Social technology transfer? Movement of social science knowledge beyond the academy

The “Roma issue”

The situation of Roma people and their coexistence with the non-Roma population is an issue in the Czech Republic. It intensified and became highly visible after 1989 with the coming of capitalism and the establishment of human rights and cultural NGOs and Roma political representation. During the economic transformation of the 1990s, the Roma were among the first to lose jobs; they gathered substantial debts, engaged in gambling, and in many places got into trouble with housing as local councils sold flats in municipal ownership, thus restricting the availability of social housing and anti-discriminatory renting. The national prominence of the Roma issue reached its peak in the second half of the 1990s when a substantial number of Roma families migrated to the UK, Norway, and particularly Canada, where they were granted political asylum on the basis of racial discrimination in the Czech Republic. In reaction to these developments, the Inter-ministerial Commission for Roma Community Affairs was established in 1997 with representation of the Roma and an executive Secretariat to prepare policy documents and strategies; the establishment of a governmental Agency for Social Inclusion in Roma followed in 2008.While in the 1990s the policy framework was “multiculturalism,” it has since shifted to “integration” and “inclusion.” Since the 1990s, the Roma have also become the object of attention and intervention by a number of social and cultural NGOs, Roma and non-Roma, providing social work, counselling, and legal defence or supporting Roma cultural activities. While national policies engage in the discourse of human rights, local politicians and civil servants are often critical of these policies for preaching equal opportunities and anti-discrimination while providing very little practical and financial support to municipalities.

Social scientists have played their role in all this. There have been a number of research projects conducted on “Roma issues” since the 1990s, mainly by anthropologists, sociologists, and Roma studies researchers (“Roma studies” is a MA study programme at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague). Such research has taken the form of academic texts (including a number of MA and Ph.D. dissertation theses) or expert studies commissioned either by the Inter-ministerial Commission for Roma Community Affairs and the Agency for Social Inclusion or by NGOs. Some researchers have also collaborated with NGOs on a long-term basis and contributed to the media. In this paper I will explore three case studies of movements of knowledge and expertise between academia, policy, the NGO sector, and the public sphere. I aim not to map the field of Roma expertise in the Czech Republic as a whole, but to analyse a few selected cases of practices and mechanisms of generating, circulating, appropriating, and translating knowledge in this space.

Strathern (2006) proposes considering three types of vehicles of knowledge mobility in her study of an emerging interdisciplinary community around a Genetics Knowledge Park at the University of Cambridge. She considers “products” of research (patents and publications), “projects” (research collaborations), and “persons” (knowledge embedded in researchers moving around). These three vehicles of knowledge transfer are also at the core of policy efforts. Contemporary science policies aim at supporting the movement of knowledge products from the academy to industry in order for industry to use such products in development and innovation processes. They also support joint projects and the movement of researchers between the academy and industry. The paradigm here again is in the natural sciences and commercializable material technologies. I will follow the three vehicles of products, projects, and people when analysing the movements of knowledge and expertise on Roma in the triangular space of the academy, policy, and the NGOs or civil society, and in the conclusion consider how they relate to the dominant policy paradigm.

Projects: “Collaboration” as benefit or threat?

The first case study is an exploration of the way in which collaborative projects of academic researchers and non-academic institutions are perceived among academic researchers engaged in Roma studies. The relation between the academy, NGOs, and the state has recently been addressed in a discussion in a Czech qualitative sociology journal, Biograf. On the occasion of publishing a paper by a Dutch researcher on memorials of the Roma holocaust in the Czech Republic, editors asked a number of Czech researchers active in the field of Roma studies to reflect on the state of research in the Czech Republic, on communication between researchers, use of knowledge produced, connections to research abroad, and so on. Seven papers were published over three issues. ¹

Questions of the relation between the social sciences and the state or NGOs took significant space in the contributions. Five of the texts stated (more or less strongly) that academic research is compromised by such connections and should stay clear of these. Authors used metaphors such as “collaboration” (which in Czech has a clearly negative connotation of collaborating with evil—historically with the Nazi regime and communist secret police), “project prostitution,” or “contamination.” While one of the papers appreciated that these links have significantly helped to establish social anthropology in the country, the authors embraced pure social science independent from political and social agendas as an ideal and a feasible goal. One of the authors went so far as to claim that social scientists should actively prevent uptake of scientific concepts by lay discourse which distorts them. He proposed to create concepts which are “ahead” of lay discourse and possibly unattractive enough not to be taken up—and degraded—by popular discourse. The author went on to show an example from his own work where he introduced new words invented to distinguish between different modes of being Roma which, according to him, are confusingly mixed in the category of the “Roma.” By doing this he wanted to make the expert discourse untouchable by lay people. It has to be noted, however, that some of the authors who saw the interaction with external actors as contamination and a threat to academic researchers accused each other (at least implicitly) of such impurities in their contributions. What is supposed to be a perfectly unbiased relation in their own case is seen as contamination of science in the case of their academic competitors.

Three other contributions were in principle in favour of the links between academy, the state, and NGOs, and saw them in fact as hardly avoidable. One contribution defended applied anthropology as a legitimate and internationally well-established branch of the discipline. These three contributions focused on how (rather than whether) such links should be enacted and cultivated. There seemed to be an agreement that researchers should try to and be able to influence the formulation of research questions (and not simply have the questions imposed on them). It is the bi-directional influence between academic research and NGOs or the state that gives legitimacy to the entanglement of academic with non-academic actors and spheres.

To summarize, contributions to the discussion argue from three different positions. In the first case, they work with a view that social science entangled with political and social agendas (through collaboration and sponsorship) ceases to be proper science. Social scientists can always be suspected of being not only epistemic spokespersons for social phenomena or groups they study but also political spokespersons, and delegitimized as such. This position was taken up when competitors were to be attacked for improper research. In the second case, the contributions argue that entanglements may exist without compromising the purity of social-scientific research. This was an implicit position of some of the authors when they related to their own research. Only a minority of papers, in the third case, were ready to accept the impurity of social science research, and discussed strategies for dealing with it.

The second position of collaboration of the academy with external actors that does not compromise the epistemic “core” of research seems to be most convergent with current science policies, which envisage academic research intensely linked with society while keeping the modernist epistemological framework of disinterested objectivity. However, the two other positions show how difficult it is to defend such disassociation of collaboration from reconsideration of epistemic objectivity. Researchers thus have to either limit their links to external actors (as they always constitute collaborations with evil), or start conceptualizing their work and knowledge as an entanglement of science and politics and treating it as such. If, in this case, the entanglement of the academic and the non-academic was most often seen as compromising science, in the following section I will show other possible dilemmas arising from the interaction between the social sciences and the sphere of politics.

Products: The dilemma of an authorial claim

The second case is a study of the complicated relation of the academy to politics exemplified by a controversy that followed a speech about Roma policy in January 2008. This speech, which was given by a minister of regional development (Jiří Čunek) at his party conference, attracted significant media attention. The minister argued that the root of the “Roma problem” lies in their collectivist culture and that extended families have to be eradicated for a change to become possible (Čunek, 2008). At the beginning of his presentation, he listed four books and studies, two of them by social anthropologists, but later did not refer to any concrete work. His claims were received controversially in the public space, and hence a few days later one of the social anthropologists (Tomáš Hirt) who, in 2004, edited a volume referred to by the politician was approached by a major national newspaper. The editor distanced himself from the politician, saying that he personally thought

that [the politician] wants again to make himself visible through his old topic, this time as a conceptual bloke. And to distract attention from his other problems. I really would not like to provide him with an alibi for this even if he cited whole paragraphs from our work. He’s been known to spout extraordinary populism in the past. And I am afraid that he is concerned with something else than a systemic solution to the issue of socially excluded people. (Kolář, 2008)

When asked directly about the politician’s thesis, he said it was hugely simplified and it was “both right and wrong.” This reaction does not in a strict sense deny that the politician might have been inspired by the work in the edited volume. But the quoted anthropologist articulates the need for a connection between intention and knowledge for the latter to be used legitimately. For him, the intention is not separate from the message; it co-constitutes it. When the intention is changed, the ideas cease to be connected to the author.

As Biagoli (2003) stresses, authorship is simultaneously about credit and responsibility. Usually an author takes both credit and responsibility for his or her work. In this case, the authors were not directly “accredited” by the politician; at the same time, some of their colleagues (Kobes, 2008; Slačálek, 2008) tried to discredit the authors by insisting on the connection between the social anthropologists’ work and the populist politician and made them, at least indirectly, responsible for his words. The anthropologist quoted above refused all: credit, discredit, and responsibility for the ideas in the hands of the politician, “even if he cited whole paragraphs from our work” (Kolář, 2008).

Two days later, an author (Jakub Steiner) of one of the chapters in the edited volume referred to by the politician at the beginning of his presentation voiced his protest against him in a newspaper. In his original chapter, this author analysed the situation of Roma families from the rational choice perspective and aimed at showing the vicious circle of “large solidarity networks,” “ineffective behaviour of the Roma,” “discrimination,” and “poverty.” Under a schema presenting the vicious circle, he says that “it does not make sense to ponder over whether Roma are discriminated against because they behave inappropriately, or whether they behave inappropriately because they are discriminated against” (Steiner, 2004. p. 2). Without any reference to this author’s work, the politician used the scheme with only a modification of the graphics in his Power Point presentation. The sentence accompanying the scheme reads: “Controversies do not make sense of whether Roma are discriminated against because of their behaviour or whether their behaviour is a cause of their discrimination” (Čunek, 2008, slide 6; well, there is really no reason for controversy about this as expressions in both parts of the sentence say the same thing!). There were other similar “borrowings” in other slides. In his reaction, the author claimed that the politician “borrows only those of his ideas which sound good to the xenophobe part of the public and not those which show that Roma have real problems and can be the object of discrimination” (Valášková, 2008, para. 2), and spoke of intellectual plagiarism, as there was no reference to his original work. The strategy here is different: the author claims—and reclaims—his work in the politician’s speech in order to be able to point to distortions and selective uses of his ideas. He explicitly talks about intellectual theft and plagiarism, thus voicing the expectation that standard citation practice should apply beyond the academy.

We witness two very different reactions that amplify two very different relations to authorship and the trajectory of social science knowledge beyond the academy. The first one emphasizes mutability: ideas change by moving into different contexts, by being used with different intentions, even if the “words” stay the same, and the author cannot be made responsible for them and credited or discredited accordingly. The other one emphasizes the link between the idea and the author, who has the right—and responsibility—to reclaim his or her ideas from those who appropriate them for their skewed agendas.

Both positions have strong and weak points. The first one treats knowledge as a public good and dissolves the authorial gesture (which is more and more unsustainable in the information age). ² Yet, it potentially weakens social scientists as accountable epistemic actors in the current science policy regimes. If they renounce what they feel as discrediting appropriation of their academic work, on what basis do they claim credit at other times? It also ultimately disables any action against plagiarism, if they assume that identity of claims does not rest in wording. ³ The second approach allows for credit and for remedial actions but only at the price of making knowledge proprietary. As such it too easily accepts current tendencies of privatization and commercialization of research results in the natural sciences and it also opens door to costly legal controversies. (The author in this case claimed he would not take legal action against the politician, but it is noteworthy that he was considering the issue in these terms.)

Persons: Boundary engagement

The final case is a study of two persons who transfer social science knowledge across academic and non-academic spheres. The first is Pavel. I met him years ago through my university friends; he is also a nephew of one of my former professors of sociology. One of his cousins studied Roma studies, another social work (also working with Roma). He himself was studying demography at that time and running a Roma children/youth group in one of Prague’s neighbourhoods which included afternoon activities and weekend stays in the countryside. When I asked him for an interview in May 2009, he had worked for several years as coordinator of a “labour opportunities” programme for the Roma in a major NGO (focused on the Roma and other social and human rights issues). He had also been running an NGO focused on providing demographic information, consultancy, and research, which he established with his former fellow students from the faculty, now working in public research institutions. It was obvious during the interview that he was well connected to and knowledgeable about both the NGO sector and (academic) research.

According to Pavel, NGOs, especially the bigger ones, often produce expert studies themselves, not contracting them out to specialized research (academic) institutions. This has to do with NGO funding, which is always tight. Funding for expert studies that are often part of a larger grant an NGO acquires (e.g., from EU structural funds) can provide a substantial financial source for an NGO (e.g., it can cover a full-time employment position for a person for half a year). If an NGO subcontracts the study to an external organization or researchers, it loses most of the allocated financial resources. Pavel sees the in-house expertise as a problematic practice. Rather than original research, it consists in the systematization of experience acquired through practical engagements of NGO employees. As such, it does not provide NGOs with the much needed “view from the outside” on their work. Pavel himself sees fruitful collaborations with external researchers as very important. For example, he recently worked with a university economist on a methodology for evaluating financial loan schemes offered by different banks and money providers, and studying how Roma work with this information. He stressed an important aspect in this context: in order to be able to collaborate with an established academician, he or she must understand and accept the standards of academic practice (e.g., the logic of control groups), and he or she must offer something back to the academic researcher in terms of his or her epistemic interests. In this case, it was access to the Roma population and their “collective-centred reasoning.” The social science background of an NGO partner is thus a great advantage, and his or her willingness to accept academic terms and conditions is crucial.

Another person transferring academic knowledge beyond the academy is Petr, who was a civil servant at the Secretariat of the Inter-ministerial Commission for Roma Community Affairs. He graduated in social anthropology and sociology and kept contacts with academic researchers in these disciplines after finishing his studies. It was thanks to his initiative that an expert working group was established at the Secretariat, composed mainly of academic researchers. The group was established after a major quantitative study contracted by the Inter-ministerial Commission was carried out and received a lot of publicity. It became an important reference in the debates on Roma communities and policies. Not everybody was happy with the quantitative design, however, especially if it was meant to become a major research strategy to study Roma communities and inform Roma policies. Petr, who was knowledgeable about other possible types of social science research, was one of the disgruntled. One of the missions of the expert working group he convened was to contribute to preparations for a new call for research to be funded by the Inter-ministerial Commission. And indeed at the beginning of the second year of the group’s existence, Petr described the working group’s contribution in the following way:

I think that the existence of the working group was very important in this respect, since expert consultations taking places through this working group influenced in a significant way the final shape of the research as it is formulated in official documents for the tender. (Petr, email to members of the expert group, 31 January 2008)

The subsequent research project used qualitative approaches and was carried out by researchers (and their students) from a university department of social anthropology (some of whom had also been members of the working group of the Inter-ministerial Commission). Furthermore, the final report from the research project stressed the advantages of ethnographic research for studying these types of issues. Using his cultural capital and social relations to academic social scientists, Petr helped to shift the public administration’s concept of policy-relevant knowledge in the area of Roma issues. Whether this shift is sustainable remains to be seen, but it is noteworthy that after Petr left the Secretariat, the expert working group stopped functioning.

Star and Griesemer (1989) introduced the concept of “boundary objects” to analyse translations and cooperation between different social worlds. Their case involves the worlds of professionals, amateurs, and administrators related to a museum. Boundary objects are “both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites” (p. 393). In a similar vein we can consider boundary subjects or persons: persons who are recognized and reputable in different worlds, thus connecting them and translating between them. Pavel, especially, is such a boundary person. His professional identity is complex: while always working in the NGO sector and paid primarily for his practical work with the Roma, he has run his own research-oriented NGO and has collaborated with academics and public research institutions, ready and able to accept their rules of the game. Such a multiple identity may create tensions: for example, the head of the NGO where Pavel works does not appreciate it when Pavel “says different things in the different identities of an NGO employee and an independent researcher” (research interview, 29 April 2009). Yet, the knowledge mobility embodied in people seems crucial for knowledge transactions beyond the academy. I will argue in the following section that these multiple identities need recognition by knowledge policies.

Restoring the symmetry between the social and natural sciences

To conclude, I will return to the issue of social science knowledge and objects in the broad context of STS scholarship on natural science and technical disciplines. I would like to discuss more explicitly some specificities and commonalities of social science knowledge in relation to natural science and technical disciplines, and the related science policy frameworks. I will again organize my argument along the three concepts of projects, products, and persons; this time in a reverse order starting with persons.

The first issue is the mobility of persons. Mobility of scientists is a great concern in science policies. Two vectors of mobility are taken into account: international mobility within academic networks; and mobility between academy and industry. This mobility is valued, monitored, and supported. Mobility to the industry sector is clearly recognized as enhancing application of academic research or, in the other direction, inseminating academic research with industrial application needs and logics. However, science policies are silent regarding the same logics applied to social sciences and humanities, where the places of application are NGOs, public administrations, public media, and so on. As we have seen in the case study, this mobility of persons between the academy and other spheres exists and seems crucial for possible collaborations and meaningful use of scientific knowledge. It does not always take the form of direct transfer (from A to B), but sometimes involves multiple engagements and identities and utilizing one’s educational background and social networks developed during university studies. How might one think about links created through these movements? Do they need recognition and explicit support?

Funtowicz and Ravetz (1993) speak about “extended peer communities” when arguing for democratizing (natural) technoscience through enhancing public participation (mainly for evaluating risks and uncertainties related to new technologies, defining priorities, etc.). They argue for new institutional arrangements which allow different sorts of non-experts to participate in processes from which they have been strictly excluded in the construction of “normal” modern science. These arrangements should help handle uncertainties produced by contemporary science. The concept might catch some qualities of the linkages I am tracing in this paper. However, it also is problematic in many respects. Firstly, I am not sure it is really useful to think in terms of an extended peer community, at least in the case I am interested in. Positions, aims, and skills of persons involved in knowledge movements can be very different. I do not see in which sense they can be “peers” to each other unless we say that everybody is in principle a peer to everyone else. Secondly, and for quite a similar reason, I am not comfortable with the notion of a “community.” There are no shared rules, canonical texts, or places (as in the case of a scientific community in a strict sense); there are only partial overlaps and convergences. Thirdly, and most importantly, I do not see these linkages—at least not in the social sciences—as something having emerged recently. They have existed at least since higher education institutions started producing massive numbers of graduates who did not end up in the academy but in other places (public administration, the third sector, the private sector) or who operate on interfaces between the academy and other sectors. It seems they have been neglected as a structural phenomenon that should be taken into account when the societal impact of social sciences is considered. Although they do not operate most of the time in the mode of “extended peer-review” as imagined by Funtowicz and Ravetz, providing a collective deliberative effort to evaluate new knowledge and technologies, it is nevertheless through these linkages that society engages in a “review” of social-scientific knowledge and ideas in a sense of commissioning, using or misusing, translating, and appropriating them. Therefore I propose to speak about extended translations or extended connections rather than an extended peer community.

I maintain that similar to the mobility between the academy and industry, extended translation of social science knowledge needs recognition and support so that academic researchers have a chance to engage with NGOs and public administration as a legitimate part of their professional trajectory, and so that especially NGOs have a chance to seriously engage with capacities of academic researchers (in terms of collective projects, etc.). Otherwise the extended translations will become strongly biased towards non-academic locations that can pay for the academic capacity on a competitive basis.

The second issue is the movement of “products.” In the case study, we have seen troubled trajectories of social-scientific knowledge embodied in academic texts: it got mutated if not mutilated; it became disconnected from its authors, rejected as politicized, and so on. There definitely is not a shared understanding and practice of legitimate mutation and appropriation of social science knowledge objects beyond the academy. (Within the academy there are at least formalized and written rules to help evaluate plagiarism even though they may be interpreted differently by various actors.) In the case study, researchers took very different positions with regards to their production beyond the academy: from letting go and reclaiming the proper meaning to crafting “ugly” concepts immune to lay appropriation (such appropriation being equated with distortion). This may seem messy at first sight compared to natural-scientific knowledge and technologies resistant to easy hijacking owing to the specialized treatment they need and their material embeddedness. However, if we consider legal controversies around patents, we have to conclude that natural science knowledge/objects are no less controversial. As Bessen and Meurer (2008) document, investments in patent lawsuits are huge in the US, and in many areas (except for pharmaceutical and chemical R&D) significantly exceed profits. For example, for the period 1996–1999, the aggregated investments in legal cases were US$0.07 billion and aggregated profits were US$0.06 billion for small firms (up to 500 employees) and US$10.8 billion and US$2.52 billion for large firms, respectively.

A difference between the social and natural sciences is not so much in the degree of smoothness of knowledge trajectories but rather in how the controversies are handled and represented in public and policy space. Czech science policy overrates patents, giving absolutely no attention to the issues of patent controversies which hugely diminish both private and societal effectiveness of such intellectual property rights devices. At the same time, social science products aiming beyond the academy are perceived as highly unreliable by Czech policy: difficult to evaluate and trace. They only count in research evaluation as connected to social science (i.e., to researchers as authors) when adopted verbatim in legal norms and official documents or having a narrowly defined format (of a specialized map or applied methodology), as though any other use of social science beyond the academy were in principle unaccountable.

My final point concerns the politics of collaboration and application. We have seen that social science knowledge is easily politicized. Some argue that it is always already politicized (in a broad sense of being entangled with and acting upon a vision of how the world should be) and the issue is how to care about political autonomy (not autonomy from politics). Others condemn politicization and insist on the normative idea of science as autonomous from politics and society. In any case, politicization is an omnipresent issue. However, natural science and technical knowledge and technologies are no longer immune to this critical view, either. I do not mean primarily STS research, though it definitely has played its part, but civic initiatives (arising both from outside and inside science) making visible the politics in science and demanding and enacting its democratization. ⁴ The main concern here is the politicization in the mode of economization. If social science knowledge is viewed by some as losing its scientific quality or becoming simply non-science when appropriated by political actors and logics, similar concerns are formulated about the relation of natural technoscience and industry and the economic logic. As studies of pharmacological R&D show (Matheson, 2008; Sismondo, 2009), scientific values are threatened in these highly prized streams of research as many practices and procedures considered as constituting modern experimental science have undergone significant transformations here. The logic of marketing has become inscribed into the experimental design and scientific articles are ghost-written by commercial “medical communication companies.”

We can thus observe two opposite tendencies. On the one hand, science policies strive for convergence in science bringing the social sciences under the paradigm of the natural sciences: for example, when lists of journals are compiled on the European level so that bibliometric evaluation of the social sciences and humanities, comparable to natural science disciplines, may become possible. ⁵ On the other hand, the natural sciences are increasingly exposed to the similar questioning of their epistemic foundations and political economy as the social sciences and humanities have been since their foundation as scientific disciplines in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. From this perspective, social technologies should not be approached as a handicapped sibling of material technologies mediating between the natural sciences and society. Rather, social technologies enable us to shed a different light on these issues, making even clearer the challenges for science in a knowledge society.