- This post is part of a debate on the relation between scholarship and policy held during the conference “The Constitution of Cultural Property: Interim Conclusions” in June 2011. It is reproduced on this blog for further discussion.
The two parties have offered their first positions on the motion “This research group holds that scholars have a social/global responsibility to provide policy recommendations in contexts and negotiation bodies concerned with cultural property.”
I will begin by noting the conflicting or contradictory use of the term “positive” as employed by Mr. Bizer and Mr. Groth respectively. Mr. Bizer coins the notion of “pos-people” for disciplines engaged in documenting and interpreting what is there. Mr. Groth invokes the concept of positivist heuristics for an approach to research that allows one to ignore all the anomalies. One might then rephrase the players in the two groups as “positivist norm-guys” and “critically problematizing guys and gals”.
Both debaters invoke a scholarly past, but to different ends. Mr. Bizer, not without irony or perhaps longing, references a past within which scholarship faced less expectation. He observes a fundamental shift in the sociopolitical parameters within which social scientists work. Society no longer wants to support scholarship without immediately recognizable use, and Mr. Bizer points to the economic reality that society pays us to produce useful results. This change in parameters is due to distrust vis-à-vis what it is scholars actually do, and hence an effort to distribute funds in exchange for concrete and useful results. Society seeks guidance, he argues, and thus offers public funds to have groups such as ours offer guidance, in this case on an emerging issue such as a cultural property – which is by no means devoid of normative posts at the outset.
Mr. Groth evokes the longevity of a dispute once fought between critical rationalists and critical theorists and rekindled at between new camps motivated by new contexts but formulating an analogous opposition. Using Mr. Groth’s argumentation, and considering the research topic of cultural property, we are to face the impossibility of society’s demand for policy recommendations in exchange for research funds. To him, social phenomena are too complex and too contradictory for them to be harnessed in experiments capable of forecasting reliably the costs and benefits of a given course of action.
Yet the fact that Mr. Groth’s statement, too, is not devoid of irony would indicate that the state of affairs is not entirely pleasing. While Mr. Bizer chaves under the nature of newly introduced systems of measuring and paying academics, Mr. Groth refuses a service sector role for social scientists, but there would seem to be a certain longing behind the sarcasm of that expression, a wish to be able to do more than acknowledge the irresolvable nature of the cultural property conundrum.
Hence you are now both invited to respond to one another and further prepare the ground for our ensuing discussions.