Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 659
wil no doubt continue to pursue such ‘mixed‘ strategies, but substantial progress
in this field does not seem likely unless we reach a higher level of differentiation
and specialization in research roles: some social scientists wil no doubt
continue to pursue theoretical refinements, but to meet their demands for evidence
we must also encourage the formation of a broad phalanx of experts on
a wide range of empirical data across several countires.
To form a basis for detailed comparisons of rates of development within
new as well as established nation-states, it is essential to supplement information
from historical documents and observers’ reports with data from standardized
counts and other attempts at systematic social, cultural and political mapmaking.
Only in this way is it possible to approach reliable estimates of changes
over time and of within-unit variations in the conditions and sequences of
development.
The statisticians of the Western world can look back on more than a century
of cooperative efforts to standardize national bookkeeping and census-taking
procedures. The great Belgian pioneer, QuCtelet, established a network of contacts
throughout Europe and, in 1851, took a decisive initiative in launching the
International Statistical Congresses. The next generation went further and in
1887 set up the International Statistical Institute: this provided a basis for
contacts among experts and adrninistrators of many nations and prepared the
ground for the systematic work of comparison and standardization later taken
up at the governmental level by the League of Nations, the International
Labour Organisation and, during the last two decades, by the United Nations
and its Specialized Agencies33
It took a long time, however, before the impact of these developments was
felt throughout the social sciences. The demographers were the first to develop
the tools of analysis required in mastering these vast quantities of data, the
economists followed suit after the Second World War, but the sociologists have
only recently taken up the challenge of the increasing masses of cross-national
data. The early fascination with comparative statistics for suicide, homicide and
other items of Moralstatistik did not herald the advent of a comparative sociology
of national development: Durkheim’s work was of great methodological
significance but was not followed up through broader comparative investigations
of processes of change in industrializing and urbanizing nations. It is characteristic
that the pioneering comparisons of mobility data published by Pitirim
Sorokin in Ig2734 barely caused any reaction in the scholarly world at the time,
and was discovered to be a true classic of cross-national research only after the
establishment of the Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility
under the auspices of the International Sociological Association in 1951.35 The
decisive breakthrough toward quantitative comparisons did not in fact occur
until the 1950s: economists finally began to come seriously to grips with the
possibilities of precise analyses of rates and patterns of growth, sociologists
started concerning themselves with comparative measures of processes of
structural change, and even students of politics ceased to be exclusively absorbed
by single systems and began trying to work out schemes of comparison and
to devise ways of testing hypotheses quantitatively.