ii the sociological and psychological study of scientific activity

II

THE SOCIOLOGICAL A N D PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY 1

D. M. G V I S H I A N I , S. R. M I K U L I N S K Y A N D M. G. Y A R O S H E V S K Y

The following article (in slightly abridged form) is reproduced in MINERVA because it throws fresh light on recent Eastern European thought about the study of science. Like much of the recent work in the Soviet Union and Poland, it is concerned with the efficiency of research teams and does not arrive at any significant substantive conclusions. However, by its clear emphasis on the characteristics of the individual scientist and on his creative power as independent determinants of scientific accomplishment, it goes beyond much of this work and beyond the ordinary Marxist conception of the determinants of scientific development.

This article presents no new observations or original, insights. It really says no more than that generally accepted techniques for measuring creativity in terms of quantity of output of publications are inadeqraate--which reasonable men everywhere know. Nonetheless, its emphasis on the creative powers of the individual scientist is important, and seems to me to show that, struggling against a heavy burden of dogmatic Marxism, some Soviet students of science are now coming to see what has been known elsewhere for a long time. It shows that in a country devoted for years to the fictional belief in the planning of science and in the inconsequentiality of the individual mind, reality has a way of breaking through. The progress marked by this article only brings the Soviet discussions to the starting-point--but to a point which is the beginning of wisdom. E.S.

� 9 Science, as a specific form of human activity and social institution and as a system of knowledge, is undergoing profound qualitative, quantitative

a n d structural transformations in response to new social and economic demands . . . . The processes of the differentiation and integration of scientific knowledge are proceeding with increasing intensity. The interaction of the sciences and the interpenetration of the methods of the various sciences with each other are often necessary prerequisites of success. The nature of work in science has changed significantly, and forms of organising scientific activity entirely different from those of earlier periods, as well as new principles of organising research teams, have appeared. The rapid growth of the number of persons engaged in research, the sharply increasing investments i n science and the demand for persons of the highest qualifications, as well as the necessity of making the most

1 An abridged translation of " Sotsialniye i psikholologicheskiye aspekty izucheniya deyatelnosti uchenogo ", Voprosy Filosofii (Problems of Philosophy), No. 3 (1971),: pp. 83-92. D. M. Gvishiani and S. R. Mikulinsky are Corresponding Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

122 Reports and Documents

effective possible use of the vast material and manpower resources~ allocated by society for scientific investigations and developments, have raised numerous social, economic, organisational, psychological and ethical problems. The problems of applying research to production and of making rapid use of the achievements of science and technology have acquired exceptional importance. The dependence of a country's economy, defence potential and prosperity on the rate of scientific and technological progress requires the constant expansion of research. Science is becoming a mass profession.

In addition to general problems of science policy, there is a whole set of problems connected with the search for rational principles for the organisation and functioning of research teams. What is the most rational way to organise scientific institutions? Which structure will ensure the best possible conditions for the functioning of the research team and create the most favourable atmosphere for realising the creative potential of each of its members? Stagnation in the structure of institutions, which interferes with reconstruction, frequently inhibits the elaboration of the new problems and trends which appear in the process of the development of science and production and affects the activity of the research team. What is the best way of attaining the greatest mobility of scientists from one research field to another? With the present differentiation of science and the present system of education such movement between research fields---even close or adjacent fields--leads to major difficulties.

Nor have the problems of the optimum size of research institutions or the principles of the selection of scientific personnel been studied ade- quately. In the past, the great difficulties which a person who had chosen research as his profession had to overcome guaranteed that as a rule only really gifted persons with strong will-power, exceptional devotion to their work and profound inner motivation entered science, whereas under present conditions there have been marked changes in the motives for doing scientific work.

The vast demand for scientific workers, the rise of the social prestige of science and of the profession of research work, as well as the moral and material advantages which a scientific worker derives from his profession, have led large numbers of persons into science. However, not all of these possess the abilities and qualities essential for scientific work. Hence the problems of selection become very urgent, and they cannot be salved intuitively.

Even the most talented persons cannot always form an efficiently operating research team . . . . To operate efficiently, a definite combination, but not just any combination, of persons of various skills and experience and with various ways of thinking is essential, so as to stimulate and, at the same time; limit and supplement each other. They must all share an inner concern with the research problem. Of major importance to the

The Sociological and Psychological Study of Scientific Activity 123

fruitfulness of a team is the correct ratio of leaders and auxiliary workers, their social and vocational orientation, the formal and informal relations within the team, the creative motives predominating in it, the relations of the members of the team among themselves and with their supervisor, whether the formal superviso~ is really a research leader in this group, whether the research theme has been chosen correctly, etc.

The great number and importance of science policy problems . . . . the acute necessity of solving them so as to stimulate scientific and technological activity and enhance the efficiency of research institutions have given rise to a new research field--the sociology and psychology of science. There is now a vast body of literature which analyses the factors affecting the productivity of scientists, the modes of organising research and development, ways of intensifying the utilisation of the results of research in production, the elimination of the gap between the requirements of science and ,the state of education, the improvement of the system of scientific and technological communication, etc. Much attention is given to the methods of diagnosing the creative capacities of an individual and conditions which foster a scientist's creative powers, the production of original ideas and overcoming of stereotyped ways of thinking. Much of this literature is concerned with the individual psychological features of a scientist's personality and activity . . . . The interest in this problem can be easily explained. The processes of creativity, although socially determined, presuppose the concentration of the scientist's intellectual powers on the objects of investigation. No new scientific laws can be discovered, no original methods and theories can be contrived, no scientific discoveries and technical inventions can be made without such a concentration of the intellectual powers of the individual in their highest and unique form.

The work of an individual brain is connected through numerous visible and invisible threads with the thought of other persons. But this does not lead to the disappearance of its creative uniqueness. Present-day science is acquiring an increasingly "group" nature--in the sense that research is now done by teams of scientists and not by individual scientists working alone. One might even gain the impression that the creative act has already lost much of its individual character. Dr. Alvin Weinberg states, however, that while the sum total of knowledge of the members of a team is greater than the knowledge of each one of them, he could not imagine that the relativity theory or Dirac's equation could have originated in a team.

Dr. Weinherg's reflections are a reaction to attempts to deny the significance of individual creativity on the ground that modern science is increasingly becoming a "team activity ". There are in fact no grounds for ignoring the significance of the creativity of the individual scientist. Still, old categories and schemes in studying sciemific creativity are no


longer adequate in view of the changes which have occurred in the organisation of research.

The question is: how do organisational forms affect the operation of a scientist's intellectual powers within them? We must nowadays be con- cemed not with the creative individual, with his abilities, aspirations and gifts, as he used to be conceived, but with "scientists in organisations ". � 9 Research has now to be centred not on the properties of the creative individual . . . but on the correlation between these properties and the specific environment ("psychological a tmosphere" or "psychological climate ") which arises in organisations where scientists are actually trying to use their creative powers.

Today scientists cannot be considered separately from organisations, and not only because the latter provide them with expensive equipment and financial resources. The scientist is becoming an "organisation m a n " Research institutions offer their personnel not only technological and other resources. They create for their staff a working atmosphere, an environment and medium which can either stimulate or inhibit the productivity of the scientists.

The environment, i.e., the organisation in which the scientist works, where he develops his hypotheses, where he checks them experimentally, makes discoveries, etc., is a very delicate and complex mechanism formed by the interaction of the individuals who take part in the production of scientific ideas.

Is organisadon antithetical to creativity? What should the organisation of a scientific team or institution be in order to stimulate the scientists' creative powers and to make the best possible use of the capacities of all the members of the team? Organisation does mean a more or less rigidly functioning arrangement for the performance of certain tasks, whereas creativity does not tolerate any restrictions outside the scientific quest. This is not an accidental conflict. The question remains: are coordination and hierarchy, peculiar to a modem research institution, compatible width the freedom of research?

It is obvious that the resolution of this conflict is among the paramount problems in the management of science . . . . The dichotomy "organisation or freedom of research" is misleading. It arose as a result of deficient research management . . . . Particular ways of o rganising research might hamper creativity, but this does not mean at all that organisation is incompatible with creativity. The rational--in harmony with the demands of the present scientific and technological revolution--organisation of fundamental and applied research and development can be of help to creative scientific work.

Rational organisation multiplies the scientist's creative potential. Such organisation postulates the existence of creative powers in the individual; it also postulates the influence on these powers of intercourse and interaction in the t e a m . . .


Psychologists and sociologists are now conducting empirical studies of how the organisational patterns formed i n research institutions act upon a scientist's personality and activity and how the specific features and requirements of organisation affect his aspirations and motives concerning research.

The motivation of the scientist is a factor on which the productivity of scientific work depends; it is also closely connected with the scientists' satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with this work. It is essential to investigate whether the productivity of a scientist is affected by the harmony of his personal interests and the interests of the research institution and how effective the methods employed by institu,tions for bringing about such harmony are.

Another problem which has to be investigated is that of the relations among scientific workers within an organisation. Particular attention must be paid to the scientists' contacts with each other (frequency, nature and duration of contacts among team members, the extent to which their scientific interests are involved in these contacts, etc.), on the similarities and differences in the style and strategy of the reasoning of scientists engaged in joint activities, the dynamics of creativity in relation to age, changes in the productivity of research teams through extended periods of joint work by teams with a permanent composition and similar problems . . . . .

One of the most interesting works in this field is Scientists in Organisations by D. C. Pelz and F. M. Andrews. It sums up many years' empirical investigations carried out by the authors on a number of research organisations . . . . Having interrogated over 1,000 employees at various types of research institution, Pelz and Andrews analysed their data by the techniques of mathematical statistics and factorial analysis. They established the correlation among the different variables; the problem was to discover which factors affected the productivity of scientific work. To do this they had to develop criteria for defining scientific productivity and means of assessing it.

Creativity is a phenomenon the mastery of which by numbers and measurements has not been established so far. Attempts undertaken till now to subject it to quantitative analysis have been ineffective. The productivity of a scientist measured by the number of publications, patents, research projects performed, etc., by no means always gives a clue to a scientist's real creative contribution to the solution of problems and the degree of the scientist's or team's productivity, It often happens that they not only fail to coincide, but sometimes are not even correlated positively, Meanwhile, only the number of publications; patents, reports, etc., is subject to objective measurement.

Pelz and Andrews took the number of publications as a criterion of productivity. Realising its insufficiency, they added another one to it expert ,appraisals. These were provided by various persons who knew


the particular scientist's work and who considered themselves to be competent to compare it with the work of other scientists at the given institute. Each judge assessed the scientific contribution of the scientist concerned and his usefulness to the institution. The term "usefulness" referred to the contribution to the institution, regardless of the scientist's particular job---whether his activity was research or management, whether it was creative or ordinary. The very fact of drawing a line between these two appraisals shows that the concepts of "scientist in science" and "scientist in an organisation" do not coincide although, of course, they are connected with each other. The combination of judges' appraisals with the objective criteria of productivity (on the basis of the number of products) provided the authors with their dependent variable.

. . . . It is not difficult to point to the, weaknesses of this method. But so far no more effective and reliable methods for measuring the productivity and creative attainment of scientific work have been elaborated, This kind of inquiry . . . presupposes some indicators of productivity; only when these have been provided can one study the factors which affect the rise and fall of productivity. . . Subjective convictions, intuition and common sense, even if correct, are no substitute for reliable data gained by rigorous observation and experimentation and analysed quantitatively.

If Pelz and Andrews' method of determining the productivity of scientific work, for all its vulnerability, has a rational meaning, the case is somewhat different for their approach to the assessment of the creative capacity of scientific workers. One of the principal conclusions which they reached states: "Creative capacity increases the productivity of work on new problems in the case of free contact, but in less flexible situations, creative capacity might restrict scientific productivity ".

In the industrially developed capitalist countries, in particular the United States, there is much discussion of the problem of creativity. This is a response not only to the economic needs of competitive capital- ism but also to the scientific and technological achievements of the Soviet Union . . . .

And so, in a situation where creative capacity is treated :as the most valuable attribute of the human personality, when the prime mover of scientific progress is seen to lie in this attribute, Pelz and Andrews, proceeding from the empirical material which they have collected, affirm that it can even be a hindrance on the path towards increasing scientific productivity. On what is this hypothesis, which at first glance seems so paradoxical, based?

The investigation of ,the dependence of scientific productivity on creative powers requires that we find a measuring unit for these powers and this, in turn, raises the question of what creativity actually is. Original ideas or their combination, the novelty and unusual nature of Solutions are accepted as indispensable criteria of creativity. Such a vague


and inadequate conception of creativity psychology�9 It was on the basis of the elaborated for distinguishing a creative o n e . . . .

�9 . . The point is that the traditional to identify creative abilities, but also original, unstereotyped thinking . . . .

is widely accepted in American above treatment that tests were personality from a non-creative

testing technique not only failed rejected persons who tended to

�9 . . Attempts to find the correlation between creative abilities and scientific productivity have shown this correlation to be unstable and close to zero. Tests are known to be built not only for diagnosis, but also for prognostication. I t is generally thought that the significance of the product resulting from scientific work is determined by the level of the scientist's creative ability�9 . . But the tests for assessing creative power have proved to be quite poor "predicters" of scientific productivity. Creative abilities are usually considered to be a prerequisite of scientific achievements. But the figures resulting from the testing of many hundreds of scientists have revealed no correlation .between abilities and achievements�9 It is, however, possible that correlation coefficients of zero between abilities and achievements may be explained by the specific features of the given situation in which the creative potential is being investigated. Some situations deprive the scientist of the possibility of manifesting his ability, while others stimulate activity leading to success (i.e., high productivity) even in those in whom this potential might be rather low.

In this connection Pelz and Andrews investigated the relationship between creative power and productivity under various conditions (for instance, in conditions of varying duration of work on a research project with varying degrees of "rigidity" of structure in the given group,, in conditions of "adequate " a n d "inadequate" contacts, etc.). From this, they draw some practically valuable conclusions o n the expediency of switching a creative scientist over to new research, on the organisation of his communication possibilities, sharing his ideas with others, and on the rote of the ,system of remuneration and incentives practised at the given institute: The problem which remains, however, is whether we can accord any confidence topropositions about creative ability if it is measured by tests which are inadequate to assess the creative powers of the mind . . . . This may be the reason why the correlation coefficient between the productivity of-scientific work and creativity has proved to be close to zero. If the test used did not measure the ability to produce- original scientific ideas; but something altogether different, then the above results are not surprising :at all . . . .

In Order to make substantial progress in diagnosing creative powers, it is essential to take into account the uniqueness of the concrete historical sphere in which the individual realises his creative ,abilities. S u c h an approach allows understanding of the nature of scientific work and the


subject thereof--the scientist's mind--in a new light. In seeking indicators to distinguish highly creative scientists from those who have not produced outstanding results, many present-day investigators conclude that the differences lie, first and foremost, in motivation, and not in particular intellectual talents. Creative scientists are characterised as more dominant, possessing more initiative and more strongly motivated towards intellectual success.

�9 . . This sphere has its own problems, reflecting the specific features of organisation and division of labour in modern "big science" organised along the lines of industrial production. Under these conditions motivation changes. The independent pursuit of one's own ideas may prove to be incompatible with the requirements of the "scientific enterprise ". The road chosen by a scientist is now determined not only by the inner development of his thought, but also by an intricate network of relations with other people, by the necessity of risking (bearing in mind the high cost of research equipment) the institution's material resources, etc. Mean- while the scientist's renunciation of the free development of his ideas paralyses the vital nerve of creativity. In this case, motivational factors, such as subordination of the intellect to problems which are alien to the cognitive interests of the individual and the desire to avoid risk, exert a destructive effect on intellectual work. Pelz and Andrews, having analysed the motivational aspects of American scientists' activityr con- cluded that scientific workers must be granted the freedom to choose their line of research. Personal motivation is strengthened when the scientist is permitted to be internally determined, since spontaneity and initiative are at the core of creativity.

The division of motivation into internal and external is, doubtless, important to the investigation of creative activity in general and of the scientist in particular�9 But with Pelz and Andrews this distinction is made on a faulty foundation, i.e., the self-analysis of the scientist, his own image of the sources of the ideas he develops. The information contained in replies to a questionnaire is used as the sole source of information on the scientist's motives. The questionnaire asks the scientist, for example, what problems he prefers to work on: those advanced by the supervisor of the research team, or problems prompted by practice, or born of the development of his own thought, or derived from the literature, etc . . . .

�9 . .~ In examining the problem of motives, we shall be able to make progress when we pass from the collection of the scientists' views to the analysis of actual activity. And this analysis necessarily leads us beyond the subject's conception of his own motivation, beyond his self-analysis. �9 . . Scientists' views about the stimuli of their creative activity should not be fully t r u s t e d . . , largely because the authors of self-analyses do not possess special concepts and methods allowing them to investigate this reality in a reliable scientific manner.


The mission of the psychological and sociological study of science is to work out such concepts and methods. Drawing on the achievements of the various sciences, it strives to disclose the mechanism of the functioning of science as an integral system, the successful performance of which depends on the interaction of numerous economic, social, logical, structural, o.rganisational and psychological factors.