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

680 Stein Rokkan
areas of each country.95 A fist discussion of the development of such ecological
archives took place at the Second Conference on Data Archives in September,
1964.9~ and a technical conference on quantitative ecological analysis took place
at Evian in September, 1966.97
The ISSC has for some time made efforts to move beyond the exploration
of such strictly quantitative methods and to take up other approaches to
systematic comparisons among cultural and political units. At an international
conference in Paris in 1965 an attempt was made to map out a strategy for
comparativc research within three further fields.98
Thefirst theme to be taken up was the Cross-Cultural Method: the qualitative
alternative to the aggregate comparisons espoused by Karl Deutsch and his
team. Bruce Russett and his collaborators chose as their units of analysis the
politically and territorially defined entities termed nations and assembled the
available quantitative data on their properties. George Peter Murdock and
his co-workers chose as their units a sample of culturally dehed societies and
developed a system of qualitative codes for characterizing each such unit.
Robert Textor went further and tried to organize, on the basis of such codings, a
computer-produced Cross-Cultural Summary for a sample of 400 cultures. This
great effort in data processing, at the time still only in the form of direct printouts,
formed the basis for the discussion of the first theme of the conference.
The second and the third themes of the conference were closely related to each
other: the discussion of Comparative Analysis of Historical Change focused on
the building of nation-states in Europe and the West, and the discussion of Comparative
Analysis of Processes of Modernization concentrated on the possibilities
and limitations of generalized developmental models in the study of social and
political change in any part of the world, whether in the older naiions of
Europe and the West or in the emerging units of post-colonial Africa or Asia.
Notions of development, directional change, and modernization had already
been extensively discussed within the ISSC programme, but thus far mainly in
terms of the availability of codable and quantifiable data for systematic processing:
data on levels and rates of growth, on differences between advanced
and backward areas, on the spread of material and cultural innovations, on the
speed of economic, social and political mobilization. But such data must be
analysed and interpreted in a broader context of historical knowledge. The
social sciences can become ‘developmental‘ only through close cooperation
with the students of the time dimensions of social life, the historians. For the
first time within the ISSC programme, steps were taken to bring historians and
social scientists together to explore how they could be mutually useful in
comparative studies of nation-building and processes of modernization.
The discussion at the conference brought out a broad consensus on priorities
in the development of cross-cultural and cross-national research. There appeared
to be general agreement that the International Social Science Council is in a
position to exert an important brokerage function in the advancement of comparative
research across political, ideological and cultural boundaries. It was
equally clear that the Council could not make much headway on its own: it
has to base its action on initiatives taken at the centres of intellectual innovation