News

To establish a Public Good Fund for Research in the Domain of Culture and Society [PGFCS]

17 May 2007

Source:	HUMANZ

HUMANZ believes that the development of a national knowledge policy is critical to the successful transition of New Zealand from a resource-based to a knowledge-based society. The formation of a national knowledge policy must be a fully collaborative process including all the principal producers and users of New Zealand's intellectual capital.

The Humanities Society of New Zealand
Te Whāinga Aronui
HUMANZ

Research Policy Paper [1996]

To establish a Public Good Fund for Research in the Domain of Culture and Society [PGFCS]

Reprinted for the 2005 Annual General Meeting, 7 October 2005.

1. RESEARCH POLICY

Public policy for research in the domain of culture and society is a crucial component of cultural policy and is urgently needed to complement the continuing development of New Zealand's research policy. Annex 1 outlines HUMANZ's view of the importance of humanities research in the current environment.

A necessary step in the formation of a national knowledge policy is the establishment of a Public Good Fund for Research in the Domain of Culture and Society [PGFSC].

2. A TITLE

The Public Good Fund for Research in the Domain of Society and Culture could be named The New Zealand Foundation for the Humanities. This title would clearly signal that the role of the government in funding research in the humanities/aronui also includes the conservation and development of the nation's collections of cultural materials on which the production of cultural knowledge so completely depends.

3. CONCEPT AND SCOPE

To advance the distinctive work of the humanities/aronui in the emergent knowledge-based society, the New Zealand Foundation for the Humanities should have as its functions

3.1 to implement a national knowledge policy in the domain of culture and society;
3.2 to encourage nationally and internationally significant research in the humanities/aronui;
3.3 to support strategic or applied research in the humanities/aronui addressed to nationally significant issues; and
3.4 to support projects designed to increase public understanding of the humanities/aronui.

The scope of operation of the New Zealand Foundation for the Humanities should include the various institutions comprising the cultural sector - archive, arts, education, historic places, leisure, library, marae, media, museum, whare wananga - in which the production, transmission, collection and preservation of cultural knowledge is either a principal function or a closely associated activity.

4. POWERS

In order to address these functions, the Foundation should be empowered to

4.1 fund nationally and internationally significant research in the humanities/aronui;
4.2 ensure New Zealand's national capacity for research and expertise in the humanities by supporting advanced training in this body of knowledge;
4.3 facilitate communication among those knowledgable in the humanities/aronui in New Zealand and overseas, and promote awareness and use of Foundation-funded results within the academic community, the public and private sectors, and the general public;
4.4 support the publication of humanities knowledge in appropriate media;
4.5 support improvements in education in the humanities/aronui at all levels;
4.6 foster programmes and projects which provide access to, and preserve materials important to research, education, and public understanding of the humanities/aronui;
4.7 ensure the integration of the humanities/aronui and the arts into the national and global information infrastructure.

5. GUIDING PRINCIPLES

The guiding principles which provide the foundation for a New Zealand Foundation for the Humanities are implied by the powers and by the fact that New Zealand is a small knowledge economy.

5.1 Selective Excellence. It is not possible for New Zealand to achieve or maintain international excellence in all fields of knowledge. The increasing complexity and degree of specialisation in contemporary knowledge require a small knowledge economy like New Zealand to establish priorities among the areas of research and study for which public good funding could be sought.
5.2 Priorities. In a small knowledge economy which must nevertheless keep pace with international research, the New Zealand Foundation for the Humanities would have the crucial role of establishing research priorities and encouraging projects which involve collaboration among researchers from different parts of the cultural sector.
5.3 Collaborative Research. Cooperative and collaborative work will have to be emphasised so that a critical mass of knowledge and expertise in significant areas of the humanities in New Zealand can be developed. The Foundation will need to emphasise programmes and projects which bring the greatest benefit to New Zealand in terms of relevant knowledge, the effective participation of New Zealanders in international forums, and the best resolutions of complex contemporary issues.
5.4 Public Benefit. The maximum public benefit should be derived not only from the research itself, but also from direct public involvement in activities and programmes which promote a better understanding in local and national terms of New Zealand's history and its cultural diversity, human modification of the natural environment, and the global context for New Zealand's future development socially and culturally.
5.5 Partnerships. The Foundation will emphasise partnerships in fulfilling its functions. Funding will be made available for projects both wholly and in co-funding arrangements with other institutions and agencies in the cultural sector, and with organisations in the public and private sectors. A portion of the funds available to the Foundation will be used to support long-term research, through the establishment of research centres and research networks.

6. HUMANITIES RESEARCH IN THE KNOWLEDGE-BASED SOCIETY

6.1 Peter Drucker writes in Post-capitalist Society (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1993): "That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource is what makes our society "post-capitalist". It changes, and fundamentally, the structure of society. . . . the amount of knowledge, that is its quantitative aspect, is not nearly as important as the productivity of knowledge, that is, its qualitative aspect. And this applies to old knowledge and its application as well as to new knowledge. . . . Our experience in making knowledge productive has so far been gained mainly in economy and technology. But the same rules pertain to making knowledge productive in social problems, in the polity, and in respect to knowledge itself. So far, little work has been done to apply knowledge in these areas. But we need productivity of knowledge even more in these areas than we need it in the economy, in technology or in medicine." (pp.41, 168, 175).

6.2 The establishment of the New Zealand Foundation for the Humanities will be the tangible sign that the government has grasped the distinctive and necessary role of the humanities/aronui in the future development of New Zealand as a competent nation in the twenty first century. The humanities/aronui have a crucial role to play in helping our society to contemplate and envision its past, present and future, and to make a range of important and difficult decisions - decisions which will affect not only the distribution of power, authority and wealth, but also the lifestyles, concepts and degrees of privacy, the balance between the individual and the collective, and the evolution of democratic control and freedom. The humanities and the social sciences together will provide New Zealand with a major share of the information and applied knowledge needed to address the challenges of the next century.

6.3 Research in the humanities should be constantly aware both of the global flow of cultural theories and practices to which we are now exposed, and to the specific dynamics of interacting cultures and histories in the geographical space of New Zealand. The Foundation should encourage the engagement of scholars with the most complex forms of humanities enquiry, now often conducted in high-level theoretical languages, the application of contemporary thinking in the humanities to all aspects of national and communal life, and the provision of opportunities for increased public understanding of the humanities.

7. ISSUES FOR A NATIONAL KNOWLEDGE POLICY

7.1 A general conclusion about the present state of the humanities in New Zealand is that what was already acknowledged to be a very underfunded dimension of research in New Zealand by international comparisons has suffered reduction and restriction in every aspect of its activity since the state sector reforms were initiated which led to corporatisation, privatisation, and the establishment of the Public Good Science Fund. There is an urgent need for better information in this policy area.

7.2 The priority given to science and technology in national knowledge policies is based on an inadequate model of innovation in which the links between science, technological change, industrial competitiveness and economic growth are represented as being linear and dependent only upon those components of society. The contexts of literacy, values, history and cultural knowledge are all critical in the ability of a society to be innovative.

7.3 Deficiencies noticed in the conduct of and provision for social science research in New Zealand are also significant in humanities research: a lack of programme research on relevant New Zealand topics; limitations on the skills and professional development of humanities researchers; the underdevelopment of common resources; poor utilisation of research; and lack of opportunities for working collaboratively.

7.4 The reasons for these deficiencies, as they are made apparent not only by international comparisons but by comparison with science research in New Zealand, are: chronic underfunding; international (colonial and post colonial) criteria for evaluation of the significance of New Zealand-focussed research; lack of research programme development in the universities because they have functioned and been funded primarily as undergraduate institutions; lack of critical mass in academic departments trying to represent the full international scope of a discipline; the role of the traditional discipline in creating professional identities and administering modern knowledge production; lack of private investment in research; professional and institutional barriers between different modes of formulating and presenting knowledge in and of the humanities/aronui; and the fact that much humanities research can have immediate political implications, which are not necessarily consistent with the position or policies of a particular government.

7.5 The government needs to recognize that the historical imbalances of funding for the different principal kinds of knowledge in New Zealand reflect traditionally different valuations of these kinds of knowledge in western societies.

CONCLUSION
To begin the process of redressing these imbalances will require the finding of new money, not just the redistribution of existing allocations within the cultural sector. Humanities researchers will, correspondingly, need to form new accounts of the work they do which demonstrate the importance of humanities knowledge for New Zealand';s present and future development in the contexts of its complex cultural history and the evolution of global culture.

ANNEX ONE

THE HUMANITIES/ARONUI ARE SOCIALLY AND ECONOMICALLY NECESSARY KNOWLEDGE REQUIRING A DIFFERENT APPROACH IN POLICY, STRUCTURE AND FUNDING FROM THE NATURAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL SCIENCES.

The humanities/aronui are that body of knowledge and those modes of enquiry and reflection which concern what it is to be human, including our inhumanity and our relation to the non-human. In the Western tradition, the humanities have been identified with literacy and with value laden knowledge, the core requirements for establishing and maintaining a civil society. They connect the texts of the law with those of religion, philosophy, ethics, economics, history, science, technology, the arts and architecture.

In the more holistic Maori world view te kete aronui (the basket of secular or profane knowledge), one of nga kete wananga (the three baskets of knowledge), may encompass theoretical and practical knowledge about the sciences as well as the humanities. The other kete contain ritual knowledge and occult knowledge (about witchcraft, evil, war), respectively. Love, compassion and peace ensure that wananga aronui is used for benevolent purposes but the possibility remains that it will be used instead for evil and destructive purposes.

The humanities/aronui are diffusive. Because it is value laden, knowledge in any aspect of the humanities/aronui may be (but is not necessarily) significant in any other aspect; because its medium is language in whatever mode (spoken, written, in print, on television or the information superhighway) humanities knowledge cannot be pure or universal knowledge but is always caught up in the processes of social and cultural change. Its ultimate "products" are citizens capable of playing a full part in the shaping of their society, beyond the economic roles of producers and consumers.

The humanities/aronui are also accumulative: new knowledge is not necessarily better than old knowledge; specialist knowledge exists in a spectrum with popular knowledge and local knowledge rather than providing the only correct account. The texts of the past are always available to be read, viewed or heard again by anyone in the present and have power to modify the future.

These distinctive features of the humanities/aronui point to crucial differences between cultural and industrial products. While the latter are typically made from non-renewable resources and are used up immediately or over a period of time, cultural products are not only reusable over long periods of time by many people but without being used up they also provide the materials for the making of new products.

The dividing of the humanities into specialised disciplines is a result of the evolution of professional and bureaucratic methods of organising, producing and transmitting knowledge which, in the context of industrialisation, culminated in the research oriented Western university. Furthermore, the social sciences developed as competitors, bringing the modes of enquiry of the empirical or natural sciences to bear on the sphere of human culture and society.

Both of these developments, together with the ascendancy of Western science and technology as the knowledge of power, have had the effect of shifting the humanities/aronui from the centre to the margin in the Western system for valuing knowledge. In New Zealand as elsewhere the humanities have become identified with the personal rather than the public, with schooling rather than society, with the remote rather than the local, a supplement to the politically and economically dominant cultures of science, technology and the mass media.

New Zealand is not unique among Western democracies in ranking the humanities lowest in the scale of valued knowledge as measured by the investment of public resources; it is unique in having established no national institutions specifically dedicated to maintaining and advancing the humanities.

The government's investment in research in science and technology is focussed by the Ministry of Research Science and Technology and the Foundation of Research Science and Technology; it is complemented by the Royal Society as a government funded public organisation representing the interests of science and technology, including science and technology education. The government's investment in cultural knowledge is principally focussed by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, although this Ministry has responsibility only for the arts and most of their funding is dependent on the Lotteries Board. Unlike the funding of research in science and technology, the funding of research in cultural knowledge is dispersed over various government departments and ministries. It is a sign of its low valuation that no attempt equivalent to that for science and technology has been made to rethink the historical and bureaucratic processes which have led to this institutional fragmentation and the lack of coherent policies for cultural knowledge. There is no equivalent to the Canada Council or the United States National Endowment for the Humanities; in contrast to the government funded Australian Academy of the Humanities, which has just celebrated 25 years of operation, the New Zealand Academy is just two years old and has no government support.

At the core of humanities research are the collections of stories, objects, documents, texts and taonga which constitute the materials for the production of cultural knowledge. Unlike the non-human world, these materials are not simply there to be investigated and transformed to serve human interests. There is no common or internationally determined core content for these collections; they differ as the histories and cultures of particular places or nations differ from others. A local library or museum in New Zealand will have different collections from the National Library or Museum of New Zealand, which will in turn be different from any other nation's collections. It has been very well observed in a Canadian report, Basic Research in the Social Sciences (p.7), that

"Social reality is not the same in North America, in Japan and in Europe; there is not even homogeneity between Canada and the United States. Unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences are highly specific. And also contrary to the situation prevailing in the natural sciences, Canada cannot rely on foreign countries to produce the necessary knowledge of itself. The study of Canadian social realities must always remain 98% Canadian. Knowledge of other societies matters to us and must be promoted for our own self-interest: amongst other things it serves to have a better understanding of the specificity of our own human environment."

New theories of culture and interpretations of history are challenging the now conventional disciplinary divisions in the humanities just as changes in economic and political relations have shifted New Zealand's focus from Europe to the Pacific and to Asia. Not only is cultural knowledge, both of ourselves and of other societies, an increasingly important factor in our competence as a nation in the world economy, but it has been observed in Humanities and the Arts on the Information Highways, p. 35, that "The humanities and the arts . . . are the producers of the intellectual property that will be one of the nation's most valuable economic resources in the new information economy."

It has become increasingly apparent that effective action both for an individual and a nation in a world economy depends upon: the recognition of cultural diversity, not the assertion of monocultural absolutes; a firm grounding in a birth culture and language, and the ability to acquire other languages; an increasingly sophisticated literacy, which includes qualitative and quantitative modes of analysis and the ability to work with graphic and numeric as well as alphabetic representations; an understanding of the transformations being wrought by new information and communications technology in the ways we think and interact with one another.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Basic Research in the Social Sciences: An Indispensable Element of the National Policy on Science and Technology, a brief of the Social Science Federation of Canada to the Working Group on Basic Research established by the Council of Science and Technology Ministers. [Ottawa], (1987).

Humanities and the Arts on the Information Highways: A profile, final report, September 1994: a national initiative / sponsored by the Getty Art History Information Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Coalition for Networked Information. [Santa Monica, CA]: J. Paul Getty Trust, [1994]