Dear visitor of the newly established ICCR Blog!

Before establishing the new blog, we had a long debate at the ICCR whether or not a blog makes sens for us. After all, we talk about social sciences and humanities, and these are disciplines that need a lot of thinking and well placed arguments. Hence, long discussion papers, articles, books. There is already an ongoing trivialisation of the SSH, based upon presentation software and the format of SSH conferences: 15 - 20 minutes, 10 slides to make your point. It is obvious, that this development is against all scientific rules.

In fact, this development comes from the management “sciences”. We can see the effects all over the social and political life: “New Public Management” is at odds with democratic governance. Evaluation and assessment is trivialised to “benchmarking”. Politics and policies are reduced to election winning strategies. This is what Marcuse already criticised in his famous book “The One-Dimensional Man” and what Gramsci called the hegemony of the ruling class.

Why then starting a blog? It is to defend the SSH in a modernistic electronic age. Do not expect social theory happening here. This is not the medium for it. The approriate media are still books and journals; arguably so, social action could be included into this: Prominent authors, like recently Luk van Langenhove, call for action research. Much earlier, Patrick Moynihan held the claim that social scientists are “professionalized reformers” - and became Senator of New York. Even if one would not subscribe to this claim - and I personally do not - “science&society” is quite relevant a topic: there must be a way between “Ivory Tower” and trivialisation.

A blog cannot replace what Mannheim called “The diagnosis of our time”; and this is still the mission of the SSH. What a blog can, however, achieve are critical comments on developments. It might make readers curious to go deeper into specific issues and, for instance, look into the sources the notes are referring to. And politics, policies, cultural developments, the society at large as well as the scientific societies deserve a lot of critical comments.

This is why the ICCR-family, the Interdisciplinary Centre in Vienna, the Centre Interdisciplinaire in France and the ICCR Foundation as umbrella organisation of the two research centres have decided to start this blog.

It is up to the readers to judge about its usefulness. Hirshman told us that there are two possibilities to disagree, exit or voice. You might choose not to participate in the journey - which is exit, although you have not yet entered. You might choose to react by saying: no use.

But voice can prove participation as well: you are welcome to comment, whether you agree with the arguments developed on blog, or whether you disagree. In either case, we would count it as encouragement.

Yours sincerely,

Ronald J. Pohoryles