Three Social Science Disciplines in Central and Eastern Europe [antikvár]

Social Sciences in Central and Eastern Europe on the Verge of EU EnlargementBearing in mind the extent to which the overall context of the social sciences in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has changed since 1989-90, the questions of the rebuilding of and, in some cases, the new foundation of academic institutions, as well as of the content of teaching and research in the social sciences, arise naturally. Operating under the assumption that the social sciences are an integral part of the science system and of culUire at large, after a decade of sociopolitical transitions, the moment seems right to assess the status of the social sciences in CEE.The idea for the project emerged during the year 2000 at Collegium Budapest in discussions with Max Kaase, Wissenschaftszentrum (WZB, Berlin) and a former member of the Academic Advisory Board of Collegium Budapest; Helga Nowotny, the Chair of the Academic Advisory Board; Andrew Sors, Head of Unit (Social and Economic Knowledge Base) at DG Research of the European Commission, Brussels; and Gábor Klaniczay, rector of Collegium Budapest. The concrete shape of the project was developed in close cooperation with GESIS/Social Science Information Center (Branch Office Berlin). The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM, Vienna), the Wissenschaftszentrum (WZB, Berlin), Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin), and Maison des Sciences de I'Homme (MSH, Paris) were further collaborators.The project objective was to produce a comprehensive overview of the state of three social science disciplines in this region: economics (including labor market research); political science (including administrative science as well as policy analysis); and sociology (including social policy). The project was limited to these three disciplines because including a larger array of social science disciplines, desirable as it would have been, would have gone far beyond what was possible with the resources available for the task. For the same reason, the project was also limited to the CEE countries seeking entry to the European Union. It was envisaged to produce a compendium in the form of a handbook pinpointing the developments of the last decade in the three fields and also ftinctioning as a map of orientation for future cooperation with scholars in this region. We are very pleased to present this book, which attempts a systematic look at the state of these three social science disciplines in terms of both infrastructure and research.At the beginning of the project, there was an academic interest in establishing a firm basis for a reliable assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of important contemporary social science disciplines in CEE. Envisaged was a comprehensive collection of relevant and compatible data from the ten countries based on further-developed, already existing databases offered by GESIS in Beriin under the guidance of Ulrike Becker and the Political Science Network of EPSNet directed by Hans-Dieter Klingemann. A set of negotiated criteria and a muhi-step evaluation and confrontation by outside critics of the country reports that were written by carefully chosen local experts established the frame of reference of the project. Also, the need was felt to overcome an often pre-set (and principally Western) theoretical agenda before this stocktaking took place. This is because many political, cultural, and linguistic factors, both in the West and in the CEE countries, have prevented and still encumber the creation of a regular and reliable flow of information, a stable set of academic values, and a transparent image of key figures, institutions, and important productions in the three fields.Before the democratic transition, the academic system in Central and Eastern Europe was organized more or less according to the Soviet model: the academies of sciences were the core research actors and presented various impediments to a pluralistic, university-centered model with pre-World War II antecedents, which could have communicated more easily with researchers in the West. As a consequence, the socio-political transitions affected the social sciences in the East deeply, although not in a homogenous way, due to differences in the "philosophies" of the organization of science and its specific disciplines in Eastern European countries and due to economic constraints arising from the transition to market economies. The years of transition and