The Development of Policy Relevance in European Social Research

In the last twenty years, the organization of scientific research has undergone structural change. Perhaps more than many practitioners are aware, these changes have also effected the social sciences. The transformation has been driven by long-term forces historically associated with scientific and technological progress, such as the demand for interdisciplinary research and the increase in research costs. In this context, a growing consensus has emerged within policy environments that publicly funded science must be more closely connected to societal concerns. Such a concern for relevance has been interwoven with – but not reducible to – the demand for commercial viability, the attempt to apply quasi-market criteria to funding decisions and last but by no means least, the growth of commercially funded research. For the social sciences, a major factor contributing to change has been the move towards new relationships with national economic and social policies. Just as in the ‘hard’ sciences, social sciences have been urged to produce ‘products’, ‘commodities’ or ‘services’ which have a ‘real’ social relevance. Increasingly, funders demand that social science should contribute to tackling those practical problems that face contemporary societies. The demand is based on the fact that “knowledge generated from social science research is all too often not relevant for those who have to make decisions relating to the problems of change” (Heller quoted in Van Langenhove, 1999, p.48). It follows that “social science has to be brought into the public sphere by promoting research that brings together researchers, those who play a role in the phenomena researched and those who are in a position to make decisions about the phenomena studied” (ibid. 1999, p.49). Interestingly, these developments can be seen as a part of a much wider debate on interactive social sciences (Bulmer, 1978, 1982; Heller, 1986; Science and Public Policy, 2000). The idea that the generation of knowledge occurs through the overlapping interactions between university-industry-government has posed a series of theoretical and methodological challenges for social research. To varying degrees of intensity, this debate on the relevance of research to policy has involved the various national social research communities. More interestingly, the birth of a European social science community has been part and parcel of similar issues arising at a EU level within the 4th and 5th Framework Programmes. All the relevant EU official documents intone the relevance and usefulness of social research. However, at a closer analysis it becomes clear that EU decision-making bodies have avoided providing a clear definition of this issue also because the research community was expected to contribute actively to it primarily through its practices. As already explored in chapter two, the definition of the European added value, of which the policy relevance is a key aspect, brought with it both uncertainty and dynamism. This chapter takes these aspects as the starting point for empirical research. Social researchers who participated in the 4th and 5th Framework Programmes were confronted by demands for policy relevance that were both strong and very vague. How did such researchers understand such demands? Through what research practices did they try to meet them? What advantages and what problems did this aspect of EU research bring for social researchers themselves? In other words, the chapter seeks to provide an understanding of what researchers think they are doing, how they are practically responding to the demand for relevance of their work to policy and who they perceive to be actual or potential members of their audience. The novelty of the research presented here lies therefore in the fact that it addresses the re-interpretation of the link between research and policy ‘from below’ as it emerges from researchers’ experiences.