- 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 following position argues in favor of providing policy recommendations in connection with cultural property. I will unfold this argument along two questions: First I want to ask, why society affords keeping up social sciences. Then I want to make a case for why society does so in the case of our research group.
Why do they pay for us? If you look at academia, social and natural sciences alike, don’t you ask yourself, why society pays for it? One of the obvious reasons is that schooling makes people more productive. Education increases individual (higher wages) and national welfare (higher GNP). But academia is more than education. Professors do research, write books and articles, meet each other around the world, and comment on each other’s work. But what progress is there in social sciences and how does it assist society?
Before I endeavor to answer this question let me reflect the crucial point of this paragraph: My argument is a functional one. Society appears as a principal which engages science as an agent. This agent is paid for his work, but society cannot closely observe the effort of the agent. Economists call this asymmetric information, and it is one of the reasons why the market alone cannot really function properly. If asymmetric information exists, principals will avoid contracts with agents because they will pay without really knowing if they get something.
But let me come back to the question: What fruits can society harvest from the tree of the social sciences? For a long time the classic answer was that society desires to have someone who has time and resources to think deeply about society, about life, at large. Apparently this has changed. Society has lost faith in academics to just spend time and resources to come up with critical thoughts. And thus, (German) society invented a new paying scheme for professors (in Germany, this is the W-pay-scale); it channels resources according to publications and research grants (so-called LOM) and makes universities vie against one another in the national competition for excellence. Of course, All of these instruments are highly disputable, but it is beyond doubt that they reveal a deep mistrust of academia and its potential to bring about gains for society at large. With other words: They are due to asymmetric information and society’s lack of control in terms of what academia does with its resources.
Within this functional perspective, academia and especially the social sciences are supposed to provide assistance to design and redesign societal rules in order to satisfy more of the needs of the population. To many social scientists, this is ‘social engineering’ and connected to a relatively simple and frequently mechanistic understanding of social actors and rules. But I would like to stress the point that social sciences are diverse enough to show how difficult it is to form a common understanding of the functioning of a rule. It is by no means trivial to gain a perspective on how to change which rule in order to achieve a certain objective from the insights of as many disciplines such as economics, political science, sociology, ethnology and anthropology, law et cetera. To make this attempt and to actually try to find analytical approaches for the design of institutions is what makes social sciences worthy of the resources society provides.
The German Research Foundation (DFG) provided funds for our interdisciplinary research group on cultural property. The DFG prides itself in funding basic research. This research group started its work with the discussion of the obvious conflict between normative and positive sciences. Let us assume that there is a clear divide between the normative disciplines (law, economics: the norm-guys) and the positive sciences (ethnology, anthropology: the pos-people). The norm-guys always want to find out how things should be. The pos-people are happy if they accurately describe how things are – and why. While the former acknowledge the importance of positive work as well as normative work, the latter disregard normative concepts as non-scientific, inconclusive and a general “no go”. The norm-guys will, however, not give up trying to convince the pos-people of venturing into normative discussions.
Why new institutions for Cultural Property? Cultural Property is an emerging field: Most people agree that many aspects of cultural property are not covered by classic intellectual property rights such as patents (cultural property is rarely new) or copyright (cultural property is frequently produced by many not one). As technological possibilities arise, cultural property is increasingly misappropriated – at least that is the claim of many NGOs and some governments. But neither have an idea what type of property rights should be brought into existence. Nor do they know about the intended consequences and non-intended effects.
In such a situation the pos-people observe the process of national and international bargaining, of the diverse arenas for consultation, and the various intertwined processes by which groups attempt to influence the results in the WTO, WIPO or CBD. They identify actors within the field, analyse communication, interests, legal positions, economic successes and shortcomings. But in the end they tell a tale about what is – and how the existing circumstances led to a specific outcome. This will lead us to better understand discursive processes, it will help to enlighten the role of NGOs in international bargaining, and it will enrich the academic debate. But will it provide assistance in how to design cultural property rights?
Of course, a proposal for a design of property rights will be based on normative assessments. And such assessments are pre-scientific. We have formed them either long before we started working as social scientists or they depend on all kinds of different characteristics beyond and outside the inner science arena. But still society will want to know what is the best (or the better) design for property rights. Can the norm-guys help? Yes, because in most cases, normative values are not kept a secret. Constitutions and their interpretation are full of normative concepts – the declaration of human rights at an international level. And politics provide us with many normative decisions. All such normative decisions we can take as a starting point: We can analyze normative positions and develop adequate instrumental designs for which we simulate on the basis of the best available data intended and non-intended effects. But we can also develop a competing normative basis which may reveal that other effects are possible. Occasionally, there will be instrumental choices which are better than their alternatives in all aspects. Then it is easy to decide normatively which instrument to implement. But in most cases instrumental choices will be better in some but not all aspects and then only the public or their policy makers can decide – not, of course, social science.
In such a scenario, the norm-guys meet societies request for guidance. They help to ease society’s problem of asymmetric information because the effort of academia to help out is visible. To do so requires plenty of positive-analytical work beforehand which is jointly provided with the pos-people. But the pos-people themselves should not stop with describing and analyzing but make use of their expertise and contribute to the normative decisions.