Accolades are due all of the world's Social Scientists for their great accomplishments during the past century or two. They have developed scientific methods applicable to research on human behavior and institutions that not only give us great insight into our social, political, economic, cultural and psychological problems, but they provide tools and methods applicable to their solution. We need to treasure these achievements and honor those responsible for these advances over earlier traditions which relied on non-scientific methods and more subjective, ethnocentric ways of viewing human beings and their relationships with each other.

Having said that, we need to recognize that much more work is needed before we can truly claim to understand ourselves and know how to solve our problems, many of which assume new and frightening aspects almost as we speak. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of all the industrial empires have been followed by the rise of a host of new states and ethnic nations eager for recognition and security, by new technologies with glorious possibilities and frighteningly dangerous risks, and above all, by the heightened interdependence of all human beings that we call globalization. In this new era, greater interdependence, greater technological capabilities, increased potential for self-destructive violence, massive population growth, environmental destruction, unrestrainable urbanization, massive poverty and widespread criminal violence all pose growing challenges for human imagination and creativity.

In this context, Social Scientists face ever more serious and important challenges. In order to cope with them successfully, we need better ways to understand and deal with the problems facing our world. This effort will require some far-reaching transformations in the way we structure the Social Sciences. Of course, we need to build on past achievements, but we also need innovations in order to analyze our changing human condition more effectively. These changes are well referred to by the single word, globalization. Its far-reaching implications challenge our creativity. They may be summarized under two main headings: disciplines and area studies.

Disciplines. The Social Science disciplines evolved in Western contexts where a high level of social differentiation had taken place, by which we mean that separate institutions had evolved as contexts for universally important social functions. To take the extreme contrast, in ancient and primitive societies, the family or clan provided a single framework for handling the economic, social, educational, religious, cultural and recreational needs confronting humans everywhere. In modern times, and especially in Europe and other "Western" countries, separate markets, schools, churches, community centers, sports arenas, and above all governments with an elaborate state apparatus, were created. It was in such a context that natural science evolved as an ally of technology and industrialization, while the Social Sciences developed as independent disciplines focused on the study of markets (Economics), government (Political Science), communities and social classes (Sociology), schools (Education), the mass media (Communications), health services (Medicine), legal institutions and practices (Law), and growing individualization led also to Psychology.

In most of the world, however, more holistic traditional institutions retained their influence in all these spheres, even though because of industrial imperialism and its increasingly powerful technologies, Western-style practices and attitudes have become ubiquitous, including the appearance of a host of Universities in which these disciplines have been reproduced. The result is a kind of perverse dualism in which new institutions and practices are now globally pervasive in uneasy and sometimes hostile co-existence with ancient social structures and attitudes, including centers devoted to the perpetuation and intensification of ancient traditions and beliefs. To be relevant to the new world system generated by globalization, Social Science needs concepts and tools to understand these highly disparate and novel conditions, including ways to acknowledge and legitimize the best features of traditional learning. The established disciplines which still presuppose the neat formalisms of Western social structure lack both the concepts and methods needed to understand and help solve the emergent problems of our global society. Increasingly, we find hybrid fields in which specialists from two or more disciplines join forces to find more coherent ways to understand the world. No doubt this is an important development with promising results, yet it is still inadequate: we need to link many more disciplines in order to achieve real integration of knowledge.

Area Studies. After World War II, a novel and increasingly important effort to achieve such integration arose under the heading of area studies. The basic premise of this initiative involved cross-disciplinary cooperation and geographic localization. It was assumed that if we could compartmentalize the world into a large number of localities, each different from all others, a team of specialists drawing on the expertise of every discipline could put the pieces together and re-create Humpty Dumpty -- the parts would fit together and give us a holistic view of how each local system worked, as a whole. Since the Western scholars who created modern Social Science were largely ignorant about conditions in the countries that had come under modern imperial rule, it seemed reasonable for them to send bright graduate students and study teams to do field research in these countries and apply their skills as Social Scientists in order to find solutions for the important problems they lumped together under the headings of development and modernity, or even Westernization.

We can now see some of the inherent limitations in this approach and we should, I think, be able to redesign Social Science to help us overcome them. This new approach has both a substantive and a methodological dimension: substantively, the world has changed so much that a design which seemed appropriate 50 or even 25 years ago has now lost touch with reality; and methodologically, the available disciplines now require fundamental transformations in order to help us understand and solve the problems of our globalizing world.

At the substantive level, it used to be pretty realistic to think of every world area as a kind of self-contained territory, with its own people, culture, language, religion, institutions, and problems. It involved a kind of projection to higher levels of the way cultural anthropologists used to look at isolated communities each of which had a distinctive culture, language, social structure and identity. When applied to large areas with long histories, and complex civilizations like Brazil, China, India, Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, etc. this model quickly revealed its limitations, but the fiction of territorial integrity still seemed useful enough to support a host of country studies and regional professional societies dedicated to research on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and even the "Slavic" world. The concept of area studies, however, seemed inapplicable to the industrialized world where scholars complacently assumed that the established disciplines could provide all the knowledge and solutions they needed without trying to patch them together. Only recently have such fields as "American Studies" appeared, but they are not so much intended to help Americans understand themselves as to try to explain America to the rest of the world.

The impact of globalization has, by now, so transformed the world as a whole system that these premises of area studies have become increasingly invalid. Massive trade movements bring the latest inventions to the most remote villages -- consider not just soap, rope, and thermos bottles but cellular phones, television, computers and even the INTERNET. The global flow of information now makes events in Washington, London, Paris and Moscow familiar to the masses in every country, and even Western audiences are now exposed to intimate details about problems and events in countries whose names they scarcely knew a decade ago. Perhaps most importantly, the accelerated streams of migrants coming from almost everywhere and going in all directions now means that we cannot assume that any territory has a stable population. Many members of every nation are scattered around the globe so that research on Filipinos, Iranians, Nigerians, or Peruvians, to say nothing of Americans, French, Germans or Russians cannot be confined to countries that bear their names. Moreover, the population of every country has become a polyglot mixture of folks coming from many places, and their traditional cultures and traditions are overlaid by a thick mantle of innovations. In this context, we can well ask, "What is an area and how can it be studied in a meaningful way?"

This brings us to the methodology: many of the fundamental concepts and methods that developed in the Social Sciences presupposed Western conditions, as mentioned above. Yet many of these concepts distort reality in most non-Western environments. Moreover, the effects of globalization referred to in the previous paragraph are also undermining their utility in the Western world. Concepts of the individual, of class, of the state, community, justice, equity and security which used to be taken for granted as universally relevant must be viewed now as contextually limited, relevant only in certain special situations, in particular times and places?

Finally, globalization has created a completely new context for all Social Science. Initially, it was a kind of Western monopoly, and when scholars embarked on field trips to do area studies, it was mainly Western scholars who investigated non-Western areas, assuming no one else could carry out such inquiries. Today, Social Science has become ubiquitous -- although some countries have many more than others, Social scientists can now be found throughout the world: the globalization of Social Science is a reality. This means, I think, that scholars in every country can take primary responsibility for studying and explaining their own country -- area studies should no longer require outside investigators. Instead, insiders have the need, the capacity and growing opportunities to study themselves.

However, we also need global cooperation for several reasons. Insiders can benefit by inviting outsiders to help them, and scholars from every country need to travel and confer with their counterparts in other countries and even to do research in many places in order to acquire the objectivity and balance that Social Science requires. It is, indeed, easy for anyone, under local pressures, to become ethnocentric, to exaggerate and boast, and to create hostile images of outsiders and false explanations of serious problems. Cosmopolitanism in Social Science is the obvious antidote for such parochialism. Vigorous and lively international professional societies and extensive use of the INTERNET and World Wide Web to supplement traditional publications and correspondence, are among the available instruments to help all of us maintain a balance in Social Science research. The Americans and Germans need the help of outsiders as much as do the Nigerians, Iranians, Colombians and Pakistanis. Increasingly, I think, Social Science has to become a global enterprise in which scholars from every country join in the search for solutions to our most important human problems. Moreover, our need for synthesis in creating holistic views about the interdependence of our problems in any place on earth depends on the ability of local people living in these places to put the pieces together in what we might call home studies rather than area studies. Ultimately, the synthesis of innumerable home studies may be provided by what, throughout the world, can be understood as global studies.

Return to top of this page
Updated: 19 June 1998

See linked pages: [] Social Science || Area Studies || Concepts of Globalization || Web Sites []

---