Domsa Károlyné, Fekete Gézáné, Kovács Mária (szerk.): Gondolatok a könyvtárban / Thoughts in the Library (A MTAK közleményei 30. Budapest, 1992)

KÖNYVTÁR ÉS KORSZERŰSÉG – LIBRARY AND MODERNITY

Comparative research in Europe: the Vienna Centre What conclusions can be drawn from this short overview, in particular regarding the Centre's future policy? Any future-oriented strategy should be devised around the concept of originality: the Vienna Centre has been, and should continue to be, an originál organisation, and everything must be done to reinforce this. Only in this way will the Centre be able to compete with other organisations in the international aréna. This means that the Centre should strive for visibility and impact. In order to increase its visibility, the Centre must raise the number and, foremost, the quality of its publications. In order to achieve a greater impact it should integrate its various activities to a greater extent, and maintain its originál character as a mediating organisation, both between East and West and North and South. Putting special emphasis on the study of change in the political, social, economic, cultural, environmental etc. domains, the Centre considers all of them strongly interconnected. Only the structure of these particular changes can be used as a sufficiently powerful tool to describe and explain the very complicated extent, and especially future processes, of the European development. This structure of particular changes requires, first of all, the elaboration of new methodological approaches, of new cognitive equipment for international comparative research. Changes in reality have to be followed by changes in methodology. But the notion of change represents alsó an unavoidable challenge for new cognitive efforts. In the aftermath of the radical changes in Europe social science research has to face completely new issues of content, namely describe and explain processes of (presumably) rapid and large-scale change, as against topics proceeding from the assumption of an environment with nearly stagnant parameters. And the research of these new problems is not separable from questions of methodology. It is, of course, both necessary and useful to investigate particular comparative topics. What now has to be taken into consideration both for the selection and the implementation of any new research project is that the generál context is under constraints of rapid and large-scale change of a complexity that one should not underestimate. In other words: a conceptual framework is needed to capture, at least approximately, the multiple interdependences within which one particular field of investigation should be specified. This calls for two different but interconnected strategies. On the one hand, there is a need for theory-oriented projects; on the other hand, a large-scale participation of all countries affected by and interested in these recent developments is necessary in order to come to grips with these complex interdependences. Thus urgent questions of methodology call for more multilateral work in all areas of the social sciences. As a European organisation covering various fields of research, the Vienna Centre provides an appropriate fórum for this approach. „ Gondolatok a könyvtárban " 165