Social science and policy: lessons of post-socialist reform

Abstract

Many scholars aspire to weigh in on issues of public policy and assume the position of a public intellectual who straddles the line between academic research and public discourse. Moreover, there is also an expectation, frequently expressed at scholarly presentations and in the discussion of candidates for academic jobs, that research should have clear policy implications. Given these desiderata, some scholars have identified the increasing specialization and division of the social sciences into disciplines and sub-disciplines as one reason for their failure to resonate beyond narrow circles. Hence, they have called for a radical restructuring of the social sciences and a breaking down of these disciplines, which they see as divided by boundaries that are more the product of historical decisions than functional demarcations. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the expectation of policy-relevance and engagement across the research–policy divide under the currently dominant economistic paradigm has potentially serious drawbacks. Hence, this contribution argues for a nonlinear approach to both the organization of social science research and to the conceptualization of action in it. It explores this argument by pointing to the marked failures of policy advising in the context of theorizing about post-socialist economic and political development. Furthermore, it describes a way of reconceptualizing action in social scientific analysis that is more open ended and views society as a complex system affected by nonlinear dynamics.