On The Lack Of Objectivity And Academic Wastage In Social Science Research

Most academic disciplines belonging to broad category of social sciences are intrinsically interpretative. This is because any claimed addition/contribution to ‘knowledge’ in any branch of social sciences is typically based on interpretations—in terms of verbal or mathematical argumentation/reasoning—of a set of evidence/data (quantitative or qualitative or both), drawn either from primary or secondary sources, often stylized and subjected to statistical/empirical estimations and statistical tests of significance, if necessary or possible. However, the ‘knowledge’—thus gained—in social sciences cannot be proved or disproved in a controlled laboratory conditions (‘keeping other things constant’) under which an experiment in physical sciences such as physics or chemistry is typically done before confirming a new immutable discovery or invention. Therefore, unlike in physical sciences, the knowledge produced in social sciences remains unfailingly conditional/qualified and at least partially subjective and hence vulnerable to newer interpretations, refutations, falsification and alternative argumentative and interpretative challenges. This, in turn, causes relatively quick accumulation of huge bulk of literature consisting of debates, discussions, and controversies diverse research questions dealt with in social science branches. Yet human society, historically speaking, never demeaned or undervalued or ignored such bulky but qualified, conditional, transient knowledge on myriad aspects of humanity and society, (at least) partly because they are all constituents of overall stock of ‘knowledge’, the output of thousands of hours of hard thinking, reflections, and deep scholarship and insights of intellectually powerful minds around the world, which can continue to inspire and ignite newer and more directly relevant output.

What then is the essential core commonality in academic (systematic) research between physical and human/social sciences that brings them together under a single label of science? The answer squarely lies in the fulfilment of a common condition, namely ‘objectivity’ of both the concerned researcher and her academic pursuance of research work that makes for respective academic contribution/addition to knowledge. Therefore, although ‘knowledge’ in social sciences, unlike physical sciences, is neither universally valid, nor temporally immutable (because of intrinsic unpredictability embedded in the way a human society behaves or moves with the passage of time along with an incessant multitude of predictable/unpredictable and internal/external events, happenings or influences many of which just cannot be adequately controlled for), they both are required to qualify the test, if any, of objectivity.

It is because of the key prerequisite of objectivity of researcher and her research pursuits/methods that academic research in human/social sciences, despite its inherent fallibility or malleability across time and space, is considered no less important for humanity and its progression than a scientific inquiry of physical sciences. It is fairly plain that it is the objectivity of a research endeavour that makes the outcome a ‘scientific’/academic contribution. This has been a long-revered wisdom in whole academic/scientific community/fraternity over at least two preceding centuries of modern civilization, but only up and till WWII and the onset of the Cold War when whole world got charged by an ideational/ideological war and propaganda. An intense confusion, bewilderment, frustration and pervasive scepticism during and immediately after WWII gave rise to an ideational void and hence an opportune moment for making new intellectual revolution.

Scholars were lavishly induced and incentivised to question or challenge the foundation of long-standing ideational edifice of modern civilization and its perceived potential for continuous progression in diverse spheres – economic, cultural and social and political. And immediate post-WWII period, charged with the Cold War, turned momentous in the ideational history with the launch of massive projects of paradigmatic/ideological reshuffles. For example, a pervasive mood of questioning and rupturing the pre-existing ideational constructs and paradigms based, as it were, on liberal ideals and welfare state took over intellectual centre-stage. Attempts at ‘deconstruction’ or perhaps even demolition of the Enlightenment-born premises, perceptions, prescriptions were touted to be most ‘fashionable’. This caused a heightened opportunity among relatively ambitious social analysts and intellectuals of the time for thinking wild and too cavalierly in a bid to emerge radically new/original in the eyes of bewildered masses. Post-modernism and its anti-Enlightenment ideas, which challenged two major intellectual pillars/instruments of the long post-Enlightenment period, namely reason/reasoning and objectivity, are a case in point.

The ransack of unreason displayed during WWII by the nations which have long boasted of having experienced ‘Enlightenment’ and reason/rationality-centred modernity, opened wide scope for ambitious social theorists both for talking radically new, for showing off their intellectual prowess and ideational novelty, and thereby for earning name/fame with anti-Enlightenment rhetoric and propaganda. Intellectual attempts were launched by the 1970s by some scholars (to be branded later as ‘post-modernists’) with the prime object of arousing large-scale distrust and suspicion about the post-Enlightenment vision of modernity, values, perceptions and assumptions, particularly the primacy of reason/reasoning, rationality, and objectivity in founding modern civilization - an overarching framework that dominated only until it began receiving jolts since WWI and finally almost crumbled in the wake of WWII and the onset of the Cold War.

For example, the verbal language, which is a prime vehicle both for germination and communication of ideas, argumentations, or refutation pertaining to build-up of generalisations/discourses, is posited to be intrinsically incapacitated in human science discourses, with the bulk of pre-existing body of academic arguments, propositions, reasoning being branded merely as an ‘esoteric discourse’ and virtually ineffectual. Michel Foucault, while verbally dissecting the origins and anatomy of a language, attacks it, ironically deploying language himself, as a too frail instrument for building discourses: ‘Language stands halfway between the visible forms of nature and the secret conveniences of esoteric discourse’. What has been hitherto perceived as a persistent refinement of language in course maturing of modernity is – almost summarily – nullified by Foucault as ‘infinite movement of discourse’, thereby leaving language-based text and its purported meaning on an infinite move with no possibility of return or promise:

’For now we have no longer have that primary, that absolutely initial, word [thrown up by the God] upon which the infinite movement of discourse was founded and by which it was limited; henceforth, language was to grow with no point of departure, no end, and no promise. It is a traversal of this futile yet fundamental space that the text of literature traces day to day.’

No wonder the impact on young adult minds who read or listened to Foucault’s exceedingly novel and dramatic yet sweeping ideas such as continuous traversal of language that makes for a futility both of its own and of entire pre-existing knowledge (post-Enlightenment) is bound to be nearly magical.

But from the standpoint of intellectual history and pre-existing dominant perspectives, perceptions and understanding, Foucault’s above stance could arguably be seen as a travesty of truth – albeit hardly voiced loudly enough by larger intellectual fraternity yet to recover fully from ideational/ideological abyss, intellectual shock and uncertainty triggered by WWII-related holocaust and the Cold War. By questioning the foundation of pre-WWII literature, generalizations and theoretical constructions and their fragile (apparent) ‘unity’ in social sciences, Foucault welcomed and praised what he called ‘local character of criticism’ being made in the 1950s and 1960s against preceding traditional (intellectual) discourses. He rather sensed in this post-WWII criticisms of the earlier approach/discourses some promising signs of ‘an entire thematic to the effect that it is not theory but life that matters, not knowledge but reality, not books but money etc’. Foucault in the same vein praised a ‘re-emergence’ of what he calls ‘low-ranking’, ‘naïve’ and ‘popular knowledge’ ‘such as that of the psychiatric patient, of ill person, of the nurse, of the doctor’ – the ‘subjugated knowledges’ which, he thinks, have been hitherto treated as ‘unqualified’ but have always been parallel and marginal to disciplinary qualified knowledge of medicine. Foucault thus pleads for a ‘union of erudite knowledge and local memories’ – a knowledge of a new genre which he calls ‘genealogy’. With a rapid rise of popularity of such grossly novel, populist and allegedly anti-elitist ideas (partly thanks to rapid developments of communication technology and media), the curriculum in educational institutions began including these ‘unqualified’, neglected, unpolished discourses together with intellectually diluted/undemanding content of education and abandoned increasingly age-old pillars/tools such as objectivity in ‘knowledge’ creation. All this makes one sceptical as to whether post-modernist discourses were indeed an outcome of scholarly objectivity required of an academic/scientific pursuit.

What is then meant by objectivity in scientific/academic research?

There is a common misconception that objectivity requires the researcher or her research work to be value-free. For example, Sandra Harding had shown in the 1970s ‘how social research directed by certain social values can be more objective than research in which these values play no role’. Indeed objectivity of social inquiry is often found to be maximized if researcher is committed to egalitarian political values. After subjective selection of research questions, the researcher has to be ideally committed to absolute objectivity in such matters as research method or data source and results derived from data/evidence and finally in interpretations of results with strictly logical reasoning. Therefore, it is the moral/ethical strength with which a researcher maintains ‘objectivity’ as a necessary prerequisite in research activity that determines whether the knowledge produced by the researcher in question is objective or not. But in the wake of ‘post-modernist’ ideas, knowledge is widely held to be inextricable from subjectivities and power and hence cannot be ‘objective’ – a statement which is ironically deeply entangled with subjectivity. If knowledge produced by a researcher is not objective, it is either because the researcher is dishonest or bereft of a sense of academic integrity or she does not know what is actually meant by being objective or by keeping up objectivity through academic research.

Objectivity of research does not necessarily call for value-neutrality. Indeed, objectivity is itself a value. A researcher can, of course, hold a value or an ideology or a religion but because of her precise sense/commitment to academic integrity and objectivity that the former does not vitiate her research results or its interpretations even if found contrary to her ideological positions. Anecdotally speaking, a doctor’s sincere professional services in a hospital’s emergency ward of treating someone fatally injured in an accident who incidentally happens to be the doctor’s long-time enemy are what a strong sense of professional objectivity on the part of the attending doctor ensures. Likewise, a researcher can hold socialist values and ideology, but her clear and strict sense of professional integrity and her clear sense of objectivity would ensure that she would not shy away from telling objective truth about how and why socialist regimes have failed. Similarly, a strong sense of objectivity would make a judicial judge announce a verdict of life sentence to a rapist in court room even after having raped his own wife in the preceding night by having sex with his unwilling or uninitiated partner.

However, a sustained propaganda of neoliberal self-maximising values has of late contributed to rapid erosion of commitment to objectivity in research. There are myriad ways in which a lack or steady declines of objectivity in social research have been contributing to what call academic waste. For instance, a non-empirical research - based on secondary books, reports of commissions, memoires - can easily entail intermediation of researcher’s fondness/bias in form selective/purposeful use of evidence suitable for vindication of her intended contention. This adds to academic waste. Academic waste can also pile up when the researcher deliberately chooses some specific methods/strategy which are likely to churn out empirical or other findings consistent with the preferred hypothesis or conclusions. Although the reviewer or referee of journals is supposed to take care of such errors or anomalies on the part of the researcher, the number of journals is also getting multiplied fast currently to sell off or offer a shelter to such façade of an academic contribution. There are numerous ways of compromising on objectivity and hence piling up of academic waste in an intellectual regime in which professional researchers are perfectly rational in trying to score high just in terms of personal career-building indicators which are currently in vogue to quantify, or measure quality/standard or even objectivity involved in research in social sciences.

For example, increasing use of sophisticated mathematical methods in a few social science branches often – not always – reflects a fashionable/frenzy desire to show off one’s command over mathematics. With least academic objectivity of researcher devoid of objective commitment to human society, much of this research output based on mathematical model-building represents huge academic waste just not in the sense of very limited usefulness of such animatedly elegant-looking body of research output on societal issues. It also entails an enormous waste of intellectually gifted minds being engaged and absorbed by a parochial personal ambition of showing off personal intellectual/mathematical capabilities rather than by contributing to real knowledge over concerned societal issues. Majority seem to forget that academic research is not about showing off one’s intellectual prowess, which often brings material reward in diverse forms, but it is about creating some worthy lasting contribution to knowledge in concerned field of study. Most of social science papers produced out of the researcher’s sheer desperation of keeping herself afloat against professional pressure of ‘publish or perish’ are bound to be intrinsically/qualitatively of low academic/epistemic worth in comparison with those produced with researcher’s full academic objectivity contingent only on an innate urge for discovering truth.

Lack of objectivity often originates in researcher’s personal – often obsessive - interest in producing new or novel or different message, no matter what the state of knowledge in the field calls for. A researcher can consciously choose methods or evidence in social sciences to make research-results appear consistent with her ideological inkling. Inspired by presently dominant neoliberal educational philosophy, if the single most important purpose of doing research for majority of researchers is to build a market-friendly personal career – academic or otherwise – they can remain ever ready to resort to a camouflaged compromise, if necessary, with objectivity in methods and interpretations of results and produce a sort of fake knowledge, albeit superbly printed and bound, and thus would pile up a huge academic waste. Similarly, the free play of capital in publishing industry in this neoliberal age – often guided by profit, marketing and sales rather than true academic worth and related agency - is greatly responsible for production of large amount of socially wasteful or spurious – albeit impressively packaged, printed, and presented - academic output. Although it seems socially desirable to ask many of the academic profession not to write and publish anything so that a lot of social resources such as printing materials and long academic hours of professionals doing and writing much of substandard research with little sense of academic objectivity and commitment, can be saved, but there is a great potential risk of losing immeasurably valuable insights that could have come out of very high standard of research of relatively few gifted and extremely talented minds amongst them. Therefore, from one standpoint this huge academic waste ought to be perceived as a necessary cost of generating really new useful discovery, insights or visions because it is difficult to pre-judge who among the lot would really turn to be able to do so. From another angle, since intellectual talents are distributed randomly among relatively few individuals, let higher education, academic research and related activities be restricted to only those talented and motivated few who come from all sections of population, irrespective of class, creed, race, caste, with adequate social/public resources on scholarships and other financial assistance for the demonstrably talented/gifted amongst economically weaker segments of population.

In the prevailing neoliberal context of dwindling moral strength, honesty, public spirits and integrity of researchers, most researchers tend to set aside all values and commitments to academic integrity except the prime value of scoring as high as possible in terms of number of publications in journals or books irrespective of real academic worth of them, adding to ever bulging volume of academic waste. This trend is, needless to say, needs to be resisted or arrested. This calls for embracing back the traditional (pre-neoliberal) traditions, ethos and practices in academia, despite very few being its ready-takers amongst present generations, especially those who happen to hold power. As a preliminary major step towards this end, the academy has to regain full confidence to be self-governed and particularly freed from the dictates or directions or even advices of marketeers, economists, technocrats, and powerful politicians. Let a highly-renowned scholar (with rich academic contributions to objective knowledge with scientific integrity) – rather than a smart person with a special knack for deal-making with diverse stake-holders, populist, ‘renowned’ (through hundreds of 1000-words-long pieces on myriad current issues published in opinion-pages of leading dailies) and market-friendly corporate-executive type - be invited back at the helm of the university/college again.