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

The organization and financing of research 791
ly those of the single professor variety, which this tradition has tended to perpetuate.
18. In this regard the larger departments common in American universities
with multiple chairs and in which associate and assistant professors have a
voicein decision-making afford a better match to what is required. On the other
hand, American universities maintain the tradition of academic individualism
by forcing the individual scholar to conform to the rule of ‘publish or perish’.
In the West R & D laboratories in some of the large industrial concerns are
organized more in keeping with a group value system than are many universities.
Empirical studies are required on what the climate is like and how decisions
are made in the Institutes of the Academies of Sciences of Eastern Europe.*
19. In some universities the tendency is growing not only to form centres of
selectively inter-dependent individuals, drawn from a number of teaching departments,
but for these centres to form research consortia with other organizations
in different universities and in other countries. Nor are such associations confined
to university bodies. The probability is low that the key resources for
critical programmes wil be found in one place. Nevertheless, these resources
need dependable bases if they are to join together in high-risk research expeditions
of a temporary though often protracted character. An inter-dependent
system of stability and mobility requires to be evolved.
Longitudinal capability
20. Another direction of the search for an alternative to academic individualism
is the creation of institutional capabilities which would permit the undertaking
of large-scale investigations over long periods of time. The basic issue has al-
ready been touched on. The increasing rate of change and the degree of uncer-
tainty and of environmental complexity characteristic of the contemporary
world is forcing societies to collect more accurate information about their
populations, institutions and individual members, the trends and levels of their
economic and social performance, and to seek to know more also about other
societies. The collection of social and economic facts has, however, tended to be
left to governmental bureaucracies slow to make use of the latest techniques and
resistant to widening for scientific purposes categories of information designed
to meet limited administrative requirements.
21. The first problem is to close the gap between existing practice and avail-
able concepts and methods. This means either changing the relation between
official bodies and sources of social science competence in universities and spe-
cial institutes or bringing new and more appropriate organizations into existence.
While progress is being made in several countries it is too slow to meet society’s
requirements under conditions of accelerating change.
22. The second problem concerns the extent to which general purpose social
and economic data are made public. Wil they be presented in a form which
* Micro-studies have been made of a number of research institutes in Hungary. AR
account of these is given by Dr. A. SZALAI, ‘National Research Planning and Research
Statistics,’ in A. de REUCK, et al. (eds.), Decision Making in National Science Policy,
London, J. & A. Churchill Ltd., 1968.