Social Science Research and the Social Policy Making Process: The Case of Albania

Abstract

Historically, people have turned to democracy primarily as a guarantor of personal freedom, not as a policy-making process nor as a process for popular control over making. One great figure in Western social thought who made policy-making - particularly its efficiency or rationality - central to his work was Adam Smith. Addressing, in his Wealth of Nations, inefficiencies of contemporary governments' commercial policies, Smith began an intellectual tradition that persists to this day. Following this tradition, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper have both emphasized that social have developed very largely through criticism of proposals for social improvements, or through attempts to find out whether or not some particular economic or political action is likely to produce an expected, or desired, result (Hayek 1933: 123; Popper 1960: 68). From a different perspective, and following Max Weber, C. Wright Mills expanded on theme of rationalization, understanding it as the practical application of knowledge to achieve a desired end. Like Weber, Mills believed that rationalization's goal is efficiency, whereas its means are coordination and control over social processes needed to attain that goal. Both Weber and Mills maintained that rationalization is guiding principle behind bureaucracy and increasing division of labor (see Elwell 2006), and it is a product of scientific specialization and technical differentiation that seems to be a characteristic of Western culture (Freund 1968). It was not until mid 1940s that term policy sciences was introduced by Harold Lasswell, one of most creative innovators in social in twentieth century (Almond 1978). In 1943 Lasswell wrote: I propose to contribute to theory of sciences. The include social and psychological sciences; in general, all that facts and principles of direct importance for making of important decisions in government, business and cultural life (quoted in Muth et al. 1989: 17). Lasswell envisaged his key contributions as developing a systematic theory, devising new instruments for research, and acting as a policy advisor to aid in perfecting intelligence function in society in order to clarify alternatives of action, and to provide pertinent information about trends and causal relations (ibid, 17-18). His science orientation was holistic: a multi-method, multi-disciplinary, problem-focused, contextual approach to analysis and development. Adopting his approach, in this paper we focus on a number of issues pertaining to social science research and social policymaking process in general, such as: (1) role of analysis in making; (2) complexity of social reality and cognitive limitations to analysis, and (3) partisan analysis vis-a-vis value-freedom and objectivity in social science research.