Sébastien GandSenior Lecturer in Management Sciences at Sciences Po Grenoble and the CERAG laboratory

How would you define objectivity in your discipline?

Scientific objectivity means offering research results based on an approach and means that distance themselves as far as possible from the subjective biases that every researcher carries with him/her as a result of personal history, beliefs or interests. This is one of the foundations of the spectacular growth of scientific knowledge in societies - first in the West, then worldwide - over the last three centuries, and one of the foundations of societies anchored on a rational-legal basis, as described by Max Weber.

Various means of regulation, both individual and collective, are deployed to give substance to objectification in science. On an individual level, the first element is of course the researcher's personal ethics, for example, in the non-tampering with data and respectful treatment of his or her research "objects", in this case humans in the humanities and social sciences. In this respect, the production and use of research data is now more closely supervised.

The other major individual (and team) aspect of a project is the implementation of an appropriate research design, from the elaboration of the question in the light of existing knowledge, to the choice of methods and the production of results. This is the researcher's core competency, which he or she has received in-depth training in during their doctorate and continues to develop throughout their career.

On a collective level, peer review is the cardinal mode of regulation for the production of objectified scientific knowledge. On the basis of their expertise, reviewers are asked by a journal editor to judge the quality and interest of the work submitted for publication.

However, these elements of individual and collective regulation of research quality are not without their flaws. This is illustrated by the explosion in the number of publications in my discipline, Management Sciences, which increased 16-fold between 1993 and 2013! In this context, the evaluation and revision of submitted work, carried out on a voluntary basis by solicited researchers, is a time-consuming and unappreciated activity, at the risk of allowing inconsistent contributions to be published.

Nor should we be naïve about the fact that scientific communities are also coteries of researchers seeking to assert the place of their research interests and individuals (as David Lodge has amusingly described). Yes, there are a certain number of more or less irreconcilable chapels, but the collective issue is that plural scientific contributions can be expressed as long as they respect a scientifically debatable approach that can be put to the test of facts to understand and act on a social phenomenon.

Preserving and reinforcing the means of individual (training, career development criteria, working conditions) and collective (quality of evaluation work) regulation of scientific production is therefore essential to guarantee scientific objectivity.

Is researcher neutrality possible and desirable?

We cannot abstract ourselves from the space-time in which we evolve, and which partly shapes the way in which we elaborate and treat our research objects; we are, in a way, prisoners of what "we have before our eyes" (which does not exonerate the social scientist from an effort to distance himself historically and culturally from his research object). Thus, the works of Sartre and Aron are strongly marked by the context of the Cold War, in which they take partisan stances. But this did not prevent Aron from writing a very well-founded chapter on Marx in Les étapes de la pensée sociologique. And the "hard" sciences were not to be outdone. Etienne Klein has retraced the physical path of Einstein's life, marked by successive exiles and the Swiss mountains, to better grasp what was "before his eyes" when he produced his major work on relativity. 

In this relationship between the researcher and his space-time, we find the link between science and politics: what are the major issues of our time? What is authorized or not, audible or not, fashionable or not? These elements help to frame, to a greater or lesser extent, the work that is carried out, since it will receive priority funding, attract numerous researchers and more easily interest journals. For example, the French government is now refinancing fundamental research on coronaviruses, which had been largely slowed down. For my part, I started working in 2010 on issues relating to support for the loss of autonomy of the elderly, but it would certainly have been more difficult to do so ten years earlier, at least not with the same resources and the same possibilities for observation and action. 

The researcher's subjective commitment is necessary to advance knowledge. We choose a subject out of attraction, whether for the scientific enigma it confronts us with and/or for questions that resonate with our personal elements and convictions. But subjective commitment is not at odds with the scientific objectivity that research requires.

The question of neutrality becomes more delicate when the researcher leaves the scientific discussion with his peers to exchange ideas in the community. Depending on the subject, its topicality, its sensitivity and the interests involved, our work can be caught up in debates or controversies and instrumentalized. Instrumentalization is quite inevitable, and the difficulty for the researcher is to find a space in which to defend his results, including certain subtleties that are sometimes necessary, and the recommendations he draws from them for public or private action. From this point of view, the existence of a medium like The Conversation is particularly salutary. Finally, the social scientist is not responsible for the radicalization of opinions and the systematic hysterization of the way in which debates on certain themes are conducted. 

How important are methods to you as a researcher?

The aim of scientific research is the controlled production of knowledge, so that it can be explained how results are arrived at, as well as their scope and limits. The choice of methods and their proper use are inevitably central to this process, yet they often disappear completely from the discussion as soon as we leave the scientific arena.

However, it seems important to me not to reduce science to a "technicist" representation of the use of methods. Methods are part of a research design, i.e. "the framework that enables the various elements of a research project to be articulated", from the construction of the problem to the collection and processing of data, via the choice of methods and their implementation. Methods are therefore tools that enable the researcher to study his or her object: their relevance is judged in relation to the problem to be addressed and what is to be observed.

Personally, I've made extensive use of collaborative research methods, working on problems encountered by public or private organizations that coincide with the limits of knowledge at a given moment in a field of research. From my point of view, this is a relevant way of advancing on exploratory issues and studying processes of organizational change that require a detailed understanding of the behavior of players and the organization, as well as longitudinal follow-up.  

For example, to study innovations in support for family carers or in securing home care for the frail elderly, I worked with colleagues to conduct qualitative assessments of public policy experiments. In 2010 and 2015, I felt that this approach was a good way of observing multi-actor public policies that were not yet well established, and that were complex because they were rooted in local territories and required heterogeneous, autonomous players to cooperate. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had access to fieldwork and the means to build up rich research material, with several comparable cases and whose data could be exploited in academic research elsewhere.

Collaborative research requires that the relationship between the research partners - the applicants and the researchers - be well established, so that freedom of investigation is preserved, particularly in terms of access to the various players, choice of methods and use of results. Interaction with those involved in the field over time helps to build the trust needed to gain access to the "intimacy" of an organization, to that which is not written down in procedures and organization charts, but which enables us to interpret certain behaviors or managerial choices, including their paradoxes, in a more established way. Finally, submitting your analyses and results, whether interim or final, to those you've studied is a source of improvement and validation for your scientific work.

Could you present an example of research, ideally from your own work, to illustrate the issues and tensions surrounding objectivity and neutrality in the social sciences?

I'm going to present two different cases. The first concerns the evaluation of a public policy experiment. If public authorities design and experiment with systems, it's because they have expectations. But political and scientific times are very different. While our research is often spread over several years, political sponsors may have shorter time horizons, particularly in relation to electoral or budgetary deadlines (this is how the RSA, deployed on an experimental basis in 30 départements in 2009, was generalized even before its final evaluation). Our team thus found itself having to produce a note for a ministerial cabinet, even though our data was partial and the process of rolling out the experimentation was still underway. A balance had to be struck between the need for caution in the initial analyses and their possible interpretation, and the need to show the initial effects in progress, so that funding for the experiment could be renewed, and the conditions for our scientific research preserved. 

I would like to use the second case to show how the perception of a research object can be transformed by the irruption of an external crisis. Part of my dissertation work focused on democratic companies, which I approached from the angle of their ability to renew themselves on a regular basis in order to perpetuate themselves, rather than from the classic angle of analysis of whether they are more or less successful than hierarchical-capitalist companies. The democratization of companies had been a fashionable research topic in the 1960s and 1970s, but had lost momentum in the management sciences (even though the theme of the 2003 American Academy Of Management symposium was Democracy in a knowledge economy). As a result, when I gave my first scientific papers at conferences, I sometimes received some skeptical feedback on the interest of the theme.

Then came the sub-prime crisis of 2008-2009. The strong criticism of financial capitalism that followed reopened the question of organizational alternatives to the capitalist-hierarchical enterprise, and "my" subject became particularly fashionable and a source of craze... My research work retained the same content (a historical study of the phenomenon of democratic enterprises and case studies) and the same results, but its resonance had changed: I had not lost my neutrality, but the framework of judgment and resonance had evolved.