Globelics Academy 2015
Tampere, Finland
Welcome Lecture
What means to be part of the Globelics community?
Judith Sutz
Universidad de la República, Uruguay
Five umbrellas of our community
The Globelics Community
Politics, policies,
Development studies institutions, organizations
Development stories
Science Technology
and Society
National Systems
of Innovation
Economics of technical change
and innovation
Science, Technology and Society (STS)
There are several approaches around STS
Coming from economic history (Mokyr, Landes, Bairoch,
Rosenberg) and from the history of technology (Noble)
Coming from the sociology of knowledge (Ziman, Gibbons,
Bjiker) and from the social appraisal of innovations (Rogers)
Coming from the classic political economy (Smith, Marx)
But modern STS as such was pioneered by John D. Bernal, a
very famous natural scientist
Christopher Freeman, one of the founding fathers of the
concept of National Systems of Innovation, gave a talk about
Bernal, a small part of which I would like to share with you
“Bernal studied science as a social institution.
I first went across him when I was a student at the London School of
Economics, at the beginning of the war, in 1939, the year in which he
published his classic book, The Social Function of Science.
At the LSE I never heard, in any of the courses I took, the words
research and development. No one talked about the organization of
innovation in industry. The only mention we had on inventions and
innovation was in a course on Economic History and referred to the
Industrial Revolution.
But about contemporary innovation, contemporary science, I heard
nothing.
So, when I first heard Bernal’s lecture on the Social Function of Science
it was a breath of fresh air.”
It was a breath of fresh air for an economist
Development studies, development stories
This approach concentrates in the situation of underdeveloped
countries -what we can term the South- (Sussex Manifesto) and
of those countries that were able to “catch-up” with the
industrialized world. (Amsden, Kim)
Concepts like struggle, conflict and power are main
dimensions of this approach. “Kicking away the ladders” is an
expression coined in the XIX century to describe how the
asymmetry of power works against the weak nations, masked
as good-will recommendations. (List, Chang).
Development studies pioneered the recognition of inequality as
a main factor hampering development (Hirschman, Sen)
What is development? Can it be equated to catch-up?
Economics of technical change and innovation
Here we find the probably best known names: again Smith and Marx,
and then Schumpeter and more recently the neo-schumpeterians: Nelson
and Winter, Dossi, Carlota Pérez and Freeman again (to name just a few
among a high number of very distinguished economists devoted to
technical change and innovation).
STS and even more so development studies are approaches where the
specific features of developing countries were taken into account.
In contrast, the economics of technical change and innovation was for a
long time an approach anchored in the past and present facts of
developed countries.
What can be taken as universal in the economics of technical
change and innovation and what needs to be contextualized to
become meaningful in the South?
Answering these question is not an easy task
“How modern ‘mainstream’ economic analysis became so narrow analytically?
My own graduate education in economics (…) was not narrow, or strongly
ideologically slanted in favor of market organization and capitalism. I (…) read
a lot in the history of economic thought. Economic history was a required subject,
and no weak sister to “theory” and econometrics. The issues of income inequalities
and poverty were not glossed over either. (…)
What happened to cause, or to permit, the narrowing?
One was the growing tendency within economics to think of mathematical
modeling as not simply one useful way to theorize in economics, but as the only
legitimate way. (…) And the glorification of abstract mathematical economic
theory pushed the empirically oriented courses, and specializations, off to the
side, as second-class citizens.
The great graduate schools began to train economists who knew a lot about
mathematical modeling, but who knew very little about actual economies and
how they worked.”
“To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish
passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological
speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the
other social sciences.
Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems
of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy
way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to
answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in.
The truth is that economics should never have sought to divorce itself from
the other social sciences and can advance only in conjunction with them.
The social sciences collectively know too little to waste time on foolish
disciplinary squabbles.”
Politics, policies, institutions, organizations
Science, technology, innovation and industrial policies:
for what?
how?
each for itself or integrated?
Specific institutions/organizations with a dynamic of their
own:
Universities
Firms
Sectors
The thorny issue of information, measurements and indicators
National Systems of Innovation (in retrospective)
• “The most fundamental resource in the modern economy is knowledge
and, accordingly, the most important process is learning.
• A major challenge for innovation system analysis is to avoid thinking in
terms of mechanical models of causality and develop theory as well as
analytical techniques that make it possible to study how different factors
interact in a systemic context.
• A weakness of the system of innovation approach is that it is still lacking in
its treatment of the power aspects of development. The focus on interactive
learning – a process in which agents communicate and cooperate in the creation
and utilization of new economically useful knowledge – may lead to an
underestimation of the conflicts over income and power connected to the
innovation process. In a global context where the access to technical knowledge
is becoming restricted (…) by more and more ambitious global schemes to
protect intellectual property this perspective gives a too rosy picture.”
As a kind of countervailing power to the colonizing tendency emanating from
market oriented innovation policy we see a need to develop a wider field of
politics – knowledge politics – that covers all aspects of knowledge production
and takes into account that the production of knowledge has much wider scope
than just contributing to economic growth.
Five themes that have been touched upon in this post-script need to be
further developed in future research:
• Implications of the NSI-approach for economic theory.
• NSI and economic development.
Lundvall, 2010
• NSI welfare states and inequality.
• Environmental sustainability of national innovation systems.
• Innovation in the public sector.
Most of these themes will require transdisciplinary efforts combining
economics with management, sociology, political science and engineering.”
Christopher Freeman: a man of wisdom,
commitment and hope
The big challenges: science, technology, innovation and inequality
“It is on a global scale that the most extreme effects of worldwide
inequality in incomes are apparent. The bias in the world research
innovation system is so great as to constitute a danger to the future of
human society” (The economics of industrial innovation, 1982)
“It might appear at first sight that quality of life objectives bear little
or no relationship to science and technology policies, but by taking a
number of examples I hope to show that there are very important
connexions in almost all instances” (Technology, progress and the
quality of life, 1990)
On policies
On research orientation
Commitment and hope
Sometimes, in developing countries, it is hard to perceive in which
way working on NSI can make a difference for development.
The work of Freeman reminds the simple truth in Italo Calvinos’
advise: “ Don’t have too much illusions, but never ever fail to believe that
whatever you can do is useful”. Freeman himself put it stronger:
“If a young girl in hiding in a cupboard in Amsterdam in 1944 (...)
could nevertheless find the courage to hope, then can we as comfortably
placed intellectuals (...) abdicate responsibility for models of hope and
for the effort to sustain the uncertain, painful and desperately difficult
progress to a better future?” (The luxury of despair, 1974)