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

696 Eric Trist
patterns. The country groupings adopted, together with the target countries
selected, are given below.
12. The US had to be regarded as a group in itself since the volume and diver-
sity of social science activities for which it accounts is greater than that in the
rest of the world. Moreover, the slowing down of development of the social
sciences in Europe in the inter-war period combined with the emigration to the
us of most of the leading German and Austrian social scientists, caused by the
rise of Nazism, has made American developments for some thirty years the
main technical influence on social scientists in other countries. It is only in the
present decade that a noticeable beginning has been made towards redressing
this imbalance.
13. The larger advanced countries of Western Europe, where the pioneering of
the social sciences had been carried out, constituted the next group. Germany-
from which so many of the greatest progenitive ideas have come - was selected
as the target country, as much less was known about the current situation of the
social sciences there than in France and Britain for which detailed reports were
already available. It was also a country where little had so far happened in the
way of science policy or planning. It displayed in an acute form the tendency of
research in the social sciences to separate itself from the universities. It showed
the effects on their unchanged structures of teaching overload caused by an
explosion in the student population.
14. The smaller advanced countries of Western Europe exhibit a somewhat
different pattern characterized by a trend towards a national science policy and
a higher evaluation of the social sciences - though this is now spreading to the
larger countries. They are also characterized by a dispersion of research and
persisting inflexibility in university systems. This again is present in varying
degrees in the larger countries. While Belgium was the selected country, it
would have been desirable also to include a depth study of a Scandinavian
country since a larger share of overall scientific resources is now allocated to the
social sciences in countries such as Sweden than elsewhere in Europe. Fortu-
nately, such a study was available on the Netherlands where proportional allo-
cation is ~imilar.3~
15. The socialist countries of Eastern Europe constituted another major
grouping, where the Academies of Sciences, which include the social along with
the natural sciences, represent a novel system of research organization. We
can expect considerable increases in the resources allocated to the social
sciences in these countries. Czechoslovakia was selected as representing most
of the problems and illustrating the recent growth of empirical studies. Multiple
reports on Poland and Yugoslavia were also available, which exhibit similar
trends, especially in sociology. Only rather formal information was obtained
from the Soviet Union, though detailed as regards manpower and finance.
16. From the standpoint of the level of science, the ‘developing countries’
must include the more traditional and less industrialized countries of Western
Europe. This group still exhibits little differentiation of the social sciences from
the humanities. Recent pressure from the applied area, however, is leading to
more empirical work. Spain has been taken as typical. It was chosen also be-