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

778 Eric Trist
poor one, it now has a record of considerable success in pursuing its develop-
ment by means very much its own, though these have not impaired its capability
to use foreign and international resources. While reflecting the influence of
British institutions, it has the advantage of being Catholic, which increases its
acceptability to Latin America and Catholic parts of Africa and Asia. Yet it
does not proselytize.
44. Ireland is a country where the social sciences have undergone a substan-
tial development in the last decade. These developments have been promoted by
a modernizing elite, members of which are to be found in all sections of the
society : the political parties, the Civil Service, the Church, industry, the trade
unions, the professions and the universities. Though they are few in number and
have much opposition to face - and more apathy - they know each other and in
Dublin they have a world city as their capital.
45. The two trends to be described are complementary. The first is informal
and is the result of one or two leading Irish social scientists having got to know
colleagues whom they found to be of like mind in institutes in Britain, such as
the Tavistock, and organizations in the Netherlands and Norway with which
they had become associated. All these organizations were interested in generic
problem-oriented research. Very soon their representatives were introduced to
innovative individuals in Irish industry and government. On this background a
series of projects arose in management-labour relations, regional development
and the building of new industries which involved all concerned in a common
learning process. The projects had an international colouring and members of
the client organizations as well as of the social research institutes visited devel-
opment sites in different countries. In certain projects the sites inside Ireland
were the most advanced, so that the least developed country became the
demonstrator and teacher. This is something which can happen in any part of
the world. For example, some original and sophisticated attempts in the use of
group methods in training civil servants have been carried out in West and
East Africa with the assistance of a consultant sponsored by the Ford Founda-
tion, and more recently in the UAR and other Arab states with the assistance of
the European Institute for Transnational Studies in Group and Organizational
Development.
46. The informal developments in Ireland which have been described became
related to a more formal set of initiatives taken by the Irish Institute for Public
Administration which led to the setting up of a Social Research Committee
with the objective of getting more empirical studies under way and preparing
the ground for an autonomous social research council. This committee was
widely representative of both governmental and non-governmental interests.
It led to a request to the United Nations to send an expert to review the Irish
situation and to make recommendations on the use of the social sciences in
national development. It is not without significance that the expert chosen, Dr.
Henning Friis, was himself from a small country - Denmark.99 His recommenda-
tion was that an existing institution, the Economic Research Institute, should
be enlarged and extended to become an all-purpose social research institute
which would bring together sociology and psychology as well as economics