NORTH AMERICA: Social research too inward-looking

The most distinctive feature of North American social science, besides its size, is the extent of the investment made in time, facilities, training and incentives for research since the Second World War, says Craig Calhoun, President of the US Social Science Research Council and a social sciences professor at New York University.

Writing in the World Social Science Report 2010, Calhoun says North American social science research has grown substantially and has achieved high educational standards. But it is also based overwhelmingly in universities and although the researchers are also teachers, "in more elite institutions teaching demands are moderated to allow time for research".

He says that Canada is more 'egalitarian' while the US system is more 'hierarchically differentiated' and the inequality there is tied to competition over relative standing, though neither country uses official national ranking systems to evaluate universities or departments.

"Research productivity and citation indices loom large in the variety of unofficial indicators to which administrators pay attention."

Calhoun notes that in contrast to the US, funding for Canadian social science research comes centrally from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. In the US, on the other hand, he says there is no primary, centralised government funding agency and the diversity of funding is "a major source of vitality".

Social science traditionally has attracted students engaged with social issues, he says. During the student movements of the 1960s it informed radical thought and was attacked for not being radical enough. But for most disciplines, rapid growth ended in the mid-1970s, apart from economics, psychology and new fields such as communications.

Enrolments in the remaining social science disciplines, however, began to expand again in the 1990s and are generally robust today. Some 340,000 students receive bachelor degrees in social science fields annually, or 20% of all graduates.

While the social science disciplines are broadly similar in the US and Canada, he says there are some national variations. The prominence of First Nations has influenced Canadian anthropology and political science, "leading to further exploration of group rights and related issues".

"In recent years, there have been fiscal strains, particularly in state-funded institutions, and the inequality between and within institutions has grown. At even the richest universities, social scientists are acutely conscious that funding has grown much faster in the natural sciences and at many professional schools."

Calhoun also notes that social science and humanities departments are more dependent on funding associated with undergraduate teaching but that "further institutional upheavals may lie ahead". A financial crisis at the University of California, for example, resulted in cuts that fell heavily on the social sciences and humanities.

He says an important recent concern in North American social science has been that academic research has become too "inward-looking, oriented to highly specialised intellectual sub-fields and not to broader public concerns". But he argues that the concern is as old as the disciplines themselves and points out that the idea of 'inter-disciplinarity' was introduced when the Social Science Research Council was founded in 1923.

Inter-disciplinarity, however, was not then regarded as an end in itself, Calhoun writes: "It was valued as the basis for bringing different sorts of knowledge to bear on public issues. The same agenda informed the creation of inter-disciplinary centres at universities. But disciplinary departments have remained more powerful, especially with regard to employment decisions."

In a discussion of the role of private foundations as funding sources, Calhoun says most "aim to improve the human condition and have historically supported social science because they expect it to contribute to this mission".

But he says in recent years, many of the funding bodies have become disillusioned, arguing that social science is too academic, too little concerned with informing public dialogue, and too focused on specialist agendas rather than large social issues.

"They have sometimes sought to stimulate agendas with new funding but recently many have shifted funds away from social science and towards organisations oriented to direct practical action."

Yet in a rather contradictory passage soon after, Calhoun goes on to say that North American social science "is increasingly oriented outward and focused on pressing public problems". Social scientists, he says, bring "substantial accumulated knowledge and an impressive array of analytical approaches".

geoff.maslen@uw-news.com