SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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Final points made by Dr Mats Benner:

(complementary to his paper Advantages and disadvantages of scientific networking in the era of ”globalisation”. Paper available as a pdf-file

Some of you may argue that if you have this kind of multi-disciplinary disintegration you lose contact with the development within the respective disciplines. People in biomedicine and in the technical sciences never bring this up. It is seemingly, at least it seems to me, that people in the social sciences and humanities still claim that diciplinary environment is important – a feeding intellectual environment is still important. The department still matters.

People in biomedicine say that departments are irrelevant. This university has abolished all, or is in the process of, abolishing all its departments within medicine. It has just one big department for the whole bio-medical field. The only focus will be on research groups, collaborator groups, whereas, as we all know, disciplinary departments are still very important in the humanities and social sciences, so there is at least the risk of disintegration, lack of communication between the specialization on one hand and disintegration on the other. Finally, most important, collaborationism is time-consuming. It is very management intensive.

I have followed a number of collaboration groups which started up with wonderful ideas of spontaneous harmonization of interests, due to long standing personal relationships and so forth, which turned up to be much more troublesome than was initially thought. You have to devise mechanisms for allocating resources for organising meetings, for discussing intellectual progess, for handing difficulties of one or another kind within the network itself. And you have to communicate, you have to put all emphasis on communication. People come from different backgrounds, and it is also a matter of bringing in not only old boys or old girls network, but also a matter of bringing in new people. And then suddenly the long standing relationships between people matter less, because you have to integrate new people.

So finally, I have to say something intelligent on SASNET. What struck me when I read Staffan´s paper was a number of issues, perhaps to be discussed at this workshop. One is the issue of flexibility versus permanence. A number of networks that I have studied have grown from being networks to becoming centres. Not because of some evil genius having this in mind, but it is the way things turned out. A very extreme example of this would be the Human Genome Project, Hugo, which started out as a network, involving many hundreds of laboratories around the World, but ending up with only three laboratories doing the main thrust of the work.

I would not compare you to Hugo of course, but I mean it is a telling case what happens when networks are confronted with challenges. And the challenge for Hugo was to describe the human genome in time to win the battle with Celera, so then they had to focus on the most productive of the laboratories within the network. Then it became more of a centre. It is always a question of the importance of flexibility and open design on one hand and the advantages of forming more stable centres. It is also a matter of changing from this more open decision making structure to a hierarchy; centres are always more hierarchical.

On computers as human networks integrators: There is always the idea that computers will provide common ground for participants within networks. There are many networks which start up with homepages and Internet and so forth, but they have to be complementary as you all know – that is why I am here I suppose – by face-fo-face interaction, face-to-face meetings, and a lot of travelling, a lot of meetings. And it is very nice to travel and it is very nice to meet, but it takes time. And some would argue that it takes time from research. That means that there is always a tension between integration within this new forum and time for other things.

And finally a more philosophical note on the longing for networking, disintegration of places. What happens with our Universe, with our home base, so to speak, when you join these collaborative networks, global networks? I have no answer to that but there has to be one. Remember that networking collaboration is an idea of feeding into a network – cosmopolitan, virtual department network. But feeding into that has a price, and the price might be the disintegration of local places in favour of the global flows.