Toward a Globally Connected, Public Social Science
Published on: May 06, 2008

by SSRC Executive Director Mary Byrne McDonnell

This article originally appeared as a chapter in the volume Contradictions of  Globalization—Democracy, Culture, and Public Sphere, ed. Tessa Morris-Suzuki (I House Press, 2008). It was based on a paper McDonnell delivered at a conference held in 2006 at the International House of Japan, which brought together leading thinkers to address the contradictory aspects of globalization from political, cultural, and intellectual perspectives. It is republished here with the permission of I House Press.

BACKGROUND

To imagine how we might move toward a globally connected, public social science—and, indeed, why it is critical to do so—we must know something about the context of our work as well as the character of the intellectual issues that require our attention.

The Context of Our Work as Scientists

There are five factors concerning the context of the work of the social scientist today.

First, the world is a different place now than it was immediately following World War II. Globalization is a large part of this difference, engendering both interconnection and fragmentation.

Second, our education and research systems for the training of research professionals and the development of their careers are better suited to the needs of past decades than to the needs we envision in the future.

This has, third, created a global need for new kinds of research professionals who are capable of understanding local situations in relationship to global, transnational, and international trends and impacts. The impacts and resonances of globalization are two-way streets.

Fourth, the research community today includes people both inside and outside the traditional academy. Similarly, the researchers and analysts we train will be employed in both the public and private sectors. Regardless of their affiliation, it is important that their skills be retained in service of society.

And fifth, changes in the environment in which we work encourage working in partnership and in collaboration with multiple actors from the initial stages of a project to ensure that the project meets a specific need.

This picture presents a challenge for those of us concerned with social science research and training around the world. It means being at the table with the consumers of our work, to think through the issues that confront society, and to develop programs—from their initial stages—that have a chance to impact those issues. It also means ensuring that research results are accessible to a wide range of audiences.

The Character of a New Social Science

In order to consider which research strategies will be needed and how research professionals should be trained, deployed, and sustained, we must know something about the character of these issues.

What areas will require intellectual firepower in the future? What are the characteristics of the questions that researchers will face? What are likely to be the key issues themselves?

Why Does Social Science Even Matter in This Changing World?

As we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, critical problems overwhelm conventional geopolitical and analytical boundaries. Major changes in the organization of social life have become apparent, and the need for systematic social scientific intelligence to inform policy-making environments has become more pressing. Many international discussions on urgent, large-scale, transnational social problems have ended in impasse because the basic knowledge is not there to provide the insights that could form the basis of intelligent policy. The world community needs the kind of knowledge that is embedded in social science, and these "big" issues need to be examined in a systematic, careful, professional manner.

Social science is needed to motivate the world community to do a better job of financing international public intellectual goods, such as the mechanisms and research supporting the development of a global system of organizations working to regulate the effects of market capitalism. The emergence of this system, with its multiplicity of institutions and ties above the state level, suggests the opportunity to develop the analytic intellectual resources for improving infrastructure and solving its problems more effectively.

Social science can also play a role in ensuring that large-scale social issues are managed on the basis of sound analysis by an international community of researchers that is inclusive, diverse, and able to transcend national borders.

The notion of an international social science community, or communities, is critical, for this is key to tackling a global agenda. If social science is to make any contribution on this level, the development of an international intellectual community is essential for cooperation and collective understanding of issues. And in this regard, part of our job is the development of the tools for global intellectual analysis.

What Are the Framing or Contextual Conditions That Confront Us?

Conversations with social scientists and consumers of social science in diverse parts of the globe reveal two large issues that form the backdrop of people’s concerns: globalization and market capitalism. Both act to transform the state in various ways, but although the relation between them is complex, the issues are usefully separated.

Globalization has multiple meanings and manifestations, but it is essentially about interconnections. It is our working premise that geographic areas—from remote villages to entire continents—are caught up in processes that link them to events that, although geographically distant, are culturally, economically, strategically, or ecologically quite similar. To learn more about values or social conditions in a particular area, then, means to learn not only about how that area is situated in events beyond its geographic borders but also within its own cultural or economic or ecological context.The interaction between the global and the local is one of the major features of this historical moment.

The fact of globalization is uncontested and is empirically confirmed in analyses of capital flows, mass migrations, telecommunications networks, tourism, and cultural transfers. Not always appreciated, however, are the novel ways in which globalization locates people, resources, beliefs, and information along new routes—or, in some cases, along routes resurrected from earlier times—in the process of building connections between heretofore isolated individuals and institutions. While promoting integration, globalization also brings into sharp relief differences along racial, ethnic, gender, religious, national, and sub-national lines. Interconnection and fragmentation both produce far-reaching challenges to established norms, resulting in internal destabilization, international hostilities, and economic pressures on both the middle classes and urban working poor.

Closely identified with this broad phenomenon of globalization is the emergence of market capitalism. The market, without social conscience, sees profit as an end in itself. As capitalism becomes the dominant pattern and as the world knits itself into a large-scale economic quilt, one task of the intellectual community is to define the mechanisms and conditions we can put in place to minimize social inequity in the context of the global movement of capital, people, and ideas. We need to surround market capitalism with systems that focus on food security, education, health, environment, nutrition, and other public goods to mitigate the damage it causes. The United Nations has proved largely ineffective at providing such systems. But there are institutions that comprise a more piecemeal international order—World Trade Organization (WTO), World Health Organization (WHO), International Criminal Court (ICC), International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and regional forums of various kinds. As intellectuals, we need to pursue research to implement systems to govern globalization and turn ideas about international responsibility into action.

Clearly, globalization has not made, and will not make, the world homogeneous. Itself a cluster of phenomena, some in tension with each other, globalization has a range of effects. These play out on different scales of social organization, from interpersonal relations and the local community, to specific workplaces and formal organizations, to nation-states and transnational actors. The last include corporations, multilateral organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), social movements, and even terrorist networks.

Globalization takes different forms and indeed looks different as a phenomenon in South Asia, in Africa, in Eastern Europe; not only are there local differences but crucially different perspectives. We must pay attention not only to specific concerns on the regional level but also to how global phenomena (and knowledge itself) are viewed from the regional perspective, since regionalization is itself one of the trends of globalization. Attention to these different levels of analysis and perspectives remains of great importance to intellectual work.

What Specific Research Topics Will We Study?

Within this landscape, what research topics must we—and our students—be prepared to study? Beyond the study of globalization or the global economy, what research questions gain in importance? The critical issues facing human societies are known to all of us: food security, literacy, human rights, refugee flows, globalization of emergent viruses, civil violence, nutrition, education, climatic change, trade imbalances, structural unemployment . . . the list goes on.

RESPONDING TO NEW CONDITIONS

In response to these new conditions and new needs for research, intellectuals and institutions face three urgent tasks: the reinvention of scholarship committed to the international, the building of a publicly engaged social science, and the development of international networks dedicated to collaboration on comparative research that informs our understanding across multiple borders.

Reinventing International Studies

The criticality of global-local interaction underlines the need to bring understanding of the local to bear on the global. Within this larger, enveloping context, there have been not only changes in the world around us, but also in the environment that supports us, in the terrain of social science research, and in the role required of us as intellectuals. We must reposition knowledge about the local, traditionally called area studies, to contribute to the intellectual and practical challenges ahead. These considerations clearly require a reinvention of scholarship and the role of the scholar.

There are three key elements to this repositioning:

  • 1) A distinction between traditional area studies and area-based knowledge needs to be drawn. Area studies have taken individual countries and regions as primary units of analysis. While the enterprise has primarily been concerned with knowledge about one region, area-based (or place-based) knowledge starts with knowledge about an area, then applies it to processes, trends, and phenomena that transcend the area. In this reconception, areas become porous and less rigidly defined as they are found to overlap in relation to the study of specific issues. Another characteristic of area-based knowledge is that it is necessarily combined with knowledge of other areas to see patterns that speak beyond one isolated area. Comparative work becomes critical.
  • 2) The knowledge needed to work on critical issues will come not only from the academy but from NGOs, local and regional communities, the corporate sector, local governments, and international organizations. Alliances and networks across sectors must be built.
  • 3) Finally, because no scholar from a single discipline can master all the tools, theories, or methods needed to grapple with these issues, multidisciplinary and international collaborations become critical. Scholarly networks become vehicles for research and professionalization.

We need new ways of working with each other, and innovations in information technology afford us opportunities to discover them. Honest and equal, cross-cultural dialogue is at the core of our ability to tackle the global research agenda.

Building a Social Science in the Public Interest

Much of the above assumes the public value of social science. That we produce social knowledge in the public interest is crucial to the future of the social sciences—and of our communities. But in order to ensure service to the public good, what changes in the way we work will be needed?

In a recent article, Craig Calhoun, president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), notes four crucial ingredients of a more public social science:

  • The work is problem focused and the choice of the problem is fundamental.
  • It is important to ask serious questions about the idea of "public" both in general terms and with respect to the particular project. What are the relevant publics? How are the needs and wants and interests of the relevant publics known? How are they formed, and can the knowledge-base and processes by which they are formed be improved? Social science should inform public debate, not just the making of high policy behind closed doors. It does this by informing public culture, discussion and decision making, raising the quality of that debate, clarifying its factual bases and theoretical terms. And, importantly, it avoids supporting one side or another.
  • Public social science does not equal applied research and need not be of poor quality.
  • Finally, engagement with public constituencies must move beyond a dissemination model to engage our stakeholders throughout the research process.
    (Go to Calhoun's article, "Toward a More Public Social Science.")

The relationship between social science and public policy—what it should be, how it can be improved—has long plagued the SSRC. A brief sketch of how this relationship has played out with respect to SSRC illustrates some critical points.

SSRC was founded in the early 1920s precisely to bring the relatively new disciplines of the social sciences to the domestic U.S. policy arena. These disciplines had, after all, been founded to study and critique social and economic processes with the intent of improving them. Newly emerging foundation officers at Rockefeller and elsewhere, in concert with top American social scientists, believed that there were a host of emerging domestic social and economic issues that required not simply academic minds working in disciplinary departments on university campuses but that those minds be engaged with the emerging foundation community and the newly socially conscious government bureaucracy. Early SSRC committees, at times as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s brain trust, worked on such issues as developing ethical structures for business, managing problems faced by agricultural and other rural populations, and establishing a national social security mechanism. As the United States became more engaged with the larger world after World War II, SSRC began to focus more on international affairs, and then like the academic world at large, the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the disillusionment of the 1960s and early 1970s drove a wedge between the academy and policy-makers, making each wary and suspicious of the other. With that came the virtual disappearance of the public intellectual able to bring credible critical thinking to knotty public questions.

By the 1990s, SSRC’s focus began to shift from the problematic of the United States in the world to that of the globalizing world itself. Taking its founding principals international, the SSRC has worked to reestablish the links between high-quality analysis of problems facing societies around the globe and the ever-widening arena of those who make policies concerning those problems. We believe that the social sciences have a role to play and an obligation to help create the necessary knowledge and the intellectual environment—informed governments, informed institutions, informed citizens—that make civil society possible and a just and prosperous world feasible. Academically grounded organizations like SSRC, and philanthropies like the Center for Global Partnership, which are concerned with bringing good analysis to public problems, are critical to this venture.

In the history of the interplay between policy and the academy, two observations become clear:

1) The definition of policy has expanded well beyond the early notion that social science and national government and philanthropy were the main actors. Policy is not confined to what governments do but is also about the actions and reactions of a host of actors in a wide range of arenas—from medicine and public health to economics, arts and culture, and citizen activism.

2) As the definition of policy has expanded, so have the stakeholders. In the 1920s, stakeholders were university-based social scientists in the United States, officials in the executive branch of the U.S. government, and the emerging U.S. philanthropic community dedicated to funding interaction between the two. Today, a list of stakeholders for the kind of thematic work outlined above ranges from development-oriented NGOs and international organizations (IOs) to agencies and individuals who make social policy in respective countries, to the press and the general public, as well as private-sector industries.

This is a significant expansion. Calhoun’s four points are basic to this endeavor, but we must operationalize them further to make real progress. SSRC brings high-quality social science to bear on public issues, which become objects of scientific study so that practical action can be more effective. And we seek to make such study international not only because it is fair, but because it produces the best science and the best linkage between scientific knowledge and practical action. Because we are committed to science, and to the public good, we are committed to open communication and intellectual diversity, and the opportunities to build relationships of trust that both require.

Networks, Collaboration, and Comparison

Encouraging open communication, bringing different perspectives together, and focusing analysis on key issues all simultaneously advance social science and the public interest. But that does not complete our task. More needs to be done to understand globalization, to understand terrorism, to grasp the inequalities that are fundamental to each, to clarify our choices, and to anticipate their consequences. Thus, networks, collaboration, and comparison are all key to operationalizing progress toward a globally connected, public social science.

Research and Training Networks. Many types of networks are proving enormously useful in various contexts. They may be issue-centered or disciplinary; national, regional, or cross-regional; formal or informal. But these networks are not easy to form, to fund, or to sustain—or, even if successful, to replicate.

Collaboration. International collaborative work has long been standard in the natural and physical sciences. Yet it has made little headway in the social sciences and humanities, where career incentives reward individual accomplishment. But international collaborative work is exactly what is needed to overcome increasing individual specialization, to deal with problems not contained within national boundaries, and to take advantage of the insights that emerge from connections and linkages.

We can each think of instances of successful and unsuccessful collaborations, as well as multiple impediments to true international collaboration resulting in jointly produced works. Over the past year, the SSRC has been working to develop international collaboration as a "strategic emphasis" that cross-cuts programmatic areas, projects, and activities.

Promoting international collaboration in the social sciences is not new at SSRC; however, its renewed focus comes at the confluence of several changes, opportunities, and needs, including: building upon the recognition by research and funding communities of the importance of global research connections to study global phenomena; multiplying channels, mechanisms, and projects that create international research and training opportunities for a new generation of researchers; maintaining and organizing SSRC’s international work in a post–area studies era; and "turning the praxis of our work into the object of our thought," thus ensuring institutional learning and transmission of knowledge on collaboration as a research practice and as a valued outcome of project organization. Central to the SSRC engagement with international collaboration is the belief that the quality and relevance of social science are improved immeasurably by the inclusion of varied perspectives based in multiple geographical locations.

Comparison. If, as some have said, comparison works best when problem-driven, the list of critical topics above will benefit from comparative perspectives. But we are left with pressing conceptual and methodological questions as well as external (institutional) and internal (research-related) barriers.

What can or cannot be compared? When are comparisons likely to be valid, and when do they make no sense? How do you choose a case for comparison? At what career stage does it make sense to undertake comparative work? The incorporation of a second case is very difficult for those who know one case well. Ironically, this is especially difficult for area specialists whose high standards for competence in one case may make it hard to know what level of expertise is needed for a second or third case. What methods are needed, and how can training be obtained? The more comparative work is urged, the more these questions are raised.

CONCLUSION

These are the directions ahead for international social science research committed to the public interest. There will and must be more cooperation, more real collaboration on equal terms, more development of theories based on non-western cases, and more comparative work. To move toward a more globally connected, public social science is not only possible but incumbent upon us, however difficult the task. This is the future of a truly international intellectual community.

After 9/11, internationalism encountered a crisis as the United States and other world powers responded with new assertions of their national interests, border controls, homeland-security programs, and military interventions. If 9/11 symbolized U.S. vulnerability, the invasion of Iraq symbolized U.S. military might. But not only is there still fighting today, long after the formally declared end of the war, but a host of international relationships are strained or ruptured.

Science is among the victims. The pursuit of knowledge depends not merely on peace, but on open minds and open borders. Collaboration and comparison cannot take place without the flow of information and interaction across borders. The work of social scientists is especially challenged because it touches directly on contentious matters of political power, economic performance, cultural identity, and social welfare. Social science intersects with public controversies recurrently, and too often governments respond by repressing the work of intellectuals who raise uncomfortable questions or present data that defies the prevailing view.

While social science is a vital arena of international cooperation, fear of terrorism, disease, or economic instability drives new pressures for insularity. It has become dramatically harder for intellectuals—especially those from Islamic countries—to travel to international conferences. To secure a visa is a trial it itself, and then they must suffer indignities and delays at airports. Foreign students are subject to scrutiny and regulation. Intellectuals whose teaching or research does not fit nationalist ideologies are harassed. Even in the United States, with its long tradition of academic freedom, there have been campaigns to limit not only dissidents but the teaching of international studies.

Internationally and domestically, science depends on institutions in which the pursuit of knowledge is a basic value, and in which colleagues can argue with the confidence that logic and evidence will have precedence over the exercise of political power. Science depends, therefore, not only on observation, experiment, and theory but also on trust, communication, and shared endeavor. The SSRC, along with its international partners, works to make creativity and innovation possible precisely by creating spaces for international and interdisciplinary collaboration and debate.

This is a road that all intellectuals must take together, as no single researcher, no single discipline, and indeed, no national community of researchers can hope to make progress alone on the issues facing our increasingly interconnected societies in the twenty-first century. Organizations like SSRC can and must provide a range of incentives and structures to enable this work by individuals, by groups of individuals, and through developing new and flexible institutional arrangements.

This is our shared challenge.

References

Contradictions of Globalization Cover
Contradictions of Globalization—Democracy, Culture, and Public Sphere, ed. Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Contributors: Clifford Chanin, James Fallows, G. John Ikenberry, Ignes Kleden, Mary Byrne McDonnell, Maznah Mohamad, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, P. Sainath, Saskia Sassen.
 
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