A ‘New Paradigm’ for Social Science Knowledge?
Liliana Deyanova
In the last few years people from universities and other stakeholders have been talking more and more about the need for a new type of sociological knowledge defined as ‘practical knowledge.’This is a formula that encompasses different things, different aspirationsand dreams, and, not least, different interests: ‘professional knowledge’,‘applied science’,‘marketable disciplines’, orientation towards ‘actual practice’, with ‘more practical disciplines in the curriculum’,‘opening up to society’ and to the ‘job market’; shifting focus from theoretical teaching to ‘research-based teaching’ and ‘interdisciplinarity’; or, briefly put, ensuring ‘quality education.’Of course, no one could question the need for all this nor, for that matter, its radical departure from the ideas espoused by socialist scientific apparatchiks and student ‘masses’ of providing education in social sciences that are ‘close to life’, in a ‘people’s university’ with ‘high-quality scientific workers.’
Still, this is hardly enough to explain the excessive repetition of several things in interviews with social science researchers and teachers in the last five years[1]:‘diversification of education’,‘educational investments and services’,‘quality of education’,‘partner institutions’,opposition between academic and applied sociology (obvious in statements like ‘Doctoral students must work on research and not on theory projects’), interdisciplinarity (or even ‘transdisciplinarity’ – which I must admit I’d never heard of before). That’s ‘the spirit of the times,’ one might say and leave it at that. Still, how come there is such a ‘spirit’ if we do not accept the dogmatic Marxist postulate of the infrastructure and superstructure? That is why here I will try to interpret some symptoms of the changes occurring in the ‘university field’ and in the field of social sciences in Late Modernity. My purpose, however, is not to examine systematically this problem of key importance to our discipline but only to interpret one of the conspicuous, in my view, narrative lines in the interviews in question.
In this sense, the title of my paper is misleading. It implies mainly what one of the ‘global’ experts in the sphere of university education and science has termed a ‘new paradigm of knowledge’ (Gibbons 1998: 43) and the questions worth asking in this context. But it does not imply a systematic investigation of the new situation which Kolyo Koev, in his excellentstudy on the subject through the lens of the ‘elementary forms of everyday life’ and Weber’s time, describes as a ‘classical situation’: a situation that brings about ‘a disruption of the monotony of scientific knowledge caused by inconsistence between the conceptual apparatus and the social reality subject to research’, a situation that outlines a ‘new “vision” of the world and new “consolidation” of scientific knowledge’ (Koev 2003: 30).
Indeed, as Weber notes in the text quoted at the beginning of this paper, there comes a time when the until then self-evident content of our scientific knowledge begins to elude us and our knowledge becomes ‘uncertain’: The ‘value scale’ according to which we have conducted our ‘value-free’ research changes before our very eyes but the new ‘landscape’ does not have sufficiently clear outlines, with the outlines themselves depending on the way we will designate them and explain the new types of unpredictability and uncertainty. (Weber 1998: 84)Because one of the critical tasks of social scientists is, according to Weber,[2]‘to help the individual recognise the supreme norms and ideals that are manifested in the concrete value-judgement…’ As regards the question whether the individual should accept those norms and ideals, this ‘can never be the task of an empirical science.’
§1. The ‘New Paradigm’ for University Science
Books like The New Production of Knowledge by Michael Gibbons et al point out that there is a fundamental change in the production and role of knowledge today. That globalisation is an ‘engine of change in the University’ and that this change consists in the emergence of a new set of research practices but also in the spread of research as a recognisably competent activity that is practiced beyond the walls of academe (Gibbons 2003: 118). The new mode of knowledge production is labelled ‘Mode 2’,as opposed to the structure of the old, Humboldtian university or ‘Mode 1’.‘Mode 1 is disciplinary while Mode 2 is transdisciplinary’ (Gibbons 2003: 120). Today knowledge is produced in a context of application, in the context of the usability of knowledge, and not in a context governed by the interests of a specific community. It is characterised by ‘heterogeneity of skills’.Mode 1 is hierarchical, whereas in Mode 2 ‘the preference is for flatter hierarchies using organisational structures which are transient’. In comparison with Mode 1, ‘Mode 2 is more socially accountable and reflexive.’There is also a difference in the type of quality control, as Mode 2 involves not only peer review but also ‘a much-expanded system of quality control’. In a ‘knowledge society’ the sites of knowledge production are much more in number, whereas the ‘knowledge society’ itself is ‘transdisciplinary, application-oriented and diversified,’and socially accountable (Gibbons 1998). As well as profit-making. The ‘new paradigm of knowledge’, discussed by Gibbons in his 1998 study, implies a new view of university relevance where ‘economic imperatives will sweep all before it’ (here Gibbons quotes Hague, noting that ‘if the universities do not adapt, they will be by-passed’).
Because knowledge is ‘inherently transgressive’, Helga Nowotny explains, advancing the same argument, ‘nobody has anywhere succeeded for very long in containing knowledge’: ‘Knowledge seeps through institutions and structures like water through the pores of a membrane.’ And like water, it ‘seeps in both directions, from science to society as well as from society to science’ (Nowotny 2001). As regards the question of quality control, she admits that it is a very tricky criterion because the context varies; that is why in their first book they had readily admitted that quality control is the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of knowledge production. But she calls on us to keep in mind the ‘main thing’: that if in disciplinary knowledge there are standards that will allow us to evaluate someone as, for example, a good biologist, now we should start to speak of ‘value-integrated’ quality, of something like ‘a societal value that needs to be integrated into the definition of good science’ (to the extent that society and science are ‘engaged in co-evolutionary processes’). And that there is something like an agora, which ‘is everywhere’.
It follows, then – and here I quote the third author from this group, Peter Scott – that ‘expertise is no longer the preserve of experts’; furthermore, as a result of these new configurations of knowledge producers, ‘these “activist” knowledge organisations challenge notions of evidence, objectivity, balance, debate which have typically been regarded as fundamental to the University (even if these high ideals have not always been met)’ (Scott in Breton 2003: 243).[3]
The problem of ‘the new production of knowledge’ is discussed not only in the eponymous book by Michael Gibbons et al or in another book by almost the same team (Re-Thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty). But as Gibbons is one of the experts in transnational commissions tasked to re-think and revise the role of knowledge and higher education and the author of well-known papers and studies (such as his paper on ‘Globalisation and the Future of Higher Education’ presented at the UNESCO conference ‘Globalisation: What Issues are at Stake for Universities?’ in Quebec, Canada, 18 – 21 September 2002, or the World Bank paper Higher Education Relevance in the 21st Century), he is one of the strangely often cited authors in this connection. And as I am not an expert in sociology of science and innovations nor is the novelty of this theory my subject of interest here, this summary is based less on the extensive theses expounded by Gibbons, Nowotny, Scott in their major books than on their short papers presented and published in proceedings of international conferences reformulating the role of university knowledge in the new global society, a ‘knowledge society’.
However, I find plausible the explanations offered by sociologists of science in a series of papers in the journal Actes de la recherche en Sciences Sociales as to the ‘inexplicable echo of this book’ considering that it has a ‘modest scientific place in true academic circles’ (Schinn 2002: 22), that in it ‘there are no real questions but there are a significant number of answers’, that the claims of the authors do not rest on concrete analyses and none of them has conducted concrete research, that their approach is not connected with a scientific paradigm (notwithstanding Latour’s superficial influence on some of them), that there are less popular but much more interesting models of explaining the science-government-technology nexus. Briefly put, according to experts in sociology of science this is a performative discourse of ‘the firm believer in a new social and cognitive order’ working actively for the latter’s establishment. The authors of The New Production of Knowledge, who have become the core of ‘a community where one of the binding characteristics is the use of a series of words’ (Schinn 2002), do not ask themselves questions about the institutional realities in Africa or Eastern Europe, about the mediating and authoritativeunits between ‘academics’ and society, about the possibility that their new epistemology may actually clear the way for ‘a neo-corporatist vision of the world’.
Yet precisely such views of the knowledge society and ‘knowledge-based economy’ (the subject of a 1996 OSCE report – cf. Milot 2003) are becoming a basic paradigm of the new educational and public policies of the OSCE, the World Bank, UNESCO and other institutions concerned with knowledge management, with reconsideration and redefinition of the role of university science in higher education. It is they that determine the definitions of ‘global public goods’ and the norm of ‘good practices’ which knowledge managers should bear in mind because ‘knowledge management’ (which differs from the old term ‘administration’, notes Gibbons) is a profession that has its own logic.
I was wondering precisely about this logic when I had to comment on an interview with a new Bulgarian university ‘entrepreneur’ who otherwise probably had liberal views of the world. Because his language was driven by the logic of the education market: ‘Students pay and expect services that are good value for money’; they rightfully want to receive such services ‘at minimum cost, time and efforts’; ‘we’ must produce marketable, convertible knowledge (admittedly, the word ‘marketable’ was used less frequently than ‘convertible’ but likewise referred to a quantifiable equivalent); university education must be ‘diversified’, allowing the pursuit of different professional careers. If ‘the client’ wants it, then the ‘decision-maker’ must act adequately instead of offering ‘heavy courses’ of the ‘methodology-and-theory’ type; incidentally, those who want to may choose to take such courses without expecting too much credits for them, but each must take responsibility for his or her choice; we must ‘take more doctoral students’, making them do research and not ‘theories’; there already is a ‘market for doctoral and masters students’, and university faculty approveof it…
I have ventured to quote extensively from this interview with a Bulgarian scholar made by a French colleague of mine in 2002 not because the language is representative and commonly used but because remnants of what is ultimately the same logic recur more or less in the majority of interviews in question. Even when the interviewees are criticising the new reforms in education and the ‘incompetent experts’ conducting them. We are acting as if there really were a market of knowledge services, of doctoral or masters students and as if this ‘market’ were selecting the best and referring them to ‘the global companies providing the best value for money’ (Gibbons quoted by Milot 2003: 72). As if the above statement concerning biomedical knowledge applied also to social knowledge and university-industry (enterprise) partnerships; as if there were no problem in what are being proposed to us as role models or best practices; or in the amalgam in documents which often equates ‘knowledge-based economy’ with ‘knowledge-based society’ where there are supposed to be ‘new providers of higher education’ and ‘advancement of the higher education market and the emergence of a global market of high-quality human capital’ (Salmi on Breton 2003: 55 ff). I think there is also a problem in that doctoral degrees are, paradoxically, becoming more dependent on the logic of the market and on the ‘world of professions’ (as if it were one) than on the logic of the relevant scientific discipline. Incidentally, those who are against the classical disciplines in Mode 1 and insist on a multidisciplinarity that would supposedly decrease ‘narrow specialisation’ are at the same time, paradoxically again, in favour of ‘greater professionalisation’ – which is in fact a much narrower form of specialisation than the classical disciplinary specialisation. Moreover, their multidisciplinarity is not based on interdisciplinary complementarity and dialogue between disciplinesbut on accounting criteria and is designed to improve cost-effectiveness.[4]
The new ideological language of education reformers in general and university reformers in particular is indeed very interesting: explicit or implicit, ‘left’ or ‘right’, primitively alter-globalistic or politically correct and non-catastrophic, it merits a longer review which I cannot do here – not only because I am not an expert in sociology of education but simply because I am a sociologist from the age of Mode 1 who is interested in sociology of sociology. However, I cannot omit giving an extreme example of the Bulgarian contribution to the assertion of the new ideas of a ‘knowledge society’ and of ‘education for all’. I am referring to a publication titled Obrazovanie za vsichki/Education for Allpresenting the results of the Bulgarian part of an eponymous international project.[5]The publication abounds in unverified ideological claims about presumable success and achievements in the democratisation, innovation and humanisation of the education system (p. 9), about autonomy and personal choice. There are also quite a few contradictions, such as the conclusion about ‘achievements in the decentralisation of education’ followed by the proud statement that ‘progress of decentralisation [sic] is controlled by the Ministry of Education and Science’ (p. 25). I do not know if the ‘agora’ (in the sense in which the term is used by Helga Nowotny, quoted above) has reacted to this ‘expert publication’. I am also wondering if the agora itself makes sense in the new social situation of Mode 2 where science is governed by the imperative of ‘practical knowledge’ with its ‘urgency’, ‘transience’ and so on. I can only cite an opinion about eponymous internationally-financed projects related to privatisation of health care: ‘Our project was not the only one; as far as I know, there were sixteen similar ones but none of us knew about them, about their arguments, their hypotheses and concepts, about their results… each one of us started from scratch as if nothing had been done before’ (2002).
§2. Sociologists and the Polity (Polis)
Indeed, what is the agora today and what is the role of sociologists in the polity, that is, in the civic community? It is not just cases like the one discussed above that have made me wonder where, exactly, lies the boundary between ideological and non-ideological language, why researchers choose to study one rather than another scientific or social problem, why the problem in question is worded as it is, what is the connection between wording and the priorities of the different financial and political institutions; who recommends the study and to whom do the results belong.
And something more general: How was the knowledge about ‘the transition’ produced, which theories and ideological constructs underlie the discourse on ‘the transition to democracy’ and, more specifically, which are the influential theories and the influential ideological constructs (“ideologemes”); how have sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists contributed to the elaboration of this language of the Bulgarian ‘transitions’, of the transformations on the Balkans. (Considering that we are talking about a destabilised region where there are many struggles, including ‘struggles over words’ as Bourdieu puts it. A region where expertises quickly become an ontology of the social world and even ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’.)
Before giving an example of another type of ‘details’ that are worth noting, let me say that my utopia of sociological critique is the difficult to achieve the balance between neutrality and engagement (something which the Bourdieu school calls ‘engaged neutrality’). Of course this balance is not a problem only of Bourdieu’s critical sociology. The tension between facts and values, facticity and normativity, positive knowledge and normative knowledge, expertise and critique ‘is’ and ‘should be’ a constitutive element of the ‘sciences of culture’ themselves. Because people often associate Bourdieu only with his political rather than with his scientific arguments in favour of a struggle against ‘imperialist reason’, I will cite Weber as well. As noted earlier, Weber also inquires into the value-neutrality of science (Wertfreiheit or ‘value-freedom’) but also into the relationship to values and the ‘value scale’ according to which value-free research of the social situation can and must be conducted (Koev 2003: 60). As you know, for Weber these are interlinked aspects of the common process of rationalisation of life, disenchantment (Entzauberung), value polytheism – which has made it possible for the question of the ascertainment of facts and the question of the way of practical action in a given cultural community to be two different questions, two ‘heterogeneous problems’. That is why practical action cannot be scientifically determined (by an ‘empirical’, in Weber’s sense, ‘science’). This, however, does not mean that the relationshipto values is not the significant problem. As Weberian scholars demonstrate, the main thread running throughout his work is the question of the ‘quality of the person’, the question of which social formation gives what type of chances to what type of person (Koev 2003, Hennis) («Toute organisation des rapports sociaux, de quelque nature qu’elle soit, doit sans exception, quand on veut la juger axiologiquement, être jugée en fin de compte sur le type d’humanité auquel elle donne les meilleurs chances de devenir dominant, par le biais d’une sélection de caractères internes ou externes. Car, par ailleurs, l’étude empirique n’est pas vraiment exhaustive, et on ne dispose pas de tout de la base empirique nécessaire pour un jugement de valeur – que celui-ci soit délibérément subjectif ou qu’ilrevendique une valeur objective.»/ETS 148/…)