Thank you very much for inviting me and giving me an opportunity to talk about the future of research in the Social Sciences. There have indeed been many changes in the last year or so, as you noted in your introductory remarks, which have applied to all the Research Councils and with equal force to the ESRC. The boundaries of the different Research Councils, as most of you will know, have changed and some new Research Councils have emerged from that process. An important new post has been created of Director General of the Research Councils occupied at the moment by Sir John Cadogan. It is the role of the Director General to coordinate activity between the Research Councils. Most important, from my point of view, is that during the last six months or so the Director General has been carrying out a zero-based review of all the activities and budgets of the Research Councils. This means that in principle my budget for 1995 could be zero and I have had to justify to the Director General what the ESRC will be doing in research terms from 1995 onwards. On that basis, there will be an allocation of the science vote to the different Research Councils. I can assure you that it is a process which is, I think, unique in the history of the Research Councils and it really concentrates the mind.
In addition to that, the Research Councils have moved from a system of having Chairmen, as Howard Newby, my predecessor, was Chairman of ESRC. The functions of Chairman and Chief Executive have been separated. My Chairman is Dr Bruce Smith, who is not a Social Scientist; he is by academic training a mathematician and physicist, who spent many years, although he is British, working on the Apollo Space Programme in the United States. He is now a very successful businessman. This is the new pattern of having users of research in position as Chairs of the different Research Councils. All this amounts to quite a considerable amount of change in terms of formal organisation. What I want to say to you this morning is that these formal lines of command convert into even more substantial change when you look at how the Research Councils are operating. In this sense, although the Humanities Research Board as a funding body has its own problems, I think that the challenge facing the ESRC has been equally considerable. Not to put too fine a point on it, what I see my function as being is, on the one hand, to satisfy the principal objectives which have been set down for the ESRC in the Government's White Paper and, on the other hand, to provide the maximum opportunities for academic Social Scientists in universities and elsewhere (some of the best Social Scientists in Britain do not work in universities - they work in independent Research Institutes). Those two objectives have to be brought together and a convincing case has to be made. I am very much in sympathy with what John said earlier. This should not be seen in terms of a zero-sum game between the Humanities Research Board and the ESRC. Although the ESRC seems to get relatively large sums of money in HRB terms, we must remind ourselves that the ESRC manages at the moment to attract only 5% of the total science vote in Britain (£1.2 billion). So we are really as a Research Council relatively small players in overall science spending. I would want to argue that in terms of the intellectual contribution that we could and do make that proportion should be larger. Going round the country and talking to the Vice-Chancellors of different universities, most of whom are not Social Scientists or from a Humanities background but rather natural scientists and engineers, I have found that they also seem to appreciate the point that the time is ripe for the Social Sciences and possibly also the Humanities to act as the connecting link between Science and Technology and people. The time is ripe for there to be a more considered use of the enormous academic resource that we have within our university system.
We have of course a mission statement in the ESRC, which I would like to summarise. The White Paper, Realising Our Potential, was insisting firstly that in the future the pattern of research funding by the Research Councils should contribute towards the enhancement of national wealth. That is not very new. There have been many Government White Papers since the end of the Second World War which have tried to deal with that issue. What is new is the reinforcement of that aspiration by the stipulation that when the Research Councils make decisions about funding those decisions should be influenced by a new group of people who are not primarily academics but who go under the name of 'Users', 'Stake-holders' and, perhaps most difficult of all to deal with - 'Beneficiaries'. What we have had to deal with is how we can build in these people into our decision-making processes. Who are they? What legitimate role can they play in helping us to move towards decisions about funding major research projects?
What does all this really mean? Let's leave all the mission statements: we are all drowning under mission statements from our own universities and other organisations. What does it really mean when you decode this? First of all, I think it means something reasonable and important. I believe that when everything is stripped away the White Paper does deal with one of the critical weaknesses of Britain: that is, the difficulty in establishing an organised relationship between science and society. We are very good at fundamental research but historically Britain has been very weak in translating the fruits of that research into industrial practice. One can think of all the attempts to correct this tendency in the period after the Second World War and, of course, well before that, right back into the 19th century, with the Devonshire Commission. The Rothschild Report in the 1960s talked about the customer/contractor relationship, which it tried to introduce. The Swann Report was critical about the number of graduates that drifted from the universities back into academic employment. The Fulton Report was concerned that there were too many people from a Classics background going into the Civil Service: there weren't enough scientists and engineers, the service wasn't very professional. The Finniston Report was concerned about why engineers had such a low status in Britain relative to the United States and other European countries. This has been a matter of considerable concern by government over a long period. I personally regard it as a real problem and a real challenge: I think it is worth trying to reshape research efforts in order to contribute towards that important national aim. In doing so - and this is something very important in the White Paper, which is sometimes overlooked - the Research Councils must recognise that second-rate research is a bad buy. I can assure you that the ESRC along with all the other Research Councils takes that view: second-rate research is a bad buy and we will not buy it. What we are interested in funding is first-class research which has been validated by proper processes of peer review and is imaginatively directed towards trying to satisfy some of the objectives which are laid down in the White Paper. This is not an easy thing to do and quite a complicated mechanism has to be put in place in order to achieve it.
I am aware as I go round the country talking to many of my academic colleagues that there are some misconceptions about this. Some people will say: 'Well, so you look at that mission statement; what does it really mean? It doesn't add up to very much because if you look at the users of research, academics are the principle users of research; that's all right, that doesn't really represent much of a change. The quality of life is too nebulous a concept to mean very much, because that involves more or less everything. 'Beneficiaries' is a very vague concept; and almost everyone can be regarded as a 'beneficiary'. That being the case we are not really being told to do very much. All we need to do is to use the proper language and concepts when we frame our research applications and that will satisfy the Research Councils. I have to tell you honestly that it won't. When the Research Councils come to look at applications, they will be looking at the real connecting link between the research that is proposed and the priorities which are set down by the ESRC and in the White Paper. That may sound very hard but I think it right to say it. There is no need for academics to try to redefine reality in that way because what is being proposed is not something threatening. Certainly, if what was being proposed was that a lot of ignorant 'users' who knew nothing about your subject were going to come along and tell you what to do that would be threatening; but that is not the case. What is envisaged is a reciprocal relationship between you and the 'users' of your research. I may draw upon my own area of research which happened (I must use the past tense) to be Soviet Studies. What was interesting during the 1970s was the divergence between the public agenda of what was happening in much of the Soviet Union, and what academics knew. You found it not just in the press but in the Foreign Office, the MoD, and the Armed Services: the Soviet Union represented a huge military threat. If academics were invited to conferences they were always invited to talk about the 'threat' because it was thought in some curious way that we had a more detailed insight into it. When we went along to these conferences, those of us that had the audacity to do it would say: 'Well, I'm sorry, I'm here under false pretences, I don't want to tell you about the threat because that's not the interesting thing. What you need to know is that this centrally-planned economy is inherently flawed and is collapsing, and you have to start thinking now about the social and political consequences of that collapse. Don't ask me to tell you about the threat, don't you set my agenda: I am going to contribute to setting your agenda. That gave rise to a real discussion. I see that as the paradigm for the kind of engagement that should take place between academics and users of research. I think there is less of an obligation to do this in the Humanities, but certainly there is a clear obligation for most of the Social Sciences. We can no longer as Social Scientists talk to ourselves; we really do have to talk to others and engage them in discussion about what future research priorities are.
I should also report some good news about current Government thinking. You will know that side by side with the creation of the Research Councils there has been a national Technology Foresight exercise. Panels of distinguished academic specialists, business people and government people have been set up to try to predict what the main generic technologies will be in the forthcoming decades. There were one or two Social Scientists dotted around these Foresight panels: I don't think there were too many from the Humanities area, though I may be wrong in that. The outcome is beginning to look very interesting. These panels of businessmen and research directors of large companies have been coming forward and have been saying: 'You ask us to look to the future but the most difficult thing is not the generic technologies. We can quite quickly agree on what the key technologies are. The most difficult issues for us are the issues that are connected with people. We know what the technologies are, but how do we produce those technologies competitively in organisations? What does a successful organisation look like that can handle a rate of change like this? Is it very hierarchical? Is it one which is essentially based on alliances with suppliers? Is it one which has a strategic view which it regularly keeps under review? Is it one which is constantly talking to its customers or is it one which takes a very short term view? These are very important questions. They are right in the middle of the Social Sciences. Also, all sorts of social questions quite beyond the economic dimension have come up. Let me give you a paradigm case. One of the panels has been looking at questions of personal security. We are all aware that in large cities, if you live in a city centre you tend to feel quite insecure in a personal sense. What do you do about it? Well, the technology-fix argument is that what you need is really more sophisticated burglar alarms. Convert your house into Fort Knox. This is one way of dealing with the problem. But I really do think there are other ways of dealing with the problem. There are more fundamental issues here than the sophistication of burglar alarms and this one can see in all sorts of other contexts as well. Home Shopping, for example. It's technically possible for people to sit at home, just order things and they will arrive. But do they want to do that? If they do want to do it, what are the implications for the way cities will look in the future? If city centres die all over Britain, what impact will that have on the social and political landscape of Britain? There are enormous ramifications to what looked at the beginning like relatively narrow questions about the development of generic technologies. I have to say - I hope I encourage everyone here -that these kinds of considerations are coming through and are beginning to be taken on board. Social Scientists, I believe, must not come in at the end of the process, not be called upon just to solve a problem which has been generated by a technological decision. They must be brought in at the beginning of the process so that Social Scientists shape the nature of the question. In the environmental area, for example, the Environmental Scientists can study and identify a major problem of land use and then the Social Scientists might be invited very late in the day to give advice on what techniques can be developed to change the attitudes of farmers so that they will act in different ways. Now that's not actually the way of doing it. The working practices of those farmers and the institutions and culture that they come from are variables which have to be brought into consideration in the design of the research, not an afterthought which comes in at the end.
How can the ESRC give a lead in doing this? As I say, we have been striving for several months now to devise a way and we think that we have come up with a system which will work. What we want to avoid is a radical departure from a classic peer-reviewed process of research. We know that we've got to build into it something called 'utility' but we do not want a situation where a Research Board receives an application and decides it looks like a marvellous proposal. It gets alpha-plus rating. But is it useful? Then another decision might be taken on quite subjective grounds. I think a community would have no confidence in that process. So we have had to come up with a more satisfactory alternative. In those areas of major investment (that is, in the area of research centres and major research programmes where we are talking about levels of expenditure of round about £½ million a year), we've got to make sure that proposals satisfy the White Paper objectives. Our decisions in those areas of funding in the future are going to be guided by thematic priorities. We are going to compile those themes on the basis of an elaborate process of consultation throughout Britain, not only with the professional bodies and the academic community but with our different users and stake holders. We are going to commission reviews by leading academic specialists of what the ESRC does already. We are going to ask them to look at that critically and to tell us if this work is coherent, if it is penetrating in terms of what we are now being asked to do by the Government, what are its weaknesses, what are its strengths, what are the opportunities for developing the major categories of our work. We are going to use those reviews to consult all the other users and stakeholders. We are already talking to the European Research Councils, who are interested in developing their own thematic priorities We are going to review the huge file that we have of applications for research centres and research programmes that we didn't fund, which we put into a drawer (thinking we would have no further use for them), and which are a rich source of ideas for the future. We are going to have users as members of the Steering Groups for our Research Centres and Research Programmes. They will be operating at the sharp end and able to give us advice and inform our future thinking. We are going to have special meetings with categories of users, with parliamentarians, with business men, with consultancy organisations, with think-tanks, and with the voluntary sector to talk about our future themes. We are signing concordats with the main government departments that relate to the Social Sciences. Those of you who have dealings with the ESRC will know that we already have research support teams whose primary function is to liaise with the professional associations, (economists, sociologists, political scientists and so forth). The ESRC, unlike the other Research Councils, evaluates all research projects that are produced. For every research project we have a critical assessment at the end of what it hasn't done and what the opportunities might be for developing that research in the future; and we can draw upon that. The results of the Technology Foresight Panels are at the stage now of final reports. The next stage is the synthesis of those reports by the Foresight Steering Group and that is due some time in April. Finally, there are the discussions that we have with other Research Councils about those areas of research which lie on the border between the ESRC and the Natural Sciences and Engineering. I think,that after talking to John I would like to add that we shall also be talking to the Humanities Research Board. I am sure that there are areas of great common interest and we could work together.
An issue which is of direct interest to members of ESRC Council and Boards is our style of decision-making. I should say, incidentally, that I am temperamentally inclined to keep this as simple as possible. I have spent years of my life studying USSR Gosplan and I consider myself something of a specialist in this area. One thing it has taught me above everything else is to cut bureaucracy down because most of it is rubbish. What we must do is to take the academic documents that are drawn up as a result of this process of consultation with the academic community and users and ask the ESRC Council, which will be a smaller body in the future, to do something which it has never done before: to review our entire research portfolio. We will no longer ask it just to take some discrete decisions. All individual decisions, certainly the major ones, will have to be seen in the context of the overall priority. The Council will be balancing priorities between and within its existing themes: it will be adding new ones., and withdrawing others. These decisions will then be passed on to the various Boards as serious preferences rather than instructions from Council. There will be a lot of detailed work to be done at Board level to get these things in a researchable form. The Boards will then come back to the Council having reworked and reconsidered the general proposals, and Council will at that point either approve them and allocate the funds, or refuse them.
All this has a number of implications. In order for this mechanism of consultation to work, more staff in the ESRC offices are going to have to work on creative things and since we can't increase the number of staff then we will have to cut down on some of the routine things that we do. We will be looking for opportunities to devolve that to universities where there is mutual advantage. Already we have ended the national competition for advanced coursework awards. We think they should be handled through a quota system. We are looking for opportunities to devolve the administration of postgraduate awards to universities. We will give the universities a sum of money to cover the grant and fieldwork expenses and an administrative handling charge. Rather than have letters going to and fro between Swindon and individual postgraduate students, we will let the universities do it and thereby strengthen their relationship with the student.
I think I must finish off with one important word of reassurance. What we are talking about in these themes and in the mechanism I described are major decisions about research centres and very large research programmes; it has little to do with the traditional research grants competition of the ESRC which we are going to retain in more or less its present form. It will not have its budget reduced. That is a response-mode competition which is peer-reviewed in the classic sense. It is most important to give this reassurance because one of the extreme theoretical possibilities that might have been pursued in response to the Government White Paper would be for the ESRC to look at its pattern of funding to different universities. Over 50% of our funding goes to relatively few institutions. One might decide therefore to allocate funding to them pro rata in return for a business plan. If that were the case, the administration of the Research Council could be very small indeed. Now I must say that I am not at all happy with anything that resembles that. That's never been seriously considered. The reason for having a research grants competition is that it keeps lots of universities in play. It is the mechanism which preserves the vitality of the Social Sciences nationally. It provides a critical capability for evaluating expensive research which the ESRC funds in some universities. It also provides the opportunity for young scholars to come through, often with new and unconventional ideas. These new and unconventional ideas are the major themes of the future; and we would be terribly arrogant, and indeed be operating like Gosplan, if we decided we could think of those things ourselves - because we can't.