International Comparative Research. Social Structures and Public Institutions in Eastern and Western Europe

169 Pages·1984·2.728 MB·English

by  Manfred Niessen, Jules Peschar and Chantal Kourilsky (Eds.)

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INTERNATIONAL
COMPARATIVE RESEARCH
Social Structures and Public Institutions
in Eastern and Western Europe
Edited by
MANFRED NIESSEN,
JULES PESCHAR
and
CHANTAL KOURILSKY
for the European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation
in Social Sciences
PERGAMON PRESS
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Copyright © 1984 The European Coordination Centre for
Research and Documentation in Social
Sciences
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any
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without permission in writing from the copyright holders.
First edition 1984
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
International comparative research.
"Prepared for the Second International Seminar on
Cross-National Comparative Research . . . Oberwesel
(Federal Republic of Germany)".—Acknowl.
I. Social structure—Europe—Congresses. 2. Social
structure—Europe, Eastern—Congresses. 3. Public
institutions—Europe—Congresses. 4. Public institutions
—Europe, Eastern—Congresses. 5. Sociological juris-
prudence—Congresses. I. Niessen, Manfred.
II. Peschar, J. L, 1944- . III. Kourilsky, Chantai. IV.
European Centre for the Co-ordination of Research and
Documentation in Social Sciences. V. International
Seminar on Cross-National Comparative Research
(2nd : 1981 : Oberwesel (Germany)
HN373.I57 1984 305'.094 84-11095
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
International comparative research.
1. Sociology—Comparative method—Case
studies 2. Sociology—Europe—
Comparative method
I. Niessen, Manfred II. Peschar, Jules
III. Kourilsky, Chantai IV. European
Coordination Centre for Research and
Documentation in Social Sciences
30V.01'8 HM24
ISBN 0-08-031334-5
List of Contributors
RUDOLF ANDORRA is head of the Section of Methodology of the Social Statistics
Department of the Central Statistical Office, Budapest, Hungary. His research
usually concerns the areas where sociology, demography and economics overlap. He
has been actively engaged in social stratification and mobility studies in Hungary.
JEAN-LUC BODIGUEL holds a Ph.D. in political sciences. He is senior researcher at the
Centre d'Etude de la Vie Politique Franchise Contemporaine of the Fondation
Nationale des Sciences Politiques and the Centre National de la Recherche Scien-
tifique (C.N.R.S.) in Paris, France. His main field of research is public administration
and particularly the civil service.
NANCY BRANDON TUMA is assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University. Her
main interests are stratification, economic structures, and the development of
models and methods for studying change. She is currently engaged in research on
labour mobility, marital stability, and change in social networks.
MAX HALLER is a fellow in the research project "Comparative Analyses of Social
Structures" (VASMA) and lecturer at the University of Mannheim. Formerly he was
an assistant professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna.
CHANTAL KOURILSKY is researcher at the Institut de Recherches Juridiques Com-
paratives of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.) in Paris,
France. Her main field of research is sociology of law and comparative law. From
1979 to 1981 on leave and seconded to the Vienna Centre as scientific secretary for
projects in the field of sociology of law and administrative science.
KALMAN KULCSAR is professor of sociology of law at the Faculty of Law and Political
Sciences, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary. At present he holds the
position of Deputy Secretary General for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Academy
of Sciences. His professional interest covers the sociology of law, the sociology of
organisations and political sociology, but he has also dealt with the problems of the
theory and history of sociology.
MICHEL LESAGE is professor of Public Law and Political Science at the University of
Paris I and Director of the Institut de Recherches Juridiques Comparatives of the
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.) in Paris, France. At present,
he holds the position of Director General of the International Institute of Admin-
istrative Sciences (Brussels).
BOGDAN W. MACH is researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the
Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Co-editor (with WesolowskiandSlomczynsky)
of the book Social Mobility in Comparative Perspective (Warsaw, 1978).
JOHN W. MEYER is professor of sociology at Stanford University. His research interests
are studies in comparative sociology, sociology of education, and formal organisa-
tions.
vii
MANFRED NIEfiEN is working at the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German
Research Council). Formerly he was researcher and lecturer at the Education
Department of the University of Trier, Federal Republic of Germany. From 1979
to 1981 he was on leave and seconded to the Vienna Centre as scientific secretary
for projects in the field of comparative education and training in comparative
research.
JULES PESCHAR is researcher and lecturer in educational sociology and methodology at
the Department of Sociology of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
From 1979 to 1981 he was on leave and seconded to the Vienna Centre as scientific
secretary for projects in the field of comparative labour studies and training in
comparative research.
KRZYSZTOF ZAGORSKI is a professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of
the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has been involved in a number of empirical
studies of Polish society. He is especially interested in social mobility and completed
a large-scale study of mobility in Polish society while at the Central Statistical
Office. Currently he is on leave at the Australian National University in Canberra.
viii
Editors' Note
The seminar programme of the Vienna Centre has been elaborated by Manfred
Nieften and Jules Peschar following an initiative by the then director of the Centre,
Stephen C. Mills. They were responsible for planning and organising the 1980 seminar
which concentrated on problems of theory, methodology and organisation of comparative
research.
They have also been in charge of the general preparation and organisation of the
second seminar and have set its conceptual framework (they appear in alphabetical order
among the editors). Chantal Kourilsky joined them in preparing and organising the part
on public institutions and was responsible for editing the respective contributions.
ix
Acknowledgements
With one exception, the chapters of this book were specially prepared for the
Second International Seminar on Cross-National Comparative Research which could not
have been organised and carried out without the help of many institutions and persons.
In the first place we want to thank UNESCO for allocating a special grant to the
Vienna Centre. The national UNESCO Commissions of Austria, the Netherlands and
Poland and in particular that of the Federal Republic of Germany gave their support.
The location of the seminar in Oberwesel (Federal Republic of Germany) was friendly
made available to us by the Sportbund Rheinland. The hospitality we found there
contributed much to the successful course of the meeting.
The really important people of such a seminar are of course its lecturers and
participants. Max Haller, Kalman Kulcsar, Michel Lesage, Adam Schaff, Erwin Scheuch
and Krzysztof Zagorski were willing to discuss their rich experience in comparative
research with seminar participants coming from thirteen Eastern and Western European
countries. In the sessions and in the informal discussions the meeting proved to be not
only a "training" seminar but also a place where colleagues from different socio-political
systems could exchange their professional views.
We would like to thank all the people who were involved in the preparation and
execution of the seminar without mentioning them by name. However, an exception
must be made for our two Vienna Centre colleagues who carefully went through the text
as linguistic editors: Gabriella Beck and Peter Tamasi.
xi
Some Introductory Notes on the Second
Vienna Centre Training Seminar
by Manfred Niefien
The European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social
Sciences (Vienna Centre) has been in existence since 1963. The aim of the Centre's work
has been to initiate and coordinate cooperation in the social sciences between Eastern
and Western Europe. For this purpose, the Centre has concentrated on two ways: projects
and conferences.
From the very beginning the coordination of joint comparative research projects in
all branches of the social sciences has been the main activity of the Centre. In such
projects researchers coming from both Eastern and Western European countries cooperate
in order to investigate in their respective countries a jointly defined problem in a compar-
able way. For these projects the Vienna Centre provides the international infrastructure,
by organising regular working meetings, keeping in touch with the researchers and secur-
ing the necessary flow of information.
Besides projects, the Vienna Centre has organised a number of conferences on
various topics, again with the participation of scholars from both Eastern and Western
Europe. The success of both of these activities - projects and conferences — depends on
the experience of the participating researchers and scholars. The ideal solution is when
the best experts of the countries involved participate.
A third activity which was started later is different in this respect. Its purpose is
not to bring together experts in comparative research or in topical conferences, as in the
two other cases, but to prepare the ground for future collaborative and comparative
projects by training young researchers from both parts of Europe. In 1979 the Vienna
Centre started planning a series of international seminars on cross-national comparative
and cooperative research. It was felt that by then much experience and expertise must
have been accumulated with the participants of the many Vienna Centre projects, but, at
the same time, most of this expertise had not been made fruitful to others. Among the
Vienna Centre projects there have been few exchanges on e.g. methodological problems,
and the project collaborators often "disappeared" for the Vienna Centre once their project
had ended. In short: it seemed to be time (a) to collect and cumulate the experiences with
regard to collaborative international comparative research and (b) to transmit these
experiences to young researchers from Eastern and Western Europe.
This is the intra-institutional background of the Vienna Centre's Training Seminar
Programme, following from the Centre's history. But there are also systematic reasons,
independent of this specific institution, which justify the establishment of such a
programme.
*
xiii
Due to the lore of researchers, in empirical research many things are done in a way
different from what is prescribed by the methodological handbooks. Or as S. Verba
(1977, p. 169) puts it in a paper on the organisational history of a cross-national
comparative project: "Nobody ever does research the way books and people who tell you
how to do research tell you how to do it." (An analogous divergence between principles
of the prevailing philosophy of science on the one hand and the actual course in the
scientific development on the other underlies the debate following Kuhn's studies on the
history of science or P. Feyerabend's attacks on this philosophy.)
What holds for "normal" studies is even more true for projects with international
participation. In the field of international comparative research there are additional
factors intervening with the neat and clearly defined models of the methodological
textbooks. Practical problems of all kinds stem from the fact that international
comparative research investigates phenomena in different national and cultural settings
with often differing socio-political structures and systems. And these practical problems
are multiplied in the case of projects where the researchers or research teams cooperating
come from these different countries. Many of the problems would hardly be imagined by
a researcher who sits at his desk in his home office.
As this is so, the transmission of relevant first-hand knowledge and experience
becomes of vital importance. However, this aspect is not very well documented in the
literature. The everyday practical problems of international collaborative and comparative
research are often neglected in favour of general methodological elaborations. But with
this, an important question is also placed in the background, namely "What are the
implications of those practical problems for the study, its aims, its objects and its methods,
i.e. what can be studied and in what way?"
Of course, there have already been other efforts to summarise results and experiences
of comparative research both within and outside the Vienna Centre's framework. Szalai
and Petrella (1977) e.g. report on the proceedings of a 1972 conference where three
Vienna Centre and two non-Vienna Centre projects were discussed and evaluated; and
Berting et al. (1979) report on a 1978 conference where two specific subject areas were
reviewed.
The emphasis of these two conferences was first on an appraisal of comparative
findings in certain research areas and second on problems of theory and methodology in
comparative studies. Problems of organisation and their implications for the programme
of an investigation were touched upon but they were not extensively dealt with. The
same holds for problems of cooperation in joint East-West European projects.
These aspects, now, belong to the core of the Vienna Centre's seminar programme.
A part of this programme is explicitly devoted to these aspects, but they can also be found
in other lectures and discussions on theory, methodology or research findings. The
seminars thus provide an opportunity for younger researchers to come into the field of
international collaborative and comparative research and to learn from experienced
researchers what is difficult or impossible to learn from books.
*
Thus, the purpose of the seminar programme was to collect and cumulate and to
transfer knowledge and experiences of collaborative comparative research carried out
between Eastern and Western Europe. This programme is planned to encompass a series
xiv
of seminars, each one dealing in a self-contained way with specific fields or facets, but the
series as a whole will again be cumulative.
The first international seminar on cross-national comparative research was held in
September 1980 in Warsaw, Poland. It concentrated on problems of theory, methodology
and - not least - of organisation, and served as a starting point for the next seminars.
[The proceedings are reported in Niefeen and Peschar (eds.) 1982.] The aspects of the
subject-matters of comparative research were neglected on purpose since these were
scheduled to be the topics of future seminars. The second seminar took place in June
1981 in Oberwesel, Federal Republic of Germany, with some 37 persons — lecturers and
participants - coming from thirteen European countries. It concentrated on comparative
research in two subject fields: social structure and public institutions, i.e. sociology of
law. As comparative studies including Eastern and Western European countries have been
done in both fields, the discussions could be based on specific research projects, on their
problems and results.
However, comparative research in these two fields is done on rather different
backgrounds in terms of research tradition, of the prevailing theoretical and methodologi-
cal approaches and of the extra-scientific context of investigation. Accordingly, the state
of the art of international comparisons is also different. This issue is elaborated in some
more detail in the introductory chapters to the respective parts of the book written by
J. Peschar and Ch. Kourilsky after the seminar.
These differences also came out during the seminar; they were clearly reflected in
the lectures delivered and they could also be felt in the respective working groups. They
were also the reason why we invited J.-L. Bodiguel after the seminar to write an additional
paper in the field of public institutions; this paper concentrates on the analysis and inter-
pretation of empirical data. The idea was to have papers starting from a more general,
theoretical level as well as papers starting from a project specific investigation in both
fields.
But the seminar was by no means completely divided into two camps working
independently on their respective topics. On the contrary, the lectures were delivered in
plenary sessions followed by lively discussions with stimulating contributions from both
"sides". And notwithstanding the grave differences between the two fields, the course of
the seminar led both participants and lecturers to stress a certain complementarity, too.
This complementarity - or better: the need for complementarity - was seen in the
following: research on public institutions, on the one hand, emphasises and often
restricts itself to the level of formal institutions, of formalised rules and procedures. It
conceives its object very often as formally predefined by codified regulations. (Projects
which intend to go beyond formally codified rules are demonstrated in Ch. Kourilsky's
contribution. So there are already attempts to incorporate "complementarity" in
projects.) At the same time, it sometimes neglects the interaction with social processes
and developments, among others, the influence exerted by the social structure on the
way public institutions "act", on the way people face them and on the possible changes in
the set-up of institutions. On the other hand, it is a long tradition in social structure
research to neglect the impact of public institutions on the development of the social
structure and on social mobility patterns. Changes in the set-up of public institutions
may have influences on the structural set-up of societies - as some of the papers
demonstrate with regard to the post-war revolutionary changes. To put it very simply and
by way of an example: in order to secure comparability in the categorisation of "social
xv