perception that scientists are an interest group like any other, and therefore neither neutral nor disinterested. While the new mode of production (mode 2) requires renewed social accountability and responsibility on the part of the knowledge producers, there are counter pressures that point to short-term solutions namely the “quick fix” or the “technological fix”.

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While the challenges posed to social scientists within the EU policy context are multiple, the opportunities for advancing knowledge production with new forms of collaboration between European and international partners are new. A specific research programme with funding on citizens and governance in the knowledge-based society, a science and society programme within the context of creating a European Research Area and a European Educational Area are new opportunities confronting the creativity and capacity of social scientists. References: Caracostas and Muldur, Society: The Endless Frontier, European Communities, Luxembourg, 1998. Gibbons, Michael et al., The New Mode of Production – The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies, Sage, London, 1994. EU White Paper on Governance, European Communities, Luxembourg, 2001, p.75. Interdisciplinarity and the Organisation of Knowledge in Europe, ed. by Richard Cunningham, Euroscientia Conferences, Cambridge, 1997. Lundvall, B-A. and Johnson, B, “The learning economy”, Journal of Industry Studies, 1, 1994. Mills, C. Wright, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1959. “National Science Foundation Science and Engineering Report”, Washington DC, 2002. Open the Social Sciences, Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on Restructuring of the Social Sciences, Stanford University Press, 1996. “Science and Society - Action Plan”, European Communities, Luxembourg, 2002, p.32. Social Sciences for Knowledge and Decision-Making, OECD, Paris, 2001. The Social Science Bridge, Ministry of Science and Technology, Lisbon, 1998, p. 208. “The overall socio-economic dimension of community research in the fifth European Framework Programme”, European Commission, Brussels, 2003. “UK Select Committee on Science and Technology – Third Report”,

2000.

World Social Sciences Report, UNESCO, Paris, 1999.

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Ziman; John, “Human Brickwork in the Social Science Bridge” in The Social Science Bridge, Ministry of Science and Technology, Lisbon, 1997.

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Part 4

CONCLUSIONS

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Chapter 11

FROM OPENING TO RETHINKING THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

By

Luk Van Langenhove United Nations University Maastricht

Introduction

One might wonder what needs to be ‘re-thought’ or even ‘re-invented’ in the Social Sciences? Well, in the many debates and discussions I had over the last years on social sciences, I have heard a lot of disillusion and discontent with the current state of affairs. Mostly it turns down to the claim that the social sciences are not contributing enough to improving our understanding of society, let alone to solving societal problems. Some blame this situation to the fact that governments have not sufficiently invested in the social sciences. Others blame social scientists themselves, claiming that they are not delivering the right goods. Still others point to the state of flux and rapid change in today’s societies that makes understanding and forecasting ever more difficult. In my view (Van Langenhove, 2001) what is needed is a re-thinking movement along the following four lines: First, there is a need to re-invent the infrastructural needs. Living in a globalised world means that national infrastructures will have to be framed into international infrastructures. Traditional social science developed around the concept of a nation-state and the expression of national culture (Martinotti, 1999). More and more the social sciences will have to transcend local situations if they want to play a role in understanding the global world. Furthermore, the ICT revolution is changing the way in which the social sciences research is performed and communicated. The Internet provides social sciences researchers with a lot of opportunities for transdisciplinary collaborations, data-sharing and web-based data-archiving. Also the qualitative methods are benefiting enormously from new computer applications.

Secondly, the public legitimisation of the social sciences needs to be reinvented. Although it is widely accepted that this legitimisation depends upon two aspects: (i) the claim of making the world more intelligible and (ii) upon the contribution to problem-solving and policy-making in society, it seems to be one of the major problems of the social sciences that they are not sufficiently able to demonstrate achievements in both fields.

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Thirdly, the social sciences have up to know divided the ‘complex’ world into ‘simple’ ‘variables’. It was the only way to try to follow the model of the natural sciences. Today we know the limits of that model (Van Langenhove, 1996) and we know that within the natural sciences themselves other models are emerging. Dealing with complexity is possibly the most challenging task before us. It means that the social sciences will have to be able to investigate the complex social reality at its different temporal, spatial and aggregation levels.

Fourthly, a re-invention of the disciplinary structures seems a pressing task. While most research is still done from the vantage point of single disciplines, social problems are multidisciplinary. As noted by Wallerstein (1998), the disciplinary boundaries no longer represent obviously different fields of study with different methods, but the corresponding corporate structures and boundaries are still in place and very effective in disciplining the practices of research.

Together these four challenges can be interpreted as a plea for change. To be sure, I’m not the only one making such claims and pleading for changes. The main problem is however that it looks like that the institutional organisations that embody the social sciences are not able to engage in such changes themselves. The pressures for not changing are much bigger. This is why governments have indeed a crucial role to play. Not only have they an important part of the resources available as a leverage-tool, they also are one of the biggest "buyer" of results.

But then of course, governments also need impetuses to change. This is where the international organisations come in: they can analyse and recommend to Member Countries feasible means of action that can answer various political concerns.

1. The Gulbenkian Foundation : Opening the Social Sciences

It is remarkable that throughout the whole history of the social sciences there have been many dissonant voices that have seriously questioned the practice of the social sciences. One could expect that this would have provoked a radical change in how social sciences research is conducted. But the many critical questions about the nature of the subject of a discipline, about its boundaries, about what is methodologically correct have on the whole not really changed the mainstream activities of the academic community. At best it only resulted in excitement or healthy self-reflection. At worse, it has been experienced as anxiety-provoking and threatening ... Nevertheless, there seems to be a growing consensus about the deficiencies of the social sciences and also about the possible remedies. The Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences has delivered one of the most interesting analyses. In Open the social sciences, the Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Rethinking of the Social Sciences (published by Stanford University Press, 1996). Radical measures were suggested to turn things round: from how to award university chairs, to setting syllabi and raising funds (Wallerstein, 1996).

Three major issues have been addressed in this report:

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The first one is that it showed how social science was historically constructed as a form of knowledge and why it was divided into a specific set of disciplines in a process that went on between the late eighteenth century and 1945. The second one is that it revealed the ways in which world developments in the period since 1945 raised questions about this intellectual division of labour and therefore reopened the issues of organizational structuring that had been put into place in the previous period. Thirdly, this report presents possible ways in how the social sciences might be intelligently restructured in the light of their history and recent debates. In this context the Gulbenkian commission stated that one way of rethinking the social sciences is the "expansion of institutions, within or allied to universities, which could bring together scholars for (...) work in common around specific urgent themes". It was also stressed that there is a need for establishing integrated research programs that cut across traditional lines.

2. The OECD’s work on the Social Sciences : Re-thinking the Social Sciences

The OECD has a long tradition in looking at the Social Sciences. Already in 1966, a report "The Social Sciences and the policies of governments" was submitted to the 2nd Ministerial Meeting on Science. In 1976, the OECD Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy examined the social sciences policies of three countries (France, Finland and Japan). Based on these assessments, a report was published in 1979, "The Social Sciences in Policy-Making" in which the following recommendations to Member Countries were made:

o That a more flexible and pluralist system of financing research should be devised;

o That the social sciences research system should be developed in a more balanced way;

o That the role of science policy bodies should be broadened so as to ensure the development and use of the social sciences;

o That communication between the government and the scientific community should be intensified;

o That contacts between governmental and non-governmental social sciences specialists should be stepped up;

o That decision-makers should be urged to take account of social sciences findings.

These recommendations probably are all still valid today. It is also remarkable that after the 1976 initiative nothing happened within the OECD regarding the social sciences for more than 20 years. It was only in 1997 that the Belgian delegation in the CSTP group on the Science System proposed to look once again at the problem and examine the position of the social sciences in the scientific system in such a way as to further social sciences research. The Belgian proposal was inspired by the groundbreaking work of the Gulbenkian Commission. Many other delegations supported this request and in April 1998 a Workshop on the Social Sciences was held in Paris that focussed on the problems encountered by Social Sciences disciplines today and on the ways forward. Amongst the topics discussed at that Seminar were:

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• The status of the social sciences:

It was stressed that the social sciences do not enjoy the same status as that of the natural sciences in the eyes of both the scientific community and the general public. This has serious consequences on public funding and public legitimisation.

• The influence of the social sciences:

Two conflicting attitudes were observed: those who stress that the social sciences do not seem to be of much use in resolving the problems facing society versus those who think that some social sciences disciplines, e.g.; economics, or management, do have a considerable, albeit diffuse, influence.

• Institutional rigidity and interdisciplinary:

The division or labour between the different social sciences disciplines and subdisciplines was widely recognised of being a setback for going more status and influence. On top of the disciplinary boundaries, reflected in institutional rigidity, the methodological discords make that there is a lack of unity in studying Mankind and Society.

In 1999 the OECD published the proceedings of this workshop under the title "The Social Sciences at a turning point?” (OECD, 1999). Following the 1998 workshop the CSTP decided in March 1999 to organise a number of follow-up international workshops on the social sciences under the general heading of "Re-inventing the Social Sciences" and I had the privilege to chair the international Steering Group that co-organised these workshops with respective local organisers. The first workshop was held in Ottawa in December 1999 and was entitled “The Social Sciences for a Digital World: Building Infrastructure for the Future”. That workshop focused on infrastructure and the challenge of digitalisation for the social sciences (OECD, 2000). The Ottawa workshop tackled issues such as developing infrastructure investments, disseminating best policy practices, developing new surveys. It became clear that innovations in the ICT sector are providing exciting new research opportunities for the social sciences.

The Bruges workshop was held in June 2000 and dealt with “The contribution of the Social Sciences to Knowledge and Decision Making”. Amongst the topics discussed were public consultation and decision making, problem-oriented collaboration between social scientists and policy makers, and quality assessment and dissemination issues in the use of social science by policy makers (OECD, 2001a). The Bruges workshop touched upon a set of issues that would appear to provide a new perspective

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for social sciences research: the social sciences as a process of interactive and continuous learning. The Tokyo workshop in December 2000 focussed on “Social Sciences and Innovation” examined issues related to the contribution that social sciences could make to technological and social innovations (OECD, 2001b). A final workshop was held in Lisbon in November 2001. This workshop dealt with interdisciplinarity and rounded up the previous workshops. A ‘Declaration on Strengthening the Role of the Social Sciences in Society’ was adopted in Lisbon.

The Lisbon declaration draws upon the conclusion of the five workshops and addresses the specific issue of the changing demand for social sciences input in policy-making and the ways by which the gaps between demands and supply can be bridged.

- Governments, through national science policies for the Social Sciences, should give recognition to the key role of the Social Sciences in both the acquisition of knowledge about the Social realm and in their contributing to all policy-making processes;

- the international social science system and international organisations should emphasise the promotion of excellence and quality in their actions;

- national university teaching systems should reconsider the practices of social sciences education in order to encourage interdisciplinarity at postgraduate training while reinforcing teaching the disciplinary base at undergraduate level;

- the social science system should reposition itself vis-à-vis society and establish an increased connectivity of social sciences to society. This means that societal groups concerned should be able to participate in social research. It also means that social scientists should participate in societal, ethical and other related debates, as well as in decision-making at institutional and societal level;

- international organisations should stimulate global social sciences programmes or globally focussed efforts of participatory and transdisciplinary research of great relevance on problems of global interest.

3. Two Ideas for Strengthening the Generative Power of the Social Sciences

The natural sciences have not only contributed to solving many practical problems, but also made it possible that lay-people can understand many aspects of the material world they live in. In a similar way, the social sciences should contribute to the general understanding of our societies by all those who are part of it. Kenneth Gergen has once called this the generative power of the social sciences: the power of theories to “unset the common assumptions within the culture and thereby open new vistas for action” (Gergen, 1982: 133). Or in other words: “the capacity to challenge the guiding assumptions of the culture, to raise fundamental questions regarding contemporary social life, to foster reconsideration of that which is ‘taken for granted’, and thereby to furnish alternatives for social action” (Gergen, 1978: 1346).

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In my view (cf. Van Langenhove, 2001), the social sciences lack to a great extent such generative power. The reasons for that are multiple, but I see four main reasons:

(i) the disciplinary divide; (ii) the influence of positivism; (iii) the lack of adequate financing and

the gap between the social sciences community and the communities of practitioners and decision-makers.

In the context of the OECD work on re-thinking the social sciences (OECD, 1999; OECD, 2000; OECD, 2001a; OECD, 2001b), I have advocated a radical restructuring of the social sciences. I have claimed that social policy research needs to re-invent its infrastructure needs, re-invent its public legitimacy, learn to deal with complexity, and re-invent its disciplinary structures. Here, I would like to broaden this perspective with some ideas about the ontological and epistemological basis of the social sciences. In my view, it is positivism that blocks the social sciences from having more generative power (cf. Van Langenhove, 1995). Hence, the quest for a non-positivist approach of the Social Sciences that keeps the highest standards of methodological soundness and quality control. All to often, anti-positivism has been wrongly equated to post-modernism…

IDEA ONE: WE NEED A NEW ONTOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES In everyday life, as in science, thinking about the world presupposes the usage of a referential grid that serves as an ontological basis. Within the physical sciences the referential grid in use has long been the perceived material world consisting of material objects that are located in space and evolve in time, interrelated by influences propagated from one to another. With the emergence of the physical sciences in the eighteenth century, scientists have tried to explain the world by setting up experiments and by developing theories. As such, the perceived material world became to a large extent understandable in terms of causal interactions between observable material entities. The key elements in this process of understanding (and predicting) material processes were the Euclidean conception of space, the Newtonian view of movement and the Human model causality. Together these three theoretical frameworks constitute the ontological referential grid of the classical natural sciences. The Newtonian-Euclidean worldview is largely in concordance with how people perceive and experience the everyday world. When the social sciences emerged as separate academic disciplines, they implicitly adopted this ontological grid when adhering to Newtonian experimental methodology. This implied an epistemology of the psychological and the social in three realms: an observable Realm 1 (mainly behaviour); a Realm 2 that could be observed with the help of ‘psychological instruments’ such as tests (for example, an attitude); and an unobservable Realm 3 that includes concepts such as mind and self. But today one can argue that there is no logical need to apply the Newtonian-Euclidean grid as a model for a social world grid. Moreover, it can even be argued that on the whole the

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referential grid of the classical natural sciences is simply inadequate for the social sciences from an epistemological point of view. Although there have always been many epistemological differences amongst social scientists, there does seem to be a relative ontological consensus about what the relevant social entities are that make up the subject matter of the social sciences, the ‘substances’ of the social world, so to speak. In the standard ontology, three different levels of societal phenomena are usually considered : people, institutions and societies. People tend to be treated as complex, causally interacting ‘things’; institutions as groupings of people; and societies as higher-order aggregates of people or groups. As thing-like substances, each of these can be located in the Newtonian-Euclidean space/time grid of the natural world, just like natural entities and phenomena. This seems so obvious that it hardly receives any attention. However, by locating social phenomena within a natural world location grid, the door is opened for the imperceptible transposing of properties of the natural world to the social realm.

Rom Harré (1983) is one of the first to have convincingly argued for the use of a specific grid in order to locate and understand social and psychological phenomena. His alternative consists of a person/conversations referential grid in which speech acts are metaphorically treated as the ‘matter’ of social reality. Thus, while the natural world Umwelt is perceived as consisting of things located in time and space, the social world Umwelt is in this view treated as consisting of speech acts located in persons and conversations. People, institutions and societies can thus always be situated simultaneously in two referential grids: the space/time grid and the persons/conversations grid. Persons are in this view pictured as the locations for social acts. As a ‘space’ (a set of possible and actual locations), the array of persons is not necessarily Euclidean. The grid of temporal locations, the time-aspect of human life, is also subject to changes. The distinction between past, present and future does not map neatly onto psychological time partly because the social and psychological past is not fixed. The social future can influence the social past. The occurrences of acts are the moments of social time. Speech acts can be located in persons and institutions and in the course of conversations. Persons, institutions and conversations all have their natural grid correlate: persons and institutions exist as material entities that evolve in space and time. Conversations have a material substance too, but unless recorded, they only have a passing existence in time; there is no spatial correlate of conversations.

If social scientists would put the persons/conversations grid first, a total new approach of doing social sciences research emerges: one in which the framework of analysis is much closer to the everyday-life grid.

IDEA TWO: WE NEED A PARTICIPATIVE APPROACH TO SOCIAL SCIENCES RESEARCH

“Participatory methods” is an umbrella term, which describes interactive approaches that actively involve a range of stakeholders, ranging from decision-makers to laypersons. The rationale for participative social sciences research can be explained against the background of two questions:

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! From whose perspective is research performed? ! How can social science research influence decision-making?

The first question has to do with the values of the initiator, which are of primary importance in defining a research issue that are of primary importance when initiating research. Who determines this and on what grounds? While, in the case of basic research, it is mainly the researchers themselves who decide what to study, in applied research it is the body that commissions and/or pays for the research. For instance, an academic sociologist or a government can decide to initiate a research project on inter-group relations between immigrants and non-immigrants. Seldom, if ever, are the immigrants and non-immigrants implicated in that decision and, in the majority of cases, their role in the research process will be limited to passively responding to actions. Most will never even see the results. At best, the research results might influence a development path because they will be used in making decisions on, for example, how to improve inter-group relations in a community. In the case of participative social science research, the people involved will have an active say in i) defining research goals; ii) conducting the research; iii) interpreting the results; and iv) translating them into development paths. Such an approach to social sciences takes as its starting point a community of enquiry that uses theoretical and methodological expertise to influence the process of change. In the view of some academics, this perspective may seem utopian since it ignores the distinction between experts and laypersons. I think that that is wrong because such working methods are already common in some disciplines, for instance psychological research (Reason and Heron, 1996) and in certain practises such as management performance audits in organisations (Argyris and Schön, 1974). There is no reason why it could not work for other societal issues. In my view, this also means that we need more non-linear transfers of social science knowledge. The problem is, of course, how relationships between “producers” and “consumers” can be organised in a non-linear way? Here I think we should refer to the concept of learning organisations. What is needed are new means of organising scientific research in such a way that researchers, together with all the stakeholders involved in the problems under study, can engage in an individual and collective learning process. Such new organisational forms of research not only involve the handling of large amounts of data, but also require a continuous monitoring and steering of the communication processes between scientists, policy makers and the general public. Information Highways can certainly play a facilitating role in such enterprises, but I consider it totally wrong to believe that technological tools will suffice. Such a view, once again, treats the people who act as decision-makers as passive “users” of scientific information. Dealing with societal problems involves much more than scientific information: at the end of the day, choices are always ethical and political and have to be framed in the dynamics of the social interactions in which they occur (Harré and Van Langenhove, 1998). Thus, the issue of managing social science information as a contribution to the resolution of societal problems is far from simple – as a matter of fact, it too needs to be studied. New forms of managing such information within our complex democracies are needed and, once again, increasing societal learning seems to me to be the crucial challenge. I believe

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that this can only be achieved by paying greater attention to knowledge brokering in social sciences. Today, the function of social science knowledge-brokerage hardly exists as it is considered that part of the task of social scientists is to collect all relevant material and organise the dissemination of results. Maybe what is needed is a new division of labour, where social scientists are active at a local level and are assisted by knowledge-brokers who link “local” research with globally available information. Surely, today one can find a great deal of information on any subject whatsoever in books, journals and on the Web. But easy access to the Web should not make us think that social scientists can therefore easily frame their (local) work in the global context: the abundantly available information needs to be translated into knowledge. Also, whatever the results of a given local research project, they need to be actively channelled into those places where they can be use and, in the first place, into organisational learning processes.

4. Conclusions

My position is that we need a double paradigm - shift in the social sciences: a paradigm-shift from publication-driven research towards change driven research and a paradigm-shift from disciplinary-driven research agenda’s towards research driven by problems and their driving forces. Such a double paradigm-shift, which should not loose out of sight the strictest quality control, can in turn only be realised if there is a shift in science policy (Van Langenhove, 2001).

The social sciences have to be able to generate knowledge that can be of relevance for all those who want to change a given situation. As such social sciences research should try to bring together researchers with those who play a role in the phenomena researched and those who are in a position to make decisions about the phenomena studies. But social sciences cannot claim to act as a change agent ‘on behalf’ of the rest of society: social scientists have to work together with industry, governments and civil society. The key issues are thus: empowerment through social sciences and participative research that includes all stakeholders involved. Also it has to be acknowledged that there is no point in breaking up the complex societal issues and their interrelations into simple disciplinary issues. My personal position is that indeed a radical rethinking of the social sciences is needed. International organisations can play an interesting role in such a process by making governments aware of the problems in their national social science systems and by stimulating the development of new approaches. The institutional organization of the social sciences will be a major obstacle in changing the social sciences. Governments can intervene in using the available public money to stimulate new transdisciplinary initiatives. But also, governments could set the example by using innovative social sciences research projects as much as possible in their own functioning.

The next step should be the establishment of a broad and inclusive global coalition for the Social Sciences in the 21st century. Such a coalition should put pressure on national social sciences systems to create the conditions that should allow the social

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sciences to have more generative power for advancing towards the goals of sustainable development, human security and welfare and democratic governance. Currently there exists no equivalent mechanism, which is very much needed. Also, this coalition could be concerned in strengthening the social sciences infrastructures in transition and developing countries. But, the social sciences also need to continue its critical self-reflection and its quest to be innovative. For this we do not only need policy-oriented research but also interdisciplinary oriented basic research.

References:

Argyris, C. (1980). Inner Contradictions of Rigorous Research, Academic Press, New York. Gergen, K. (1978). “Towards Generative Theory”, in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, pp. 1344-1360. Gergen, K. (1982). Towards Information in Social Knowledge, Sage, London. Harré, R. (1983). Personal Being : A Theory for Individual Psychology, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Harré, R. & L. Van Langenhove (1998). “The Dynamics of Social Episodes”, in R. Harré & L. Van Langenhove (eds.), Positioning Theory. Moral Contexts of Intentional Action, Basil Blackwell Publishers, Oxford. Lengyel, P. (1986). International Social Science : the UNESCO experience. New Brunswick, N.J. : Transaction Books. Martinotti, G. (1999). “The Recovery of Western European Social Sciences since 1945”, in A. Kazancigil and D. Makinson (eds.), World Social Science Report 1999, UNESCO Publishing and Elsevier, Paris.

OECD (1999). The Social Sciences at a Turning point? Paris: OECD. OECD (2000).Social Sciences for a Digital World. Building infrastructure and databases for the future. Paris: OECD. OECD (2001a). Social Sciences for Knowledge and Decision Making. Paris: OECD. OECD (2001b). Social Sciences and Innovation. Paris: OECD. Van Langenhove, L. (1995). “The Theoretical Foundations of Experimental Psychology and its Alternatives”, in J.A. Smith & L. Van Langenhove, Rethinking Psychology, Sage Publications, London. Van Langenhove, L. (1996). The Theoretical Foundations of Experimental Psychology. In : Smith, J., Harré, R. and Van Langenhove, L. (Eds.). Rethinking Psychology. London : Sage.

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Van Langenhove, L. (2001). Rethinking the Social Sciences? A point of view, Foundations of Sciences, 5, 103-118. Wallerstein, I. et. al. (1996). Open the social sciences-Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford : Stanford University Press. Wallerstein, I. (1998). Differentiation and Reconstruction in the Social Sciences. Paper presented at ISA Research Council, Montreal, Aug. 6.

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Chapter 12

LISBON DECLARATION – SOCIAL SCIENCES: A NEW PARTNERSHIP

Adopted on 8 November 2001

Today’s world is characterised by rapid and profound changes at all levels of geographical scale from global to local. We live in a fascinating phase in world history with major challenges to both social scientists and policy-makers. Social science knowledge is a powerful resource for understanding and coping with the growing complexities, uncertainties and risks in our world. Governments, as well as social and economic actors, should therefore make a more systematic and extensive use of social science as a source of expertise on societal issues as well as of citizens’ participation in governance. This requires a thorough re-assessment by both social scientists and decision-makers of the ways in which the social sciences may contribute to public policies. In particular, attention is to be focussed more than ever on combining autonomous curiosity-driven approaches with more directly policy relevant ones. There is also a need to reconsider current balances between:

• publication-driven and change-driven approaches; • a primarily discipline-oriented approach and an orientation focusing on

problems and major driving forces that change society; • nationally focussed and internationally or globally developed activities.

In this perspective, the social sciences should make every effort to further: • open up to society and to other knowledge fields in humanities, natural and

life sciences; • strengthen their capacities for interdisciplinary, international and global

cooperation; • foster quality assessment in terms of both academic and policy-oriented output

and develop innovative new forms of such assessment that further interdisciplinary cooperation.

For social sciences to achieve such objectives, a major condition is their intellectual and professional autonomy, as well as their capacity to articulate policy-relevant work with a reflexive and critical dimension. They should also place an emphasis on their increased connectivity to society and its actors and should not avoid working with them. The Communities and societal groups concerned in an issue should be able to participate in social research. In addition social scientists need to participate more than ever in public debates on societal, ethical and related issues, as well as in decision-making at various levels. In this respect, there is a growing need for the use of participatory research methods and well-designed public involvement processes.

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The actors of the social sciences system are called upon to take the following steps:

• Social scientists are urged to put greater emphasis on breakthroughs in Social Science theory and practice, to set up evaluation systems that support long-term autonomous research as well as short-term demand-driven research. They should open up for true internationalisation, involving views and insights from other parts of the world that currently are not participating in the development of social sciences and the knowledge generated by them. Next to their scientific work, social scientists should pay continuous attention to ethical and normative issues that have a bearing on their profession, such as pro-actively contributing to narrowing the North-South and West-East gaps in social sciences infrastructures and facilities, and such as striving towards eliminating social and gender inequalities. They should also foster multilinguism in Social Sciences, as this is a condition for their universality.

• Universities should reconsider the practices and organisation of their social science departments in order to encourage and reward inter-disciplinarity in their postgraduate training and research, while reinforcing teaching the disciplinary base at undergraduate level. Deliberately stimulating processes of recognition and self-organization might be an effective tool to achieve this.

• Governments, through their national science policies, should give adequate resources and due recognition to the key role the Social Sciences have to play in the acquisition of knowledge and understanding of society and social change and in contributing to all policy-making processes. They should introduce education in Social Sciences in pre-university teaching in order to make them part of all citizens’ culture, in part by strengthening the social science contributions in existing school subjects like economy, law, history and geography.

• International governmental and non-governmental organisations, including foundations, should stimulate international and global Social Sciences programmes, including participatory and transdisciplinary research on problems of global interest. The further internationalisation of the Social Sciences is a necessity!

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Annex

RE-INVENTING THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

List of Participants

Austria Menasse-Wiesbauer, Elisabeth Ministry of Science Belgium Burgelman, Jean Claude IPTS, Free University of Brussels Canada Bouchard, Louise University of Ottawa Renaud, Marc SCH Research Council Denmark Eyerman, Ron University of Copenhagen Finland Ervelä-Myréen, Eili Academy of Finland Vuorinen, Pentti Ministry of Trade France Boiteux, Martine Ministry of Research Dupuy, Jean Pierre Ecole Polytechnique Vaicbourdt, Nicolas Counsellor for University Co-operation at the French Embassy to Portugal Germany Joas, Hans Free University of Berlin

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Kocka, Jürgen Social Sciences Research Centre Pawlik, Kurt University of Hamburg Israel Herzob, Hanna Tel Aviv University Japan Takeishi, Akira Hitotsubashi University Yokenura, Seiichiro Hitotsubashi University Mexico Azuela, Antonio Universidad Autonoma do Mexico Portugal de Abreu, Trigo ICCTI Alves, Teresa CEG Amancio, Ligia ISCTE Arriscado Nunes, Joao Universidade de Coimbra Barbosa, Antonio Manuel New University of Lisbon Barreto, Antonio Instituto de Ciências Sociais Bonfim, José ICCTI Campos Guimaraes, Rui Universidade do Porto Caraça, Joao Gulbenkian Foundation

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Cardoso, José Luis Technical University of Lisbon Carvalho, Luis Francesco ISCTE Carvalho Ferreira, José Maria Technical University of Lisbon Castro, Alberto Catholic University of Portugal Castro Caldas, José Maria ISCTE Correira Jesuino, Jorge ISCTE Costa Pinto, Antonio Instituto de Ciências Sociais Cruzeiro, Eduarda Instituto de Ciências Sociais Dias, Olga ICCTI Esteves Pereira, José New University of Lisbon Faisca, Ana Maria ICCTI Ferreira de Almeda, Joao ISCTE Firmino da Costa, Antonio ISCTE Fortuna, Carlos Universidade de Coimbra Freire, Joao ISCTE Gaspar, Jorge University of Lisbon Godinho, Mira Technical University of Lisbon

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Gonçalves, Eduarda ISCTE Henriques, Luisa ICCTI Hespanha, Antonio Instituto de Ciências Sociais Kovaks, Ilona Technical University of Lisbon Lourenço, Nelson New University of Lisbon Machado Ferraro, Joao Instituto de Ciências Sociais Madureira Pinto, José Universidade do Porto Miranda, José David ISCTE Moura, Francisca Gulbenkian Foundation Nunes Almeida, Ana Instituto de Ciências Sociais Oliveira Ramos, Luis Antonio Universidade do Porto Oliveira Valério, Nuno Joao Technical University of Lisbon Pais Mamede, Ricardo ISCTE Palmeirim, Manuela Universidade do Minho Paquete de Oliveira, José ISCTE Patricio, Teresa ICCTI

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Pina Cabral, Joao Instituto de Ciências Sociais Pinto Coelho Aguiar, Alvaro Universidade do Porto Reis Torgal, Luis Universidade de Coimbra Rodrigues, Joao ISCTE Rodrigues, Maria Joao Special Adiser to the Prime Minister Rosas, Fernando New University of Lisbon Santos Pereira, Tiago ICCTI Silva, Manuel Carlos Universidade do Minho Soares da Cunha, Mafalda Universidade de Evora Sousa Borges Santos, Vasco New University of Lisbon Souto Sepulveda, Fernanda ICCTI Teixeira Fernandes, Antonio Universidade do Porto Vale, Jorge Instituto de Ciências Sociais Villaverde Cabral, Manuel Instituto de Ciências Sociais South Africa Orkin, Mark Human Sciences Research Council Sweden Therborn, Göran The Swedish College for Advanced Study

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Wallstén, Margit Foreign Ministry United States Bradburn, Norman NSF Wallerstein, Immanuel Binghamton University European Mitsos, Achilleas Commission DG Research Sors, Andrew DG Research European Banda, Enric Science Secretary General Foundation OECD Maass, Gudrun Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry Oborne, Michael Director, Advisory Unit on Multi-disciplinary Affairs UNESCO Kazancigil, Ali MOST Programme Kosinski, Leszek ISSC United Van Ginkel, Hans Nations UNU Tokyo University Van Langenhove, Luk UNU Maastricht World Bank Aubert, Jean Eric

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