<TITLE: Torus/Ester Conference: On the Scenes of Science 1
ACADEMIC DOMAIN: humanities
DISCIPLINE: history of science & technology
EVENT TYPE: conference presentation
FILE ID: CPRE03C
NOTES: continuation of and continued in CDIS03A, session also includes presentations CPRE03A-B/D (CDIS03B and CPRE03E are part of the same conference)

RECORDING DURATION: 44 min 52 sec

RECORDING DATE: 14.11.2003

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: unknown

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 1

S5: NATIVE-SPEAKER STATUS: Swedish; ACADEMIC ROLE: senior staff; GENDER: male; AGE: 31-50

SS: several simultaneous speakers>


<S5> thank you very much er , erm everyone who has er children in school or day care realise that for this reforming those institutions is at least as important as what is going on in our universities and research laboratories at least that is my opinion it is the small children who one of those days could be the grown ups who will take care of us when we get old and er they will certainly get old themselves and they will work and they will hopefully love er the two basic basic things in life as at least sigmund freud thought er these er young ones they deserve adequate resources and they deserve parents that are involved er when they are in their formative period because when they are formed , they will make up this thing that we call society , and er , to make this happen of course depends on us who are already grown up , because what children do is they imitate , and basically that is about all they can do together er apart from following their genetic imprints and that is also what er the strand of research in the history of in sociology of science teaches us that scientists do too harriet zuckerman's work from 1977 on american nobel prize winners show that what they learned from their professors of whom a surprisingly large portion were also nobel laureates were not facts rather but behaviour the way of doing things or what per- pierre bourdieu would have called habitus , czeslaw milosz writes in his memoirs that came out in 1980 er in er swedish and slightly before that in other languages about he writes about his adolescence in vilnius lithuania er at the age of seven he sat in a big unheated classroom with 50 other boys and read virgil , and they read virgil aloud , in latin , hour after hour and he met the words as music and learning as labour , the time he spent on these exercises in verse would he wrote later in life and i quote outweigh whole work days of storing unuseful knowledge , he learned yiddish , as a boy then lithuanian polish early on also the language of the great powers of the region german and russian in school he learned latin and french and some time after the war when he came to the american embassy in washington , where he worked for some time he picked up english , this dialect in the margin of the civilised world as he called it , as an employee of the polish radio in the 1930s he translated french poetry before going to work and during the war he ran a black market business on cigarettes sausages and women's underwear but alongside he clandestinely published anti-nazi books of poetry in washington he sat after work between eight in the evening and two in the morning by his typewriter , and he makes a point of saying that he did this every day , i think this is a formidable perhaps very unusual demonstration of civic competence , er this er something similar civic education civic training and so on was mentioned in an earlier paper today er let us recall that er i think it's very important let us recall that most things we do we do outside of the regulated 40 hour work week before working year of 1,700 hours which is the norm of the official swedish company (policy) is less than er ten per cent really of our time er in the life size time box that you can see sometimes drawn in public inquiries that they are concerned about these things our working hours just fill up a thin layer , at the bottom of our time box , er , i say this because it has to do with the the formation of societies and i think er universities and the our topics here today has to do with the formation of of modern society and societies can be destroyed in many ways one is certainly to make them unjust which is not to give equal opportunities another way is to sustain the false idea that there are institutions that are not dependent on citizens who use their time in in civic ways in care affection and (ambition) which then draws the line from , the night work of milosz to the children that are growing up , the growth of the knowledge based society should make us reconsider the role of knowledge institutions i would refer here mainly and particularly to universities but we should certainly not forget other institutions , in my question i'm i mentioned the research institutes but there are many more as michael gibbons and others er in their work on er the modern modes of knowledge production er they have demonstrated that ever larger sectors of society are involved in in in this knowledge production consequently it's increasingly important to gain an understanding of the relationships among the institutions of the knowledge sector colleges universities research intensive industries er even er media bureaucracies and research er laboratories of different kinds , and let us also include the country sector and the society at large which i will do in this talk , these relationships should be studied i think from a both national and international perspective but the consequences of the policies and of today's society of transformation should be examined also at the regional level and this analysis should be conducted from a broad perspective regional cultural to take a move from the educational sector it is not sufficient to examine a variety of easily measurable characteristics of a location be it tampere or oulu or umeċ or lund or something like that in order to analyse the possible consequences of establishing a university network the results produced by the university will also be affected by less readily accessible factors such as the local historic conditions the <FOREIGN> mentalité </FOREIGN> of the residents and the social and cultural environment at large what is being called the social capital , another term for this that er i have come to use more and more in my own work is er the social fabric the social fabric er this denotes the pattern of countless contacts meetings and social events and relationships which combine to form social patterns and networks and of which it is certainly hard to gain a comprehensive picture in some communities these networks these this social fabric tends to be sparse and fragile with little confidence or solidity in others they are strong and dense the expression of social fabric primarily er refers to the latter when when the fabric is strong and sort of comes together this dense type of cultural and communicating infrastructure the concept as such er is not very old it's er as far as i know it surfaced the first time in in a small essay by the geographer torsten hägerstrand in 1996 er he sort of mentions it rather in passing the way old torsten er really so often did er and er some thi- this these things he mentions in passing or sometimes little (concept of) jewels but sometimes also others have to pick them up and polish them erm put them into circulation which er i then tried to do in in a book i did together with a colleague er er of hägerstrand at lund gunnar törnqvist we did this in a book that came out in 2000 er er on on the universities and regional development in sweden (xx) in one of the few studies of this type of er er relationships and social fabric of swedish conditions or i should rather say because they don't use the concept i should rather say regional development er er , and it was conducted by björn olsson a historian on ideas in science at umeċ a geographer at umeċ and friberg er was published by my institute (sister) earlier this year , er this entire perspective is is is is highly relevant a large proportion of the empirical data in this study is drawn from umeċ a northern middle sized town , one could say the swedish oulu but with some important differences whe- where a university was established in the 1960s to be followed by several governmental labs and institutes the higher education and research initiatives conducted there have at least so far produced particularly positive societal effects although primarily within a fairly limited geographic region in and around umeċ itself the effects on a more distant geography the county of västerbotten and the surrounding regions in northern sweden as a whole appear to be more limited , and one of the main aims of that olsson viberg study er which i was myself also s- to some extent involved in particularly in its initial phases and i wrote one of the chapters of their book , er one of the main aims of that study is to demonstrate how the mechanisms of the social capital work in the local and regional environment the town of umeċ have certain characteristic features , strong religious devotion particularly in in the past a strong temperance movement a great deal of interest in academic learning er which stems from i think what we swedish call <FOREIGN> läser traditionen </FOREIGN> the r- reading tradition which is very strong in some of the of the of the popular (rumours) er that was also particularly strong in in in umeċ throughout the late 19th and and well in the middle of of the of the 20th century er and the strong social fabric in the community itself these are social practices and values that can be viewed in many ways as civic virtues , and as are echoed in classical works such as of course max weber's protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism , well also many other works following that tradition running all the way through to er puttman's study of italy as we know and his recent bowling alone , er the present study by olsson and viberg offers i think an insight into what could be described as very basic features of a regional growth laboratory where you can sort of look at at the the chemicals at work , now today there is a growing research going on in many places apparently in finland too all these kinds of relationships between on the one hand the universities colleges and R&D and on the other hand regional innovative dynamics and economic growth as has already been stated today er which i will repeat now with certain exceptions the findings from this research so far seem quite consistent namely it is difficult to achieve the desired growth effect to any general or radical stand solely by establishing new universities or colleges , however there are individual cases both in sweden and other countries where precisely the establishment of a college or a university has indeed had a large impact on the region and as you have just heard umeċ is one of those cases now one should also be quite cautious when interpreting these results the college or the university is not always the only reason or even the primary reason for such a development when it occurs and just to underline er this er last point i would just like to show you one of the er geographical statistics that we have collected for our we have tons of them in this two year 2000 book that i did with er gunnar törnqvist and er i will just say a couple of words explaining this one it's picked right out of the book er and it's not a very beautiful picture either although er it can be maybe beautiful to someones er the er this this is net change of the numbers of small companies we actually what we did is we studied impact in two basically two dimensions growth of new kinds of firms was one and er er growth in terms of er R&D intensive industry was the the second and many many other potential dimensions to study but these were difficult enough to run down the da- data of and ah certainly this was a particularly problematic period of swedish economic development we had a strong crisis in the country in the early to mid 1990s but and you would probably get s- slightly different results in other periods but over all you would probably get something similar to this in other periods as well and then basically the darker the picture the more growth and even er as you go down the line here you have a a net loss in in the number of small firms and as you can see even in regions , particularly if you're looking at the north of the country er where there there were established colleges in the 70s and 80s and even umeċ where which was er er up in the north there we don't find this this net growth of of companies and we had a a number of of pictures like this sort of reiterating that point that we could not just put down money in in the places expect them to start growing and when we said this in this er book which was presented at a conference in stockholm where er really there was a whole lot of interest in the minister of education and researchers themself there serving as a comment in during seminar and so on some peoples clearly were very concerned about this and not in stockhom because stockholm @came up@ very well at the time it was also the peak of the IT movement and we can there was a lot of optimism in stockholm at that time but out in certain regions in the country they they were harshly against this appearing in research and er so really i have through out the career i never really come across anything like this but @it@ <SS> @@ </SS> it was a strong wind blowing but er we we we were felt q- quite at ease none the less because we had we were so deeply buried in empirical work that we are we just couldn't (study) er now in in the light of this view of regional success and regional economic growth it is imperative that further research be conducted so i really would love to see more empirical work be conducted in many many places that analyses the effects and sos- social impact in the universities and colleges within this regional context certainly now the umeċ study also sheds light and now i'm back on the olsson viberg study on what might otherwise appear to be a local paradox , umeċ university is one of those cases where investment in research and education was less successful at least so far introducing industrial growth there's been very little in terms of industrial growth in umeċ i think there to some distinction from oulu where there has been far more of that , for a number of reasons the number of spin-off companies formed during the 1980s were s- significantly lower in umeċ than in other comparative cities we lack figures actually for the 90s sort of strange even the luleċ university of technology which is further north the smaller and younger institution produced more spin-off companies than umeċ did , 29 compared to umeċ's 19 while of course chalmers university of technology in gothenburg produced 161 now first of all maybe we should say that the measure of success here is certainly not the number of spin-off companies because spin-off companies are quite rare even in very strong er technological universities and and where s- there's a lot of success there is still a limited number of spin-off companies er but still it is an indicator the expansion in umeċ has occurred in other areas small service companies or businesses run by one or a few individuals in many cases staff members were former students of the university that form (xx) major private and public businesses had moved also from other places to umeċ in order to benefit from the large (xx) of highly educated individuals and this is a tendency frequently noted when studying the link between universities and regional development it's very very much due to the link to the students and in er after our 2000 work there's been some recent work done by er jointly by my institute and the institute for er growth holistic studies which is a governmental institute recently set up couple of years ago er that study is not yet published but i can just tell you one of the main results of that study er it is that erm er when they have er measured once again growth factors in university and college towns in sweden the the student factor comes out as very significant , er so where students flock in their thousands they bring with them not perhaps big salaries but some pocket money and they do some spending and there are some ps- simple economic (xx) at hand and students as often as faculty start companies mind you particularly in the information and technology sector in virgin sectors of the economy , now perhaps the most remarkable development of all again talking about umeċ has been the cultural sector although there are no exact figures showing the regional impact of the cultural expansion in that time on employment and economic growth er there is no doubt what so ever that it has been significant and that this expansion is linked to the university the region already had the rich and well established cultural tradition in such areas as amateur theatre and the visual arts however after the establishment of the university and in conjunction with an expansion of the broadcasting media umeċ's cultural sector expanded rapidly in the start of the 60s but grew significantly in the 80s after the university's opening a jazz festival was established several theatre groups opera dance film productions and (xx) productions were also established eventually several more festivals and major cultural events in music film puppets even and the visual arts were also er er set forth umeċ has so many museums and an unusually large number of active galleries art galleries of considerate size er perhaps one of the best museums in in the country right now called <FOREIGN> bild museet </FOREIGN> er picture museum whe- which is not just for for pictures it's in general a very la- active lively stage , er was also set up er in in the early 80s , culture is probably umeċ's single largest economic sector after health care and education the active cultural life of the city indirectly benefits tourism by providing business for subcontractors who serve the tourists who come to the city because of its cultural activities and the cultural life of umeċ has some similarities with lund in the far south of sweden more so than it is sort of similar to its closest neighbours in the north apart from other university towns few cities outside main urban areas have had such cultural ambitions and again umeċ and lund both have been cited as swedish examples of the process that needs to be examined empirically in order to determine the extent of its impact how does culture e- affect the dynamics of the region , er the direct economic b- benefits hardly reveal the whole picture er and perhaps culture helps to create what is widely perceived as a high standard of living in a town or region lund and umeċ for instance are both cities that consistently tend to rank high in quality of life surveys it could be argued that er in the information society or knowledge society a growing proportion of the industry would seize to rely on (physical) resources nearby the strategic resources consist of knowledge and skills of (xx) individuals and the preferences of these individuals , according to some research results increasingly determine the location of businesses rather than the other way around and this means that the businesses of private individuals tend to share the same preference for location location and certainly this has already been sort of er hyped into a whole er paraphernalia of literature on face making and all that , consequently a high standard of cultural activity could then , contribute somehow to to this positive regional er development process a relative abundance of cultural institutions and consumers is generally seen as one of the characteristics of expanding regions and this idea then is closely linked to the size factor the size factor highlighted in research on the relation between R&D investment and regional economic growth and the capacity for innovation , and here we were referring in our 2000 book to er one of the few works in this area that had come before then er by an american erm erm economic geographer his name is er varga er who published a big book in (1999) 1998 and now more and more work in this area is coming forth er and basically the er argument is that if there is a small er labour market and a small er diversity of institutions where the investment in the college or university or in a lab comes in there is much harder to gain or get this growth in economic growth spiral where is it larger regions this is is easier to achieve but that will also hold for more or less any kind of @@ of investment er so er which of course makes the- this quite tricky within in countries like finland and sweden because so few major centres exist and i come back to that <COUGH> in a while so er and and then again what i said a similar trend has been noted in the economic analysis of the capital centre theatres museums and other major cultural establishments have fixed expenditures that require support by a large number of people and high ticket prices and in many cases it may require a subsidy and sponsors and this means that they can only survive in cities with a large number of visitors in turn they contribute to the city's attractiveness for residents and tourists and sponsorship follows this precisely this same pattern in sweden 53 per cent of all cultural sponsorship come goes to stockholm 53 per cent malmö which is sweden's third largest city and which prides itself for its culture receives a tiny three per cent of culture sponsorship in sweden these are figures in 2000 now there are exceptions , some smaller towns also have an abundance of all sorts of activity and creativity both in culture and research and many other fields this is a well known phenomenon in the scarcely populated parts of north america small and medium sized towns even in mid-western and southern states that that otherwise lack mainly tradition in cultural institutions are capable of maintaining a varied and thriving cultural life thanks to the presence of a university in some cases universities have become something of a cultural oasis that includes museums mus- musical groups theatres concerts dance companies if not resident so at least passing by presenting their (stuff) , in towns that would otherwise have been too small to sustain this kind of kind of activity and i think this is worth considering for those concerned with cultural and regional policies (xx) in sparsely populated countries can (of) bringing together of different kinds of institutions culture education research which are all in our type of societies substantially funded by public funds help create the type of local quality of life that would attract skilled individuals who in turn are required for innovation and development without individuals (at in place) there would be really nothing happening , this kind of reasoning suggests the need for a broader view of the roles and functions of the universities it is easy to conclude that if a university or college aims to promote regional growth and i would like to stress that this is the particularly the aim and policy for the growing number of of colleges in umeċ er umeċ was early in sweden oulu was early in finland but thi- this mission is now being taken on regardless of where you are geographically even in the big cities , it should come for example stockholm again er there is a new sort of awareness growing among the KTH er karoliniska institut and stockhom university and the smaller colleges (xx) form some kind of joint action to promote and develop the asset which is the region itself and and the city of stockholm they didn't even say that couple of decades ago not at all , if culture affects innovation within the local environment perhaps the question should also be raised as to whether the local culture is affected by the university as well as whether the university is affected by the local culture so there is this sort of a , mutual relationship , and then what about research areas of course culture can utilise any given area of information artists are inspired by geology and brain research as much as by the academic study of the arts even more so er so what is the significance of the humanities viewed from this perspective , this reasoning finds support in the literature on regional development and growth research also suggests that er many thriving regions feature erm a rich er collaboration between both professional and voluntary individuals and organisations within the community , still what i say here is sort of a sampling of evidence that is not really coherent it's not wide covering there is still need of more empirical research on these kinds of relationship , the social fabric that affects universities needs to be more thoroughly er studied i think , globalisation cross border exchange and virtual flows are essential con- concepts frequently used to describe today's society in transformation this can easily lead to an impression of economic social and cultural processes that are isolated from physical geography , at the same time paradoxical though it may seem increasing focus has been placed on the locations the towns the regions of course certainly drawing in recent years from manuel castells' work but not only from his work er i would like to emphasise er ano- another book that has er meant a lot to me at least namely peter hall's major book citizen civilisation published in 1998 where he examines , mostly big cities , that er provide opportunities for unexpected meetings between people skills in different areas of the field if there is one main re- red thread that runs through this work citizen civilisation it is that cities that are created over the long term provides constantly new , stages for people to meet provide reasons for people to meet they may have their down turns but if they are er important places for people to come together they will cer- certainly come up out of that er down turn , there are many links between cultural knowledge universities and their immediate surroundings can be seen as environments for intellectual and cultural production , the word production sometimes seemed alien to this area i think it is not like all other production environments they are both directly and indirectly linked with other areas such as customers suppliers and service institutions universities often had close ties with laboratories high tech companies , as well as with establishment that provide theatre and whatnot but also with social movements social movements of different kinds and the phenomenon i think that is visible particularly in countries which are in a state of transition to democracy , we may think of this as some as a phase that we ran through in the past which to some extent of course it is er but er i don't think we have seen the last of it here either and in many countries in the third world it is something that we really should have more of in the future it is widely agreed that today's industrial and economic dynamics are dependent heavily on science and high tech innovation and it's also clear that the the key segments of this type of industry are in some way connected to what what is done in in the universities and in their research in some cases this connection can be seen geographically in the form of closely situated incubator or seed companies or in research or industrial parks this is a phenomenon that is growing in many countries now the association swede park has more than 30 such parks in sweden as members i know you have several in finland they're coming up in norway and there is virtually no place in western europe at least where they are not present , some of those are in a very rapid state of growth , these institutions generate ideas and innovations that are circulated throughout society , we can talk of these production environments not as one single limited institution such as the college the university the lab the company or rather we should think about in my opinion as larger creative centres er of the knowledge the virgin knowledge (as some would) how they work how well they try and how well they develop is probably of considerable significance to long term economic sus- success at the regional level and indirectly at the national level . i would like to er finalise my er , my talk by showing you a few examples of the the er kinds of er s- symbolic er representations that i think we can see now to quite some extent obvious process that i'm being referring to here erm er certainly we can er i- in in in er in swedish er i i've er started using the the concept er <FOREIGN> kunskaps anläggning  </FOREIGN> i haven't really thought about any good word for in in english er to er to er to to sort of underline that it's not just an institution it's not just a building er but it's rather complex set of theories er and we could see certainly some of those started growing already in the 60s and 70s this is just a a a a picture from linköping university er in sweden er in this particular building we can also see the , strong er er belief in the (linear) model @i would i would say@ <SS> @@ </SS> er but also in the production chain er the roller mat er kind of a factory er metaphor that runs through this and in the inside you would find modules with movable walls and things like that that they would every time you go to a lec- linköping for lecture they say yes you've got a lecture in this room and we can move the walls they say <SS> @@ </SS> they tell you well (will he) are we going to do that (xx) no not today <SS> @@ </SS> , when did you move them last well well <SS> @@ </SS> @@ everything happens (xx) er , er this has never come into er , reality it's a it's a sketch er for one of the proposals for the continued expansion of malmö högskolan in the very south very disputed new college that was set up in the 90s that is now being more and more established , this is the 60s design of umeċ university but what you see here is actually not part of umeċ university but rather one of those er new additions that came in as a result of the establishment of the university which is the agricultural universities' forestry branch that was being put up there in late 70s and has been fairly successful i would say er er and this is again linköping in the late 90s , early what do you say zeros er er er er design er and the bills for architects have certainly grown in er in this area now this was er is an environment close to what is part of sundsval er where mid-sweden university which is soon actually becoming a university next year according to governmental decision recently er they this er this college won a prize for its er design erm er and its location for activities close to the city centre er there is a growing awareness certainly among those that are building these <FOREIGN> kundskaps anläggning </FOREIGN> these knowledge complexes er that they are important some that they would symbolise something in the city or the region so there is a whole rhetoric of of a of pride and ambition er sort of built in to the very er er the very er er the very campus which is a word that has also been used er since the 90s in in swedish now two final little er added er things that i think has a lot to do with i mean if if we then are turning a little bit more to the normative here what what would it how should these institutions be built in order to function according to these er hopes and ambitions <PREPARING OVERHEAD> well er well i would like just to show you er , an observation er that er i made recently . on public spending on research er , here we have well maybe i shouldn't use this one i should use another er <P:06> this gets so complicated that's er this one <FINISH PREPARING OVERHEAD> well you can see that about one per cent of the gross national product in sweden is spent on R&D er when its composition has been changing over the last quarter century fairly significantly and here is the down turn of a the er technological and fibre research funded by the state and here is the general growth of academic research funded by the state in recent years this growth has been tapering off and there's complaints in the university system that it isn't increasing anymore but over the long term i mean you can see it goes from this gap there more applied than than basic to more basic and very little applied this has been compensated by the growth of course in the R&D sector and the private business sector but , this has now come to a situation where where certainly the demands of the universities to take on more applied activities has grown to an enormous extent and er that is why there is a legislation of the permissions in sweden now and there i- that is also why there is a constant er nagging at the universities that provide more and more of the applied and it's coming to some sort of identity discussion about what universities should actually be in sweden and some academics are quite concerned and that is why i have proposed that we should really start discussing , er the comparison between sweden and finland we can use other countries i er just chose finland for the occasion er where we can see that both countries have big , business R&D sectors both have fairly large public and sort of university sectors but what is really far more important here is the institutes which seem to me to be a way of dealing with the applied er to to a to a certain extent avoiding the kind of of er overload functional overload that seems to be one of the main obstacles and problems in the swedish university system at the moment but all kinds of missions really are built into the agenda of universities and it's doubted that universities could really take on more than that that was also why i've asked that question before ss- really if you want to achieve regional development i think this is my best basic message here in this talk if you wanna go for that which i think is really important the end of transition from an industrial to a more knowledge based society in various sparsely populated countries in the north that we are we have to think if you still think that politics has something to to offer and some don't then i think we should think of the sort of combined effects of public spending on anything from cultural infrastructure regional er economics and so on over to R&D education and er sort of a whole range which would then i think point in the direction that knowledge complexes where these things are sort of added and mixed together ss- really have a future if you take the (xx) norms of the university and the academic (impulse) and say this is the place where you should really do all that i think er we are in for function over overload in the universities and which would certainly er be quite problematic and and i expect er in sweden this discussion to grow in the years to come er i don't expect the @growth to same extent@ here because you've chosen another another avenue to deal with these issues my time is up thank you very much for for the floor </S5>
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