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

678 Stein Rokkan
at the right time: communications between sociologists in the East and West
had reached a point where cooperation on concrete tasks of empirical research
was possible, and the regional organizations of the West were concentrating
their efforts on purely economic studies and could not offer a minimum of
infrastructure for cross-national research in central fields of sociology.
The successes of the Vienna Centre and the UNESCO Institute of Education in
Hamburg hold important lessons for the future. Cross-national research re-
quires an institutional framework, an organizational basis. Great plans and im-
portant pilot studies may be born of haphazard encounters between enthusiasts,
but a cumulative tradition of cross-national research can develop only within
a clear-cut organizational setting.
Demographers, economists and to some extent educational scientists have
been able to build up broad international professions within the framework of
large-scale intergovernmental organizations : the UN, the Regional Economic
Commissions, the World Bank, the OECD, the EEC and UNESCO’s Sector of
Education all offer continuous opportunities for experience in the handling
and evaluation of data masses from wide ranges of countries and help to foster
genuine cross-national expertise.
There is no such firm basis for cross-national endeavours in the other social
sciences: in anthropology, sociology, or political science. There is some move-
ment in the fields closest to demography, economics and education. It is
interesting to observe that the two Research Committees of the International
Sociological Association which have come closest to the development of a
cumulative programme of cross-national studies are those focused on the
Family and on Mobility, both centring on variables close to the concerns of
demographers and both relying heavily on data from enumerations or from
surveys close to the model of the census. It is also significant that the ISA has
SO far been unable to mount an active Research Committee for the Sociology
of Education. There is already a basis for cooperative work on educational
statistics in UNESCO and the OECD and therefore not the same need for an
institutionalization of personal communication networks.
In other fields of sociology it has proved much more difficult to develop
continuous programmes: there have been no institutional frameworks for
long-term commitments to cross-national inquiries and, worse, hardly anything
has been done to evaluate or standardize the production of data across any
two or more nations.
What can be done to strengthen the foundations for the internationalization of
these underprivileged fields within sociology and the other social sciences ?
The UNESCO Department of Social Sciences has explored several strategies in
its efforts to foster an explicitly international orientation within these disci-
plines.
In its first attempts in this direction UNESCO focused attention on a few sub-
stantive fields of direct interest within its over-all programme: studies of the
sources of tensions among nations and races, studies of stereotypes and preju-
dices, studies of opinions on international issues. The principal product of
these early efforts of comparative research was the Cantril sample survey in