Keynote

Raising the Larger Questions:
Challenges for the social sciences in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

Prof. Peadar Kirby   University of Limerick

Introduction: Welcoming the ISSP
It is wonderful to address the opening plenary of the first conference of the Irish Social Sciences Platform (ISSP). The Platform marks a major step for the social sciences in Ireland, with the potential to move them into a new phase of their development and of their contribution to Irish society. The past 30 years or so has seen many social science disciplines being established for the first time in Irish universities and finding their institutional niche throughout third-level education. For example, when I studied politics in UCD in the early 1970s, the discipline was only being established and one could only study it from second year onwards. Now the social sciences attract large numbers of students, have well established associations, hold regular conferences and publish their own journals. This therefore marks a phase of formation.

I suggest that the foundation of the ISSP marks the end of this formative phase and the beginning of a much more coordinated phase, in which we have the potential through collaborative enterprise and good use of the funding that comes our way to make a qualitative leap forward. Perhaps most urgent is the need to develop real niche strengths, clusters of capacity on key issues facing Irish society. Clearly this has been happening to some extent - I think of NIRSA in Maynooth as an excellent example - but much, much more needs to be done. We also urgently need proactively to map out agendas for policy makers and for public debate, not least agendas about what sort of funding regimes would best suit our needs. This involves a steep learning curve for many of us, but I hope that the foundation of the ISSP at last gives us an interdisciplinary forum and identity through which we can achieve an overview of what is needed and together plan to develop capacity across the range of areas we deem essential. In these ways, I very much hope that we social scientists begin to become a more visible presence in Irish intellectual life, challenging the narrow and often overly technological or economistic perspectives that seem to dominate policy makers and, indeed, the media.

It is therefore a great honour for me to be asked to give this keynote address at the first ISSP conference. Recognising the important theme chosen by the organisers, I have chosen as my title, ‘Raising the larger questions: Challenges for the social sciences in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland’. Addressing this title, I intend to do three things:

1. Tentatively map out a role for the social sciences in this new phase of Ireland’s development we are now entering, the post-Celtic Tiger phase;
2. Outline one example of the distinctive contribution we could make by critically interrogating the bigger questions facing our society and, indeed, our world;
3. Offer a few reflections on the issue of our impact on policy making and on wider public perspectives.

I will end with mention of a wider challenge for the social sciences worldwide. I offer these reflections by way of stimulating discussion among us on our role as social scientists and I look forward to seeing what reception these ideas may have. My hope is that they open an ongoing discussion well beyond this conference and that this discussion becomes part of the life of the ISSP.

Role of social sciences in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland
One thing about which we can probably all agree is that Ireland is moving into a new period of its history, not just for the social sciences but for society as a whole. The 15-year economic boom has indeed transformed not just the economy but it has brought major changes to key features of Irish society also - to its class structure, its ethnic makeup, its cultural horizons and, perhaps most challengingly for us, its ideological frames of reference. Much evidence points to the fact that we are leaving behind a particular ‘imagined community’ bounded by a nationalist frame of reference but it is far too early to have any clear sense of the common bases for re-imagining the wider national community and, of course, we have a major contribution to make to developing these common bases. Therefore, the prefix ‘post’ that we use to designate what we are now moving into indicates the challenge facing social scientists: this is nothing less than to map out the contours of this new society, its core structural features and its constructed sense of itself.

From the programme for this conference, we can see some of the detailed work being done, all feeding into this mapping exercise. It also, of course, serves to identify some of the areas on which little work is being done. So, judging purely from the titles of papers (and forgive me if I’m jumping rather too quickly to conclusions here), it strikes me that we have much on territory, but little on social class; a certain amount on gender, but not much on race; a small amount on industry, but very little on services, and nothing at all on the criminal economy; bits on health and education, but nothing focusing on the health and education systems and how they are changing. One of my own pet areas, governance, comes in somewhat tangentially but there is no central focus on it. I’m sure most of you could add to these observations. Now, these are by no means meant to be critical comments, but they may serve to highlight some of the areas on which analytical capacity and critical mass has been built but also some of the core areas on which such capacity is weak or even entirely missing. Rather than being read in a critical sense, I offer these few comments as an encouragement to one of the tasks that the Platform could usefully undertake, namely to proactively and strategically plan to fill these gaps over time.

Challenge of the bigger questions: models and paradigms
But, over and above our capacity to analyse perceptively and in depth these important areas of Irish life, perhaps the most important task of all, the most distinctive contribution that the social sciences have to make, is to identify critically the contours of the new society we are now entering into, what we call in political economy terms, its model of development or in more ideational terms, the dominant paradigm. This calls for a mix of empirical research with theory building that the Irish social sciences have not been very good at doing. For example, the question strikes me: For a country that is meant to be at the forefront of benefiting from globalisation, which our political leaders tell us is the envy of the world and which The Economist tells us, based on a most opaque methodology, has its best quality of life, what contribution have we made to international debates on today's globalisation and its impacts? These are among the most lively debates in the neck of the social science woods where I mostly roam but, while the Irish case is referenced, one encounters little solid critical treatment of what lessons it holds.

Does this point to the persistence of a methodological nationalism, something of course that remains pervasive within the social sciences internationally and is by no means exclusive to our shores? But there must be few societies where the limits of such an optic are as obvious as they are in Ireland: can much that is useful be said about Ireland’s model of development without identifying its dependent and subservient nature on global capital flows as being central? Yet, the only analysis of the Irish model I know that critically identifies dependence as a core analytical category is the recent PhD study done by Philipp Fink at the University of Leipzig entitled ‘Foreign Direct Investment and Development: The Cases of Hungary and Ireland’ (Fink, 2008). This study identifies Ireland and Hungary as following an export-oriented, FDI-led development strategy that has arisen because of the failure of attempts to develop indigenous industrial capacity. It identifies the reasons for this failure and the consequences of the strategy of dependent development followed as a result, particularly its contribution to the marked socio-economic disparities that characterise both countries. It analyses how this associative development strategy diverges from cases of successful development, as in East Asia, and draws attention to the ‘institutional and policy context within which FDI takes place’ as being crucial to the developmental outcomes that may or may not be achieved (ibid.: 6). This does draw out very challenging lessons for globalisation and development from these cases, that I hope will be taken into account when it is published later this year. But this is far from our own debates over the past decade or so on Ireland’s new model of negotiated governance. I wonder whether these debates have had much that is theoretically robust and innovative to offer international debates on globalisation and governance.

My comment about methodological nationalism a moment ago requires some clarification before I go on. What I clearly am not arguing is that we neglect a focus on our own national societies for the sake of a wider international focus. While I obviously support international and area studies of all kinds (after all I hold a chair in international politics) and strongly believe these have been neglected in Irish universities in the past and are still relatively weakly developed, I reject the rigid division between the national and the international that was so pervasive for such a long time. The key issue for me is not a national focus - it is to be expected that many (perhaps even most) social scientists living and working in a particular society will devote a lot of attention to that society - but rather the wider theoretical and comparative horizons of their work. And, of course, by theory I don’t mean something closed and given, that we can as it were take off our shelves and apply. Rather I mean theory as an ongoing creative endeavour to draw valid generalisations, frameworks of meaning, from the wealth of empirical evidence we engage with. That, I think, is the most exciting thing we do as social scientists and, in doing it well, we write the script of history, we generate the frameworks of interpretation that may in time become the common sense of an era. For this reason, I am emphasising here the lessons of the Irish case for wider theoretical debates. Judging from the literature on the Celtic Tiger phase of our development, it seems to me that where these lessons have been drawn it has largely been within very narrow, neo-classical (indeed, even neo-liberal) horizons which have neglected and airbrushed out the ambiguities and complexities that make the Irish case so interesting. So to me methodological nationalism is not so much an issue of a national focus but rather an issue relating to theoretical breadth, rigour and, indeed, creativity.

My own view, and this is something I was going to analyse in the paper I originally offered for this conference, is that it is difficult to speak of an ‘Irish model’ when one compares it to such successful models as the Nordic model, the East Asian model or, a particular favourite of mine, the Costa Rican model. This is so for two central reasons that mark it out as being quite different from these successful models. The first is that it has failed to generate a sustainable national system of innovation or, in different terms, of wealth and resource generation. Indeed recent research reported in the ESRI's Quarterly Economic Commentary, indicates very low levels of product innovation and negative levels of process innovation in the Republic over the course of the boom (Hewitt-Dundas and Roper, 2008). The second is that it has failed to develop a robust regime of distribution linked to the regime of accumulation. Indeed, in my analysis, the conditions for the success of the regime of accumulation structurally undermine the development of any robust regime of distribution (see Kirby 2008 for further elaboration). If this is true, then the so-called Irish model is a contradiction in terms. Interestingly, these were some of the features of the Irish model identified by the veteran Danish political scientist, Georg Sorensen, when comparing how well placed Denmark and Ireland are to weather the global downturn. For Sorenson, Ireland’s model has not yet been tested, as was Denmark’s in the 1930s and during the second World War. With its high level of dependence on FDI, its relatively weak innovative capacity, its weak welfare effort and its increasing levels of perception of corruption, he concludes that Ireland is less well placed than is Denmark (Sorensen, 2007).

Similarly, when we turn to the main ideational paradigm guiding the Irish state’s development policy today, it is remarkable how little critical debate is taking place about what is actually means. I refer of course to the ubiquitous term ‘knowledge economy’ as if knowledge as an input into production is something new. I won’t even mention ‘knowledge society’ since it constitutes nothing more than a fig leaf to hide the economistic nature of this paradigm. The only comprehensive exegesis of the term I have come across was a paper by Bob Jessop at a conference in Aarhus last November. Jessop’s survey highlighted the problematic and malleable nature of the term, which in his view is one of the reasons it has caught on. Firstly, he writes, it lends itself to neo-liberal, neo-corporatist, neo-statist or neo-communitarian interpretations, depending on one’s point of view so that two people using the term can mean quite different and even mutually exclusive things by it. Secondly, it is a policy paradigm but hardly a theoretical one ‘screening out the ambiguities and blurring the fine distinctions’, as Jessop puts it. Thirdly, while it has a material basis (innovation and productivity for competitiveness), there is a contradiction at the heart of it: Is it knowledge as a social source of creativity or knowledge as a factor of production; is it knowledge as a source of social wealth or knowledge as a generator of economic surplus value and profit; does the knowledge generated promote an intellectual commons or an intellectual property regime (which the difference between Linux and Microsoft nicely illustrate)? Finally, in the name of this so-called knowledge economy, do we see an enhancing of the quality of education or, rather, the standardising of knowledge and the extension of educational provision with little evidence of any improvement in quality? In other words, at the heart of the debate is how one conceives of knowledge, but is it surprising that this issue never gets debated amid the ubiquitous references to the knowledge economy? Jessop’s conclusion is that the knowledge economy ‘may facilitate successful economic steering when it has requisite variety and is reflexive [or] it may also create the basis for governance failure, the “revenge” of what has been overlooked and ignored’. This at least offers some criteria for evaluating how the concept may be being used in policy terms and it would be very interesting to apply it to the Irish case. Finally, Jessop suggests an alternative to the ‘knowledge economy’; this is a ‘wisdom-based society’. Now that is something I could throw my weight behind as an objective for policy makers.

A recent and interesting example of these tensions over the meaning of the concept in the Irish case is provided in a forthcoming book by Finbarr Bradley and James J. Kennelly entitled Capitalising on Culture, Competing on Difference (Blackhall, 2008). This argues:

Ireland faces serious challenges not just to sustain economic success but to define the type of society it wishes to be. Although the economic accomplishments have been considerable, a holistic evaluation suggests there have been other substantial, although not easily quantifiable, aspects of Ireland’s boom. Contemporary Ireland, while awash with capability, confidence and resources, seems uninspired and faces significant social and environmental challenges. It appears badly in need of the driving vision that characterised the period some thirty years before the creation of Saorstát Éireann in 1922. Often described as the Irish Revival or Irish Renaissance, it was an era of cultural cohesion, prodigious idealism, self-reliance, creativity and innovation.

Ireland today must identify where its competitive advantage lies, how this differs from its competitors and what inimitable resources or capabilities it possesses to deliver high value-added products and services. Learning communities and organizations are central to competitive advantage, so Ireland must foster these in order to create a learning society. A core argument of this book is that culture, tradition and identity are powerful resources that lead to innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship and global advantage. Such qualities, founded on meaning, rooted in place and catalysed by a forward-looking public policy, can create conditions necessary for the creation of the vaunted knowledge or learning society (Bradley and Kennelly, 2008: 2; emphasis in original).

This argument sets a radically different agenda for building a ‘knowledge society’ in Ireland, taking us back to the audacious project of language reversal which dominated education for the first decades of the state’s existence. Again, it illustrates both a different understanding of the sort of knowledge required but also a more considered view of the roots of economic innovation. It will be interesting to see if this book generates any debate about the meaning of the term, and any refinement of policy towards its achievement.

So what can we conclude about the bigger questions? As I said earlier, I consider our most essential contribution as social scientists is to identify the contours of the dominant project, hold it up to the light as it were so that its inner logic is made transparent, its strengths and its limitations are highlighted, and its design and implementation critically assessed. Given our capacity not just to gather and assess empirical evidence, but to situate it within theoretical frameworks and to assess the adequacy of these frameworks, then this is a task for us. If we don’t do it, no one else will. Have we done it well up to now? That is a question for collective discussion rather than one for me to answer here. But, looking at the imitative and incoherent nature of public policy in this state, there is a real urgency that we make this contribution as richly and as forcefully as we can.

Impact: policy and media
These conclusions raise the issue of impact. I thought it revealing that when The Irish Times ran a series recently entitled ‘Beating the Downturn’ on reviving the Irish economy (August 11^th, 12^th, 13^th and 14^th, 2008), it was to businesspeople they turned, not to social scientists. Indeed, I find it rather disturbing that the media’s regular forays into social critique or into future gazing almost never draw on the views of social scientists, but rather turns to the likes of David McWilliams, Fintan O’Toole and George Lee. By the large, the economists on whom the media rely work in the financial sector and are hardly the most dispassionate or knowledgeable analysts of economic and social development. I contrast this with the humanities, where one is more likely to see leading historians, literary critics or cultural theorists on our screens or our airwaves. I do conclude, both from these observations, and from academic analyses of the narrow circles in which public policy is made in this country, with input from a very select and ‘safe’ group of academics, that the work of most social scientists has little immediate impact, either on public policy or on public debates. Whether it has greater longer-term impact through our work in the classroom and our contribution to academic debate is difficult to assess.

I think this should concern us. For, it can hardly be accidental that we have a society characterised by mediocre public services and an extremely impoverished or even non-existent understanding of the public sphere and public space. As Garret FitzGerald quite rightly put it in a recent Irish Times column:

It has to be said that we have notably failed to secure the benefits that might have been expected to accrue from the fact that we are now one of the most prosperous of European states. Our chaotic health service and our grossly understaffed education system, together with the many serious inadequacies of our social services, reflect very badly upon a political system that has massively maldistributed the huge resources we have created.

The harsh truth is we have allowed far too much of our new wealth to be creamed off by a few influential people, at the expense of the public services our people are entitled to (FitzGerald, 2008: 16).

This outcome raises questions not just about our party and political system, as FitzGerald identifies, but about our social system, our public culture and values, our civil society (and, as professional educators, we must add about the content of our education) that go to the heart of what sort of future we can expect in this society. Yet, while these realities are the stuff of daily news reporting and comment in the media, and of the everyday discourse of most of us, what are we doing to change the situation? And this is not a question about our political activities but about our professional ones - have the social sciences a contribution to make to understanding the roots of this malaise and to charting a way forward, thereby contributing to the political action that will be required to do something about it? Again, I suggest that the ISSP has the potential to act as a catalyst in this regard.

Being ambitious
So I want to end with a call to be ambitious. At least the ISSP now gives us a forum for regular collaboration, to develop a common identity as social scientists beyond the disciplinary identities that have served to divide us up to now. Let us take this very seriously and strategise and plot together about how we play this role more effectively so that our contribution to the future of our society and the wider world is more visible and appreciated.

As I end, I am very conscious that I have failed to mention the greatest challenge of all; we Irish social scientists are by no means exceptional in largely neglecting and avoiding the challenge to our social paradigms of climate change and peak oil. The requirement that we reduce carbon emissions by up to 90% within the next 30 to 40 years, coupled with the advent of peak oil, has been largely treated as a technical environmental issue that is going to be resolved though technological innovations whereas, of course, it raises the most fundamental questions about the future of the paradigm of global industrial society. For this is a crisis of our economy, of our political system, of our global social structure and division of labour. It is high time that the social sciences began to take seriously that this is, as the UNDP’s 2007-08 Human Development Report called it ‘the most serious challenge humankind has ever faced’ with the future and very survival of our children and their children ‘hanging in the balance’ (UNDP, 2007: 6). Perhaps its most fundamental challenge is to the discipline of economics and the growth paradigm that dominates it; but it equally challenges deeply rooted notions of social change, of the structuring of political power and how it is challenged, of social mobilisation and organisation, of cultural and ideological horizons. The list could go on and on and centrally includes the ways we educate and for what future we educate.

In writing of the challenge of the global risk society, Ulrich Beck a few years ago recognised that ‘new realities are arising’ and called for ‘a new mapping of space and time, new coordinates for the social and the political, coordinates which have to be theoretically and empirically researched and elaborated’. Unless this is done and social science is ‘re-established as a transnational science of the reality of de-nationalization, transnationalization and “re-ethnification” in a global age’, then it runs the risk of ‘becoming a museum of antiquated ideas’, he wrote (Beck, 2002: 53, 54). We do run this risk and I agree that we need nothing less than the re-establishment of the social sciences, though I would add to his list the greatest challenge of all, that of a sustainable economy and society. I see no reason why we Irish social scientists, with our rich history and our challenging present, could not make our own valuable contribution to this task.

References
Beck, Ulrich (2002): ‘The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited’, in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol 19 (4): pp 39-55.
Bradley, Finbarr and James J. Kennelly (2008): Capitalising on Culture, Competing on Difference: Innovation, Learning and Sense of Place in a Globalising Ireland, Dublin: Blackhall Publishing.
Fink, Philipp (2007): ‘Foreign Direct Investment and Development: The Cases of Hungary and Ireland’, unpublished PhD manuscript, University of Leipzig.
FitzGerald, Garret (2008): ‘Short-term pain should not blind us to bright future’, in The Irish Times, May 17^th, 2008, p 16.
Hewitt-Dundas, Nola and Stephen Roper (2008): ’Ireland’s Innovation Performance: 1991-2005’, in Alan Barrett, Ide Kearney and Martin O’Brien, Quarterly Economic Commentary, Summer 2008, Dublin: ESRI, pp. 45-68.
Jessop, Bob (2007): ‘The Knowledge Economy as a State Project’, keynote address to Matchpoints conference, Aarhus University, Denmark, November 15^th and 16^th, 2007.
Kirby, Peadar (2008): ‘Policy Regimes and Poverty Reduction: Country Paper on Ireland’, Geneva: UNRISD.
Sorensen, Georg (2007): ‘Globalisation and Development: Ireland and Denmark in Comparative Perspective’, paper given at the Matchpoints conference, Aarhus University, Denmark, November 15^th and 16^th, 2007.
UNDP (2007): Human Development Report: Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan