Northern Innovation, Southern Repetition? Global social sciences and diffusion of ideas Philipp Altmann,
[email protected]
Academic research is a main pillar of innovation – it is one of the few social spheres that count with global mechanisms of production (research), diffusion (teaching, publications) and legitimization (peer review, academic community) of innovations of any kind. This is also why much of innovation that happens outside academia has to recur to it at least for this last step of legitimization. While this fact is not at all new and has been studied a lot, the focus on inequality in academia has often been reduced to institutional or national levels. The production and diffusion of innovation itself is a structure of inequality and exclusion within academia. Understanding science in general and the social sciences in concrete as a global system of communications allows to focus on the diffusion of innovation on a transnational level. How are new theories or methods produced? How does the mechanism of acceptance in the social science work? Is diffusion and acceptance the same thing, for instance the publication of some finding in a mayor journal – or has diffusion other characteristics and which are they? How are certain ideas excluded on a first level from the academic system and on a second one from the diffusion to certain parts (geographic or disciplinary) of science? This work will part from the hypothesis of a systematic exclusion of innovations produced in the Global South, referring to the three levels production, diffusion and legitimization outlined above.
Theoretic reflections The complex field of diffusion of theoretic and methodologic innovations in global social sciences calls for a complex and multiple approach. Science and social science will be understood as a global system of communications, defined by certain modes of interchange -articles, conferences, grants- and of exclusion. While the luhmannian 1
systems theory will inspire the understanding of global society and global social sciences, the neo-institutionalist ideas of John Mayer and the world system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein will be taken into account just like the main thinkers of sociology of science, especially since Thomas Kuhn (2012). In each case, the special situation of the Global South in any global system needs further reflection. For the moment, three central ideas that do not exclude each other can be developed:
Exclusion A way to explain the lack of innovations in the social sciences in the Global South could be systematic exclusion. While they work as if they were part of global social sciences, they actually are not. The inclusion is merely a virtual one and does not lead to innovations that could be diffused. As the idea of exclusion is not based on geography, we could suppose the existence of certain institutions or individual researchers in the Global South that are not excluded but operate on a precarious basis as the operations of the actual global social sciences does not fit its virtual recreation in a given national or regional sphere – they follow codes that allow global inclusion but can lead to local exclusion.
Centre-Periphery Another axis of explanation of global inequality in the social sciences would be the division between centre and periphery. While Luhmann explicitly rejects an integration of Wallersteinian arguments into systems theory, the distinction between centres and peripheries could help explaining the exclusion of whole continents from communications within social sciences. If this hypothesis, based on dependency theory and world system theory, does apply, then a gradual system of `centres within periphery´ is needed. That would explain why the innovation that can be found in the social sciences of the South usually are clustered around very few institutes, the centres, that draw personal, ideas and resources from other universities with less research capacity, their periphery.
Informality Mascareño and Chernilo argument that “particular normative conditions and mechanisms” (Mascareño/Chernilo 2012: 53) in Latin America can block the universal access to given functional systems. This causes the system to work in a different way than it is supposed to do: “the system works informally but under a veil of formality.” 2
(Mascareño/Chernilo 2012: 54) Therefore, ideas, theories or other innovations cannot travel the way they should be able to because of certain local structures that work along informal codes – corruption, heavy political or economic influence or a sectarian closure of the social sciences would be examples of this case.
Methodology Analysis of discourse will serve in this investigation as both theoretical background, resting especially in Foucault’s highlighting of the mutual production of knowledge and power, and as methodological approach. The development of innovations, be they theories, methodologies or concrete findings, can be traced as the diffusion of elements of discourse. Innovations will be understood here as nodal points of discourse whose study may reveal the rules of production of elements of that same discourse. In order to understand the national or local constitution of the social sciences, it is necessary to head for a mixture of different methods of research. Analysis of discourse, the main tool of research here, has to be completed with quantitative analysis (for instance, numbers of articles published or cited) and ethnographic methods (for instance, interviews with key persons or participant observation).
Empirical research The empirical research will include several case studies that should allow a gross comparability of the findings. Three countries are included here:
Mexico Mexico is probably one of the countries of the Global South that are most included into global social sciences. It has several internationally recognized research centers and can count with visible production of innovation even in public universities. Important factors for this development have been the Spanish immigration during and after the Spanish Civil War, leading to the creation of what now is the Colegio de México, the exile of many important researchers of the continent during the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and a pre-dominance of one political party, the PRI, with a given type of nationalism until the 1990s. 3
Ecuador Ecuador is a case of relatively excluded social sciences. While it counts with recognized research centers, the production of innovations is low. Actually, after a moment of high productivity in the 1960s and 1970s, the tzantzic moment (Polo 2012), many creative social scientists left the country and produced innovations in another context. Agustín Cueva and Bolívar Echeverría are well-known examples, both of them lived and worked in Mexico.
South Africa South Africa offers itself as a point of comparison from another continent of the Global South. Here, a relation to the work of Geonet (“Investigating the Changing Connectivities and Potentials of Sub-Saharan Africa's Knowledge Economy”) is sought
Expected outcomes The research outlined above has the purpose to lead to a deeper understanding of the constitution and functioning of global social sciences by the study of the diffusion of discreet units, innovations, that are traceable in a regional, national and transnational manner. While the main focus will be Latin America, the results will be generalizable an -to a certain degree- applicable to other regions of the world. This investigation will lead to the next book of the investigator, as well as to several academic articles to be published in English, Spanish and German. A first publication with the title “Social sciences between the systems – the Ecuadorian university between science, education, politics and economy” will, if accepted, be published by the Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics in early 2017. Besides the in-depth exploration of Southern social sciences and their global position, this project seeks to further three long-time research interests:
The further development of a theory and a corresponding methodology of discursive diffusion, prepared in Altmann (2015) and, in Spanish, Altmann (2014).
A deeper exploration of the position of the Global South in general and Latin America in particular in world society.
And: the constitution of social sciences as -in part- social reproduction of exclusions, racisms, marginalizations and so on. 4
Literature:
Altmann, Philipp (2014) Intercambios discursivos. Historia migratoria de los conceptos del movimiento indígena ecuatoriano, Ecuador Debate 92, pp. 165176.
Altmann, Philipp (2015) Studying Discourse Innovations: The Case of the Indigenous Movement in Ecuador, Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 40 (3), pp.161-184, DOI: 10.12759/hsr.40.2015.3.161-184.
Geonet (http://geonet.oii.ox.ac.uk/).
Kuhn, Thomas (2012): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.
Luhmann, Niklas (1990): Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Mascareño, Aldo; Chernilo, Daniel (2012): Obstáculos y perspectivas de la sociología latinoamericana: universalismo normativo y diferenciación funcional, in: Estrada Saavedra, Marco; Millán, René (eds.): La teoría de los sistemas de Niklas Luhmann a prueba. Horizontes de aplicación en la investigación social en América Latina, México: UNAM, Colegio de México, pp. 25-68.
Polo Bonilla, Rafael (2012): La crítica y sus objetos. Historia intelectual de la crítica en Ecuador (1960-1990), Quito: FLACSO.
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