In the latest issue of the NAD journal (4/2015) I discuss how social sciences are becomming more and more compartmentalized and fragmentized, and researchers less mobile between fields. Instead, researchers are increasingly organized in thematic networks. All stages of knowledge production have, in its compartmentalized format, become so advanced and complicated that the career achievement of scholars risks becoming the one of a long row of small papers, articles, reports, thematic units stuck in a “repeat mode”.
In Finland, the national research and development institutes are shrinking in sizes and university researchers are merely externally funded. Instead of investing in permanent research professionals, strategic research programs in areas such as inequality, globalization, and innovation in welfare production are announced for everybody to apply for. Researchers are required to hook up with actors both in the public domain and business life in order to be enough sensitive to needs in society. There is, however, no apparent research establishment for the strategy projects to land in: all funds will be used for contracting short term employees that look into the selected questions in institutes and universities. The short term appointments – which already is one of the greatest weaknesses of the Finnish funding system – further fragmentizes and specializes knowledge production.
For the strategic research programs to actually work and produce meaningful and valuable knowledge it is of less importance if the researchers are placed in universities or in research institutes. What is more crucial is guaranteeing the autonomy – and time – that is necessary to plan, set up and complete a research project. This is simply not possible in the structurally compartmentalized and fragmentized contexts of contemporary knowledge production.
A worrying result for basic science may be that there will soon be a real lack of general academics – like a sociologist who can write about alcohol policy one day and the Kurdish question the next. Or that all of them will be men, since the research persona of the female scientist is more severely critisized when claiming a general expertise and taking up space.
Read the editorial in its full length here:
Matilda Hellman (2015) The compartmentalization of social sciences — what are the implications?
