Pathways and dead-ends – Some ideas about the impact of SSH in European research and policy.

1) European research policy has two main pillars or funding streams, one inviting researchers to apply for funding of blue sky or basic research and submit their proposals to the ERC. The other pillar, so-called mission-oriented research, invites researchers to contribute to pre-defined topics, developing solutions for policy problems, using the tool kit of their discipline. This dual approach of basic and applied research roughly mirrors a well-known difference between internal and external governance of science. According to the internalists, new research questions emerge from unsolved problems of existing scientific work and the yardstick is either empirical testing of hypothesis derived from theory, reproduction of experiments or refutation of propositions circulating as presumably valid knowledge in the scientific community. Hard core internalist assume a cumulative growth of knowledge, others after the Kuhnian paradigm shift introducing the idea of paradigms, take a more nuanced view and accept occasional revision or revolution establishing new starting points for cumulative work in normal science. In any case the main impact of science is on science and its value is assessed – according to the text book version at least – by one’s own peers. Research is driven by a will to knowledge.

The externalist, applied science or engineering model uses a different frame, assessing research from the perspective of its use value materialising externally outside the scientific community: what can research contribute to better understand, frame or solve a given societal, technical or engineering problem? Funding goes to those researchers, labs and disciplines promising applicable solutions. This governance models puts a premium on solution-oriented technology development and engineering. Basic research is set apart, its value is acknowledged but it is excluded from the funding schemes of applied science.

2) Now the dualism of basic and applied, based on the difference between two epistemic cultures may seem questionable and the two models of pure and applied science, internal and external governance of research have been merged in the narrative of modern rationalism.

Good basic science will produce added value outside the realm of the ivory tower through productive application of its findings for the solution of practical problems. The traditional version of this narrative branches out in a positive and a critical version. Basic physics has brought us GPS technology (the positive) but also the nuclear bomb (the critical). The role of scientists gets a moral add-on, they not only are committed to the production and increase of knowledge, reading the book of nature, but at the same time they have to consider their social responsibility, engage in foresight activities and take into account ethical constraints. Ethical questions in science can be raised with regard to the research process and the outcome of research alike. We have seen ethics debates blossoming over the last years and some researchers have voiced their concern that ethics is about to suffocate scientific work and put unjustified limits on scientific research. (I have some sympathy for this criticism)

3) The current interpretation of the modern rationalist narrative has introduced the idea of the market to assess the value of science and to govern scientific research. Innovation is spelt in commercial terms, researchers have to present business plans detailing how the results of their work will be used to create economic value. The difference between pure/basic and applied/commercial forms of scientific research gradually is vanishing. Nobel prizes for ground-breaking research have been awarded to scientists working in labs of industry. In areas like life sciences or computer sciences it is hard to tell if a research institute or lab is working as a private enterprise, geared towards producing commercial value in the market or if the research is committed to pure knowledge independent of any commercial considerations for application of its finding. European research policy is focusing on competitiveness and innovation, as the Lamy report famously put it, research should develop along the trajectory of Lab-Fab-App, equating scientific value with commercial success and making commercial success key indicator for societal value. Research universities set up incubators to launch start-ups exploiting research results and the overall marketization has fundamentally changed the academic and scientific field.

4) How does SSH fit into this picture and what kind of impact or added value can SSH research create and how could this impact be measured or assessed? The idea of social engineering was considered as a central pathway for applied social science in the area of the Fordist welfare state. The famous Great Society Programme in the United States was a typical example. Government-sponsored social scientists identified social problems, social injustices and inequalities suggesting remedial welfare and education programmes to help establish a fair and just society, eliminating inequalities and paving the way towards an envisaged future of – in EU-speak – an “inclusive” society. The majority of policy suggestions of these programmes involved investment of public money in areas like housing, education, health, etc. In traditional welfare states SSH research output often had a direct policy impact. Also, SSH experts were involved in policy implementation, designing specific measures and evaluating the effects (sometimes turning a blind eye on some unintended side effects).

The outstanding feature of the era of welfare state social engineering with regard to SSH was the integration of SSH expertise, thinking and tools along the whole value chain of public policy, from identifying and analysing policy problems to designing, implementing and monitoring specific programmes to assessment and evaluation of the implemented measures. This value chain of public policy was based on a governance model typical for welfare states. It has been termed governing through the social. Also, it was limited to the policy frame of the nation state. The discourse about applied social science developed against the background of this model: governing the social in the welfare state.

5) With the decline of the Fordist welfare state SSH have lost their prominent role in public policy. SSH no longer can claim the position of the (social-)philosopher king, defining and shaping policy issues. The transformation from welfare state policies to post-welfarism is a mixed blessing, also for SSH. Moving from a governance through the social to a neo-liberalised mode of governing through freedom (N. Rose) SSH has moved from the front seat to the back seat in policy design. To address the great societal challenges as they are defined in the policy papers shaping the European research agenda, SSH takes on the role of a facilitator of systemic transformations, offering advice that resembles the spin of marketing experts to nudge citizens, bringing them to adopt the right attitude and accept their role in policy processes. This entails an element of empowerment. Programs like SWAFS invite citizens to engage in co-production of techno-social innovation processes, supporting an approach of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) that relies heavily on market uptake. However, taking a critical look at the envisaged empowerment facilitated by SSH this empowerment is primarily reactive, i.e. citizens should be empowered to react to global challenges, they should learn how to find their role as responsible market subjects vis-à-vis technological and economic developments that are beyond their reach.

Two models of social integration can be distinguished here. On the one hand there is the model of the market, where public vices constitute public virtues, and citizens are perceived as individual rational actors pursuing their egoistic goals – albeit within the limit of a rather vaguely defined framework of “European values”. On the other hand, social integration can draw on principles of deliberation, i.e. fostering deliberative exchange among citizens to develop collectively accepted ideas and commitments for joint political action. While the first model integrates the effects or outcome of individual actions to establish, what economists call a win-win situation, the deliberative model seeks to sustain a sphere of genuine political debate, where citizens can collectively discuss and reflect about societal problems in a more principled way.

SSH can contribute to both models, addressing different audiences. Social science can produce insights for policy makers to improve governance strategies and it can address citizens on ground-level to support the development and improve the quality of deliberative processes.

6) Taking the example of SSH and its role in security research the predicament of social science and the different types of (expected, promised, presumed) impact can be demonstrated. Most of mission-oriented security research under European funding starts with a non-negotiable description of threats and security problems to be addressed by research. The scope and expected impact of research put the focus on solutions that entail some sort of (surveillance) technology. SSH is expected to pave the way facilitating the public acceptance of technological solutions and contribute to the solution of any ethical or privacy issues attached to the envisaged technology. However, rarely are the security problems themselves investigated from an SSH perspective. This leaves SSH in the role of marginal contributors or as some critical observers have termed it, in the position of the fig leave for technology-driven surveillance programmes as solution for security problems.