International Scholarly Collaboration: Lessons from the Past

SSRC WORKING PAPER SERIES International Scholarly Collaboration: Lessons From the Past A Report of the Social Science Research Council Inter-regional Working Group on International Scholarly Collaboration copyright © SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL, 2000. 810 SEVENTH AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10019 ON BUILDING INTELLECTUAL CAPACITY FOR THE 21 S T C. The Working Group PAUL DRAKE, University of California,San Diego DAVID LUDDEN, University of Pennsylvania GEORGES NZONGOLA-NTALAJA, Howard University/United Nations Development Program SUJATA PATEL, University of Pune LILIA SHEVTSOVA, Carnegie Center, Moscow Staff to the Working Group ITTY ABRAHAM, SSRC TINA HARRIS, SSRC Acknowledgments The Working Group would like to thank the following individuals for their assistance in prepar- ing this report. For research assistance, Lisa Hilbink (Drake), Kisha Johnson (Nzongola), Anjali Rathore (Patel). For their help in shaping the final version of this report, Talal Asad and Joyce Moock. For their presentations and discussions with the working group, Patricia Rosenfield, Sara Seims, and Steven Wheatley. For their help in providing us with documents, insights and back- ground material, Stanley Katz, Diana Hicks, and Olle Persson. Kenneth Prewitt and Orville Gilbert Brim, past presidents of the SSRC, were instrumental in getting the group off the ground. Members of the SSRC professional staff were always generous in their time and support of this project. The Working Group greatly appreciates the financial assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation in the preparation of this report. For help in editing and production, we would like to thank Elsa Dixler and Jonah Hoyle. Contents O ve rv i e w 1 M e a s u ring International Collabora t i o n 1 1 The Joint Committee on Latin A m e rican Studies 1 7 The South Asia Regional Literatures Project 3 4 The Nordic A f rica Institute 4 8 The Indo-Dutch Program for A l t e rn a t i ves in Deve l o p m e n t 5 7 Overview Why Collaborate? S C H O LA R LY collaboration is not a new activity. It is embedded in the institutional framework of modern research universities, implicit in the acknowledgments of every scholarly monograph, and takes place all the time, across all kinds of boundaries. Yet we are a long way from understanding the range of phenomena captured by the term “scholarly collaboration” in a systematic way. If, as most observers expect,1 the scale and extent of international scholarly collaboration will increase substantially in the future, then a fuller understanding of collaboration as a field of social action is long overdue. This report is the result of a collective step toward that end. The best kinds of collaboration promise rewards far beyond the abilities of single researchers w o rking in isolation. Collaboration is a necessary means to ove rcoming the tendency tow a rd s increased specialization and of addressing problems that cross political boundaries. Collaboration sets the stage for the synergies of small groups working together and allows for insights and under- standings that cannot be predicted. Most important, collaboration allows the nature of the problem being discussed to enlarge itself beyond the formulations of a single individual constrained by disci- pline, coming much closer to the multidimensional character of most social problems. Studies of the environment are an obvious case in point: to understand the impact of acid rain across national borders, for example, we need to call on the expertise of atmospheric scientists, zoologists, anthro- pologists, marine biologists, international relations scholars, lawyers, and probably others. But how will these experts speak to each other? Who will translate the concerns and norms of one expert into the problem set of the other(s)? Once they find a common language, how will they approach the task of framing a common question, let alone answering it? Will we end up with as many analyses as there are analysts, leaving still open the question of synthesis? Understanding collaboration better allows us to get closer to understanding what allows for true interdisciplinarity, a scholarly objective that is paid much lip-service but is rarely ever made manifest. This report begins with the assertion that it is easier to call for more and better forms of international collaboration than it is to design them. It is the belief of this working group that good design is helped by a better understanding of what collaboration is, how it has been done, and how it has been done well. Hence, the objective of this report—to apply the insights of social research to the question of collaboration so as to help reduce the transactional, financial, ethical, and emotional costs of international linkages and exchange. 1 UNESCO, "Policy Paper for Change and Development in Higher Education" (Paris: UNESCO, 1995); OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, "Internationalisation of Higher Education" (Paris: OECD, 1996). Knowledge about Collaboration EV I D E N C E about successful collaborative ventures tends to be tacit. While collaboration hap- pens all the time, is referred to in a variety of ways, and is increasingly assumed to be necessary for so much of what we do, collaborative work in the social sciences has only rarely been subjected to systematic inquiry.2 Even in the physical sciences, where collaboration tends to be far more explicit and everyday, there is little reflexive understanding of what makes collaboration work and how it is sustained. 3 It is usually just taken as a feature of scholarly interaction, like the test tubes and instruments that litter the work tables of most laboratories. Given the way that the histories of science are written, we are more likely to be informed about the great discoveries made by individual scientists than we are to know about the team efforts that cracked major physical and biological problems.4 In fact it could be argued that we are much more familiar with collaboration stories that mark failure—whether between scholars and scientists, donor agencies and NGOs, agrono- mists and farmers. Marginal notes in the files of these interactions are replete with signs of project breakdown, miscommunication, covert and overt hostilities, and unequal exchange. So, at one level, this report seeks to make the implicit explicit. In defining its analytic strategy, the working group agreed that it would adopt a comparative case study approach. The report would proceed by understanding and comparing specific cases of international research collaboration, further limiting itself to projects deemed relatively successful 5 by those within and without the project. Three constraints were fundamental in the choice of cases, addressing what the group saw as the biggest problems facing a better understanding of scholarly collaboration. Projects had to be research projects in the social sciences and humanities, they had to be international, and they had to be principally between researchers and institutions from the North and the South. Pitched at its most general level, the issue of international collaboration raises the oldest problem in social theory, namely, the search for the rules that allow people to work together in harmo- ny and under conditions of equality. The fact that there is still no consensus about this question should give us pause. Working toward better and more effective scholarly collaboration is difficult. The beneficiaries of a better understanding of this process are, however, much broader than the scholarly community and include NGOs, donors, and governments. 2 A notable exception is Joske F.G. Bunders and Chandan Mukerjee, "North-South Research Partnerships: Redressing the Imbalance," paper pre- sented at European Conference of Research Partnerships for Sustainable Development, Leiden, March 11-13, 1997. 3 Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science--And Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 4 Two exceptions worth noting are the story of how the DNA structure was discovered by Watson and Crick, possibly one of the most widely read popular science accounts of the past centur y, and the many accounts of the Manhattan Project. See James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (New York: Atheneum, 1968) and Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). A good example of this narrative tension can be found even in an atypical study of science in action, Paul Rabinow, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnolog y (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 5 The report discusses "success" below. North-South Issues C O M I N G to terms with the institutional constraints embedded in the issue of international scholarly collaboration is not easy.6 When collaborators come from the North and the South, the problems multiply. Setting aside the considerable question of language as beyond the scope of this report,7 the most obvious constraints are the vast differences in material resources available to scholars and researchers from different parts of the world. In developed countries, even junior scholars need never question the availability of current journals, 24-hour electronic mail access, and vast library holdings. 8 Most simply, they can also expect to live off their university salaries. None of these conditions are necessarily true for scholars either from the Third World or the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These unequal conditions alter fundamentally the nature of interaction between scholars from different world regions. Economically vulnerable scholars are often forced to engage in international collaboration for financial reasons. Even senior scholars from developing countries in some cases find themselves working as research assistants in order to supplement their meager official incomes—an enormous social waste of that talent.

Load more