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4
Tnstitut:ions and CuTt:ures
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4
Instit:utions and Cultures
An many respects the preceding chapters may be regarded as moving from
the more microscopic aspects of human existence to the more macroscopic.
Chapter 1 emphasized research on individual thought and behavior, paying
particular attention to biological and psychological determinants and mecha-
nisms. Chapter 2 focused on motivational determinants and mechanisms in
individual behavior, as well as research on the constraining and determining
effects of social interaction and social arrangements with respect to behavior.
Chapter 3 took up organizational arrangements, especially markets and polit-
ical and occupational systems, and examined how information, incentives, and
other features shape these arrangements.
In this chapter we move further toward the macroscopic and consider re-
search on institutions and cultures, which are those features of social life that
serve as the bases of the organization and integration of entire societies. A1-
though the analysis of institutions and cultures is associated primarily with the
fields of sociology and anthropology, aspects of these phenomena also relate
to and are found in the research of political scientists, historians, geographers,
legal scholars, and economists as well.
Research on institutions and cultures has long been an active field, and there
is now a vast array of ongoing work. This chapter begins with the most basic
questions of human beginnings: What have been the salient characteristics of
human evolution that have led to that special type of social bonding that is
described as human society? New archaeological studies as well as the com-
129
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parative study of primate and human societies are now adding major insights
on this central question in evolutionary theory. Another major field of study
in this area is demography—the study of population dynamics as affected by
fertility, mortality, and migration- and this chapter focuses on the institutional
and cultural dimensions of both fertility, especially in developing societies, and
migration, especially in the United States.
One question has been the preoccupation of nearly two centuries of theo-
retical thinking in the social sciences: How can the profound institutional
transformations that have been associated with the great commercial, industrial,
and democratic revolutions in modern Western history be understood and
explained? In recent decades this question has been extended to include the
study of developing nations as they struggle with change. Study of these insti-
tutional transformations has gone under a number of labels, none of them
completely satisfactory, but for purposes of convenience we will call it the
study of modernization. Within this large and active field, the chapter focuses
on the family and religion. It considers a range of research that has significantly
altered understanding of how these institutions have changed and continue to
change and what place and role they have in modern society.
Science and technology have been among the key features of those institu-
tional transformations and a subject of intense recent research: What cultural,
institutional, and organizational features of society are essential for scientific
knowledge to rise and grow? What are the conditions that determine whether
scientific knowledge will be applied, that is, implemented as technology? And,
then, what effect does technology have on communities and institutions and
on the quality of life in general? These questions are studied both by historians
of science and by other social scientists. The chapter also takes a look at the
behavioral and social sciences themselves also the children of moderniza-
tion- and on the relations between social science knowledge and public policy.
Lastly, the chapter deals with the most macroscopic level of all, the world
as a whole, where the stress is on systems of relations among societies. Some
of the developing lines of research are on internationalization the increased
economic, political, and cultural involvement of nations in one another's af-
fairs and on the special and timely topics of international security and, more
generally, cooperation and conflict among nations.
THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY
Every society has developed beliefs about the origins of the world and the
nature of things within it, including beliefs about human nature and society
itself. Since written records are a relatively recent historical.phenomenon, the
way in which society actually emerged lies in the realm of prehistory (prior to
written records). But a wide range of scientific techniques are now making
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I~t~udons and Culture / 13 I
possible an increasingly complete narrative of origins based on the inte~re-
tstion of material evidence. This evidence enables researchers to look back with
increasing Doria to the world of thousands and mhbons of yeses ago sod
to v~us~ze the evolution of humans sod human society. The outlines of that
evolution can be divided into six stages:
Time Period
Developmental Stage
Divergence of the hominid line Mom ARican apes
Bergen 8 mObon and
4 miLion years ago
By 4 mown Cam ago
2 an >~ ~
~ 0.5 million yaw ago
Between 50,000 and 30,000
years ago
Between 10,000 and
5,000 years ago
Evolution of bipedal gag
Habitadon of ARican savannahs
Larger than ape-sized brains
~ sat Cog
Dutche~ marks on animal remans
Wore than one species in the same region
~~-I~i~ec~ and =# Homo)
More complex stone tools
Spread into Topical and ~mpe~ce Eurasia
Homo crackup, then archaic Coma so
Loss of massive muscularity
Emergence of ark technical ingenui~an
"information explosion," including
extensive styUsUc differentiation and change
Probable increase in popubdon densities
Spread to high Arcdc, Australia, and,
later, the Americas
Scull ~nsidon
Sewed Adages and was
Food storage, culOvabon, herding
Get increases in population densities
Accumulation of Reach, concentration of power
The best Do stages saw the development of biological mechanisms similar
to those governing the evolutional branching of many primate and mam-
maban species. The test stage, involving the beginnings of Arming, finessed
the appearance of populations with aL the distinctive mental socist and tech-
nological potentisL of contemporary humans. The intervening stages, during
which changes in biology, behavior, and culture occurred, are the subject of
Lontier research on the dynamics of social change.
Social Organization in Prebistoric limes
Direct evidence on the social organization of early human groups ~ limbed,
but some tentative conclusions can be drawn. Many archaeological shes dadug
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from 2 million years ago to the beginnings of farming 10,000 years ago are of
similar size, and they suggest the existence of day-to-day social groups usually
of 10 to 30 individuals. Population densities over large areas were very low.
The firmest early evidence of household or family units within sites dates
from 3S,000 to 50,000 years ago. Signs of wider and more diversified networks
also appeared at this time, as did evidence of long-distance exchange of items
such as seashells and obsidian and other prized stones. This stage is also marked
by evidence of gatherings at ritually important places, the development of
regional stylistic traditions that reflect some kind of ethnic identity, and in-
creases in the volume of organized information being generated and transmit-
ted.
In the 1960s, field investigations of nonhuman primates took some observed
baboon societies as the model of early human society. In line with that model,
the societies of human ancestors were depicted as hierarchial, with males being
competitive and aggressive and females being passive and nurturers of the
young. Subsequent primate field research has dispelled a number of these
inferences: it has shown that primate behavior varies enormously, both within
and among species, and that simple generalizations about sex differences in
nurturance, social competitiveness, and passivity in females cannot be sus-
tained. Contemporary field studies, for example, reveal that in various species,
females compete as intensely as males and often actively choose their mates.
At the same time, in some species, including baboons, males develop long-
term bonds with females and participate in infant care.
Along with new evidence and changing views on primate behavior, there
are indications that major changes in human reproductive physiology may have
occurred relatively recently. There is some evidence that Neanderthal females
may have carried their fetuses to 11- or 12-month terms. Other evidence sug-
gests that, about 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, when some humans became less
nomadic, birth spacing was reduced, which, in turn, was a factor in causing
the population increase associated with the beginnings of farming.
With increased wealth in the form of investments in capital improvements
to land, signs of warfare appear. The oldest archaeological evidence of organized
armed warfare, as contrasted with incidental skirmishes, is a 12,000-year-old
cemetery in the Nile Valley. Although signs of warfare follow rather than pre-
cede the development of farming, fighting as such goes further back. Present-
day monkeys and apes, especially males, fight, as do modern humans; and
there is no reason to suppose that human ancestors were different. The question
is rather one of scale, intensity, organization, and the use of weapons. Fieldwork
on chimpanzees indicates that they may share with humans the dubious dis-
tinction that organized coalitions of males engage in lethal intergroup aggres-
sion to achieve territorial gains. Studies are needed to confirm the finding and
to determine the evolutionary and social context of these patterns.
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Institutions and Cultures / 133
Food, Tools, and Home Bases
At some stage in evolution, humans joined the class of animals that do not
simply consume food on the spot but carry it to central places, called home
bases, where it is shared with the young and other adults. The use of home
bases is a fundamental component of human social behavior; the common meal
served at a common hearth is a powerful symbol, a mark of social unity. Home-
base behavior does not occur among nonhuman primates and is rare among
mammals. It is unclear when humans began to use home bases, what kind of
communications and social relations were involved, and what the ecological
and food choice contexts of the shift were. Work on early tools, surveys of
paleoanthropological sites, development and testing of broad ecological theo-
ries, and advances in comparative primatology are contributing to knowledge
about this central chapter in human prehistory.
One innovative approach is to investigate damage and wear on stone tools.
Researchers make tools that replicate excavated specimens as closely as possible
and try to use the tools~as the originals might have been used, such as wood-
cutting, hunting, or cultivation. Depending on how the tool is used, charac-
teristic chippage patterns and microscopically distinguishable polishes develop
near the edges. The first application of this new method of analysis to stone
tools that are 1.5 million- to 2 million-years-old indicates that, from the start,
an important function of early stone tools was to extract high quality food-
meat and marrow from large animal carcasses. Some of the earliest tools were
also used for shaping wood and for making digging sticks and spears. Fossil
bones with cutmarks caused by stone tools have been discovered lying in the
same 2-million-year-old layers that yielded the oldest such tools and the oldest
hominid specimens (including humans) with larger than ape-sized brains. This
discovery increases scientists' certainty about when human ancestors began to
eat more meat than do present-day nonhuman primates. But several questions
are still unanswered questions: How frequently did meat-eating occur? To what
degree was meat acquired more by scavenging than hunting? What were the
social implications of meat-eating patterns?
New analyses of animal remains from the stone age are now under way. An
important question to be addressed by field studies is how the feeding, ranging,
and social interaction patterns of human beings who acquired food by hunting
and gathering compare with those of primates and nonhuman carnivores. Some
studies need to span the life cycle of identified individual animals, particularly
of apes and other species for which there is evidence of repeated strategies and
accumulated experience that amount to a protoculture.
Until recently few such studies were undertaken, and they were qualitative.
Now optimal foraging theory and other rigorous conceptual frameworks are
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being used in gathering data on the properties of nonagricultural human and
primate foods, notably their spatial and seasonal distribution, associated ac-
quisition and processing costs, energy and nutrient returns, and problems
caused by toxins and secondary compounds. A few exploratory field projects
have begun on wild tubers, meat and fat in scavenged carcasses, and such
problems as coping with tannins and their effects on food choice. Of related
interest are claims that control over fire may go back 1.5 million years, much
earlier than commonly thought; fire control had definite implications for food
selection and gathering behavior. The very existence of extended human social
systems may have been determined by the ways prehistoric people learned to
exploit widely dispersed, high-quality, portable food products—meat, marrow,
large tubers, and, much later, grain.
Evolution of Language
Language, the most important component of culture, is also the most
difficult subject to study in art evolutionary framework because there are no
living protolanguages and speech does not fossilize. The initial stages of brain
expansion and stone-tool manufacture, both suggestive of language facility,
began about 2 million years ago. But there is also some evidence of a
relatively recent change in the structure of the human vocal tract. This change
coincides with the loss of muscularity that distinguishes anatomically modern
humans, with modern-size brains, from the Neanderthals whom they replaced
about 30,000 years ago. Further assessment of this biological history, including
a more thorough investigation both of vocal tract anatomy and brain structure,
is needed.
The social and ecological factors that gave rise to the evolution of language
are unclear. Competing hypotheses about what made language-like commu-
nication useful range from considerations of foraging strategy to problems of
mating and infant care. Information sharing could have played a critical role
in organizing home-based foraging, in cooperative hunting, in resolving inter-
group conflict, and even in maintaining stable mating and provisioning rela-
tionships between pair-bonded mates, as well as between different mating
groups. These and other hypotheses can only be tested by pursuing archaeo-
logical evidence on dwelling and foraging patterns (for example, home bases
and tool caches) and integrating these findings with more thorough observa-
tional studies of the dwelling and foraging strategies of modern foraging peoples
and other primate species. The study of language origins places strong demands
on the capacity of scientists to integrate paleontological, neurological, ecolog-
ical, and behavioral studies into a coherent picture and, to put together the
results of biological and historical field methods, laboratory analyses of material
gathered by radioisotopic or microscopic instruments, data from experimental
techniques, and well-articulated theories of behavior in the wild.
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Institutions and Cultures / 135
But modern methods can only illuminate the past if there are systematic and
well-preserved artifacts available for study. There is a compelling need to pro-
tect museum-based research collections against physical deterioration and dis-
persal and to cultivate international arrangements for scholarly access to world-
wide observational and archaeological field sites.
DEMOGRAPHIC BEHAVIOR
In one sense demography is the study of phenomena that are primarily
biological, such as fertility and mortality, which in the aggregate can be analyzed
with sophisticated mathematical models and statistical techniques. Yet these
phenomena cannot be understood simply as biological processes because they
are strongly influenced by social and cultural factors. The major task in studying
demographic behavior is to unravel and analyze the complex of causes behind
rates of fertility, marriage, migration, morbidity, and mortality. This task calls
for a variety of sources of information, including official demographic records
and surveys, fine-grained observations in field situations, and careful sifting
and analysis of historical records. In this empirical work it has been important
to compare detailed data from surveys with theoretical and mathematical work
and to compare cross-sectional information from such surveys with personal
and institutional longitudinal data. Future understanding will depend largely
on multifaceted and sustained research efforts, especially in regions of Africa
and Asia where cultures and institutions very different from those in the United
States present the greatest challenges to understanding the dynamics of de-
mography.
Fertility and Lactation
Unlike animals, humans control reproduction (directly or indirectly) through
cultural mechanisms, such as celibacy outside marriage and abstinence within
it. Prolonged breastfeeding is another instance of this kind of control. The
physiological effects of breastfeeding are now well understood: the mechanical
stimulation of an infant's suckling triggers hormonal mechanisms that delay
the mother's return to normal fertility. Complex simulations and statistical
analyses of these physiological processes have increased the precision of knowl-
edge as to how this effect varies according to the frequency, intensity, and
duration of breastfeeding—which are determined by cultural forces. Those
forces, manifested mainly in family and community norms, determine how
and how long an infant is nursed as well as when and in what manner sup-
plementary feeding begins. Broad social and economic conditions, including
work and the mother's social expectations and health, affect whether and how
much she breastfeeds. This web of biological, personal, and cultural forces
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determines whether the mother or someone else nurses and when she shifts
the child to other foods, which in turn affect the survival and health of the
child. If a nursing child dies, as frequently happens under conditions of poverty
and disease, normal fertility returns, thereby increasing the probability of an-
other pregnancy. And multiple pregnancies may have detrimental effects on
the mother's health.
In some societies breastfeeding is explicitly regarded as a device to lengthen
the spacing between births. Fewer births increase the food supply for the
existing children, thereby improving their health. In addition, breastfeeding
may be accompanied by abstinence from sexual intercourse. Breastfeeding plus
abstinence can result in birth spacing of from 3 to S years. As societies change,
abstinence or breastfeeding or both may be abandoned for various reasons,
with a consequent rise in fertility, an increase in infant mortality (due to the
lack of enough nutritious and uncontaminated breast milk), and a decline in
the health of women through repeated childbearing.
Another cultural force that can affect birth spacing is the value that cultures
place on children. Male and female children are often valued differently, and
such different valuation may affect the care that an infant receives. Less than a
century ago, the survival of female children was lower than that of males in
regions of Western countries where females were believed to contribute less to
the family economy than males, and this effect can also be observed currently
in non-Western countries.
Population Change in Developing Countries
Fertility in developing countries has become and will remain a major focus
in demographic research because of policy concerns with rapid population
growth. However, scientific interest in the relationship between population
change (especially growth) and human life in general (especially economic well-
being) dates back to the eighteenth century. Research has shown that in modern
society large family size is generally detrimental to the health and well-being
of families and their members; this effect exists across different economic status.
Families that limit their size benefit as families, as do their members as indi-
viduals, on a variety of measures. However, the effects of families that limit
their size on families that do not, the effects of family size limitation on society
as a whole, and the broad social and political consequences of population
growth and decline are little understood. These issues will occupy an important
place in demographic research over the coming decade.
Many advances have been made in sorting out the biometric features of the
fertility process, and further gains in the precision of both measurements and
theoretical formulations can be expected. A key to research advance is the
careful analysis of specific cases of fertility declines in their social context, which
includes family economics, local and national administrative systems, cultural
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Institutions and Cultures / 137
change, and deliberate governmental efforts aimed at reducing fertility. For
example, a series of empirical studies have demonstrated how ideological sys-
tems imply particular emotional satisfactions in childrearing: in some systems,
there are accepted or preferred substitute goods or services; in others, there
are not. In the latter case, fertility does not drop off sharply in response to
reduced mortality and improved old-age economic security as it does in the
former case.
There are several competing theories about the efficacy of various factors in
reducing fertility: that declines in fertility result from the elimination of"un-
wanted" childbearing; that structural factors affect couples' cost-benefit think-
ing about having children; or that the decline of fertility is a response to the
diffusion of Western ideas through the developing world. The recent work of
the World Fertility Survey and the European Fertility Project lends some sup-
port to the diffusion theory, but the search to uncover the combination of
factors underlying fertility decline continues.
An impediment to research on fertility in developing countries is the inad-
equate registration of births, marriages, and deaths. Lacking these kinds of
data, researchers have devised indirect strategies for estimating levels and trends
of fertility and mortality. Questions that can yield such information are included
in censuses or surveys. Estimates of levels of fertility and other unobservable
demographic variables are also extrapolated from known population features,
especially age distribution and growth rate. These methods are valuable for
tracing demographic trends not only in the developing countries but also in
the United States, where phenomena difficult to observe in aggregate data, such
as the durations of marriages, have been built into estimation models. The
growth of estimation methods has been so rapid that a 1983 compilation of
state-of-the-art methods by the United Nations is already obsolete, and contin-
ued development and testing of new estimation procedures is essential for
increased knowledge.
Research on urban growth in the developing world is also hobbled by un-
satisfactory data. Because of the rate of growth and the fact that most censuses
are conducted only every 10 years, data on city size is out of date by an average
of 6 years and data on urban rates of growth by as much as 11 years. Urban
planning policies that are based on such outdated data are vulnerable and can
result in costly mistakes. Yet most developing countries do not have the re-
sources to conduct more frequent censuses, to institute population registration
systems, or to develop regional population estimation capabilities, like those
developed successfully in such countries as the United States and Great Britain.
Indeed, some countries in Africa, such as Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Zaire, are
finding it difficult because of political conflict and economic strains- even
to conduct regular censuses. One ingenious, new way to compensate for the
lack of data is to use remote-sensing (satellite photo) techniques, which can
provide estimates of the total population of urban areas in developing countries
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Productivity Growth: Output per Hour of Work in Selected Older
Industrial Countries Since 1950
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Institutions and Cultures / 15S
while employment in Europe has been completely stagnant. In Europe it ap-
pears that real wages are rigid so that reductions in the standard of living due
to oil shocks are transmitted to workers by increased unemployment: that is,
when wages rise relative to productivity, unemployment increases. In the United
States and perhaps in Japan, it is nominal rather than real wages that are rigid;
increases in price levels effectively reduce real wages, which in turn result in
maintaining relatively higher levels of employment. The overriding question
for research concerns the reasons for the observed differences in the apparent
behavior of wages and prices in different countries.
INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT
The four decades since the conclusion of World War II have witnessed a
great growth of interest in international politics and security, but the number
of active researchers is surprisingly small, partly due to alternating periods of
PRODUCTIVITY What is the nature of international industrial com-
petition? How is productivity related to economic competitiveness? Is the
United States in the midst of a major crisis presaging economic decline? The
recent history of international economic relations has been volatile, chal-
lenging scientists to understand what drives the global movement of prod-
ucts, facilities, and money. This figure displays some important international
trends in labor productivity, which is the value of product generated per
hour of work, for the five major Western industrial countries.
From the outset and throughout the period since 1950, the U.S. economy
has been better at converting labor time into outputs of goods and services
than were the economies of other mature industrial nations, particularly in
manufacturing. All countries have shown strong gains in this period, espe-
cially in manufacturing; the United States still leads in labor productivity,
but that lead is now much slimmer.
Overall, the United States remains the most productive economy in terms
of output per work hour. The Japanese economy is still relatively low on
this measure, at just over half the U.S. level. In contrast, hourly labor pro-
ductivity in the French economy is high, nearly approaching the U.S. level.
However, this performance is less impressive in terms of output per person.
The French work a little more than one-half as many hours per capita as the
Japanese, due to a shorter work week, more vacations, lower labor-force
participation, and higher unemployment. The U.S. population works two-
thirds as many hours per capita as the Japanese. The recent great success of
Japan in international trade is due not to generalized gains in hourly labor
productivity or longer hours, but to other factors, such as greater capital
investment, lower real wages, and specific efficiencies in the export-oriented
manufacturing sector.
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feast and famine in support for researchers. While the world situation dictates
a focus on the potential of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet
Union, research also focuses on more general causes of cooperation and con-
flict. The following kinds of questions are under systematic scrutiny: What is
the relationship between national attributes and the domestic and foreign policy
of nations? What is the evolving structure of the international political system?
What are the causes of international crises and wars? What are the dynamics
generally of interaction among nations?
To answer these questions effectively, a systematic research approach is
essential. Social and behavioral scientists need, first, to focus on posing the
right research questions; second, to develop the right kinds of research designs
to address the questions; and, third, to retrieve and generate the most relevant
quantitative data bases and qualitative evidence that can generate explanations
about them. Above all, the research should be historically and internationally
informed.
Superpower Relations
The world has not seen a nuclear exchange and has seen only a handful of
major confrontations between the superpowers. Thus, there is no direct evi-
dence bearing on such crucial questions as whether nuclear war can be limited,
how decision makers would behave on the brink of war, and the influence of
the strategic nuclear balance on the outcomes of confrontations. But there have
been 40 years of Soviet-American interaction as superpowers. Despite con-
straints on access to data that would help illuminate how U.S. and Soviet
policies and Soviet-American interaction have evolved, especially at turning
points in the Cold War, important studies have been conducted.
For example, some research has focused on the differences between declared
American military policy and actual war planning. While the former has often
stressed the concept of assured destruction of cities, the latter has always stressed
the need to hit a wide variety of military targets. Over time there has been
greater consistency in war planning, for which operational requirements and
difficulties play a larger role than they do in policy declarations. Researchers
have also learned that U.S. presidents are torn between regarding nuclear weap-
ons as extraordinary and divorced from international politics and seeing them
as merely very powerful bombs. President Eisenhower, for example, seems to
have begun his presidency with the latter perspective and shifted to the former
by the time he left office.
In incorporating modern technology into their military establishments, the
United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies have transformed
their military organizations, instituting many surveillance and intelligence op-
erations that were neither necessary nor feasible in earlier times. Many of these
activities are conducted daily on a global scale and constitute continuous sources
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Institutions and Cultures / 15 7
of international tension. Theories of organizational behavior generate a number
of empirical questions about both the internal operations of current military
establishments and the interactions among them. Those questions concern the
type and frequency of operational interactions between military forces, the
responsiveness of different levels of the organizational hierarchy, the flexibility
of operations, and the differences between normal peacetime and crisis oper-
ations.
Decision Making, Beliefs, and Cognitions
Progress that has been made in recent years in understanding decision-
making processes (discussed in Chapters 1, 2, and 3) has extended to the study
of how national leaders think about national security issues. For example, work
on cognition that stresses the importance of beliefs (called scripts or schemata)
helps explain both specific intelligence failures (for example, Pearl Harbor, the
Iranian revolution) and the general tendency for leaders to be very slow to
change their images of other countries. More generally, decision makers, like
all people in their daily lives, use shortcuts to making decisions, which conserve
their cognitive resources by oversimplifying the world. But this mode of infor-
mation processing also leads to errors and biases as they use information that
is readily available and relatively easy to grasp even if it is not the most relevant
for the task at hand. Leaders who are under great pressure to follow a particular
course of action for example, to challenge or try to block the action of another
country are likely to develop an unwarranted belief that the course of action
will succeed. The result may be unexpected conflict.
Researchers need to develop a fuller understanding of how policy about
national security issues is made. Useful starting points for study include how
and why nations perceive others as threats, how images of other states are
established and altered, the ways in which conflicts among important values
are treated, how statesmen decide that certain threats are so implausible that
they can be safely dismissed, and the biases and methods of simplification that
characterize adversarial identification and group decision making. The exam-
ination of such processes, both within a country and between countries, offers
a way of clarifying how and how much international conflict and war can be
explained by systemic factors, such as balances of power; by domestic factors,
such as specific national capabilities, needs, and demands; by decision-making
factors, such as beliefs- including ideologies and changes in leadership; or
by interactions among the three.
One very active research area is the impact of the domestic characteristics
of a country on its security-related policies. Internal politics often influences if
not dictates, external choices. Historical research into the interwar period, for
example, has uncovered the deep disagreements between Great Britain and
France on how strong Germany should be permitted to become before being
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considered a military menace and found that the passivity of political leaders
in both countries could be traced to their weakness in the face of conflicting
internal demands. At the present time, for example, many security-related
issues in the United States arms control, nuclear deployment, the transfer of
technology are highly partisan political issues. At the same time, of course,
international forces shape domestic economic and political life as well. Whether
or not a state introduces strict internal political controls, for example, depends
in part on the degree to which its security may be threatened by other nations.
Cooperation and Conflict
International politics combines cooperation and conflict, and the analysis of
international politics must do the same. The example of the prisoner's dilemma,
which incorporates these features, has led to a great deal of work in the field.
In its most pristine form, the dilemma is this: in a particular transaction, each
person has two options, which can be characterized as to cooperate or not to
cooperate. If everyone cooperates, everyone receives a positive but modest
return. For each person, however, the temptation not to cooperate is very strong
because a noncooperative strategy greatly increases that person's return if most
of the other people cooperate. But if no one cooperates, everyone's return is
very negative. What is so compellingly perverse about the situation is that, for
each individual in each transaction, the noncooperative alternative is at least
as good as the cooperative one, regardless of what the others do. So over a
series of short-term transactions, self-interest leads everyone to act noncoop-
eratively. But the return from that strategy yields less benefit to every participant
than would one of general cooperation.
A formally comparable problem in international politics has been referred
to as the security dilemma, in which efforts by one country to maximize its
security by arming more heavily have the effect whether intended or de-
sired—of decreasing the security of other states, which are likely to react by
increasing their arms, yielding mutually damaging arms races.
Experimental studies have yielded valuable insights about the ways that
modest shifts in payoff influence strategy, the conditions under which the third
best outcome occurs, and particularly the conditions under which adversaries
are able to and most likely to cooperate with each other. The time perspectives
and the relative values of the payoffs to the participants are clearly important:
cooperation is most likely when participants expect to have a long series of
interactions, not one of which will be decisive; when the gains for exploiting
the other and the losses for being exploited are relatively small; and when
mutual competition is much worse for both sides than is mutual cooperation.
Cooperation is facilitated by contingent strategies such as reciprocity, which is
based on the principle of cooperating with another participant when and only
when that participant cooperates. Cooperation is also more likely when par-
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ticipants can determine with some certainty whether or not other participants
are cooperating, when they are willing and able to reply in kind to the others'
behavior, and when the other side realizes this. Under these circumstances,
attempting to gain unilateral advantage is less tempting because it is seen as
likely to provoke a negative response.
These research findings are promising, especially since a number of alter-
native hypotheses about the causes of conflict and war have been contradicted
by evidence from quantitative studies. Attributes such as a nation's power or
its governmental structure have not been shown to be directly related to its
involvement in war. Being rich or poor, big or small, and densely or sparsely
populated also does not seem to make a country more or less prone to war.
And a country's internal political difficulties do not appear to make it more or
less likely to engage in conflict. Arms expenditures do tend to be positively
related to the incidence of warlike activity, although arms races do not invar-
iably produce wars. The very concept of an "arms race" is undergoing reinter-
pretation. Arms races have typically been defined as accelerating military ex-
penditures in the face of a potential enemy who is doing likewise, but it has
become increasingly clear that the domestic pressure for military expenditures
can be a more important factor than imminent international conflict.
Relative power, particularly between bordering nations, has also been shown
to be a factor that influences the probability for war. However, contrary to
arguments that have been advanced under the theory that a balance of power
reduces the likelihood of conflict, significant evidence indicates that wars are
most likely between nations with equal rather than unequal power. The com-
mon view that wars are typically the consequence of accumulative, escalatory
hostile interactions is not supported by analyses of numerous crises and small
wars since World War II. Extensive work on the relationship between various
structural attributes of the international system alliance configurations, po-
larization, power distributions, and status ordering- show that these attributes
do affect the level of conflict between the nations in the system, but the patterns
are complex.
Because research on international and national security issues is so important
for public policy, it is now receiving major funding from private foundations.
But most of this funding is aimed at bringing research perspectives to bear on
current security policy questions. While these objectives are important, there
is a real danger that basic research on cooperation and conflict is being ne-
glected. Furthermore, funding for the development of quantitative data and
documentary resources has been sporadic at best. The data sets that do exist
are largely the work of a few individual researchers with no guarantee that they
will continue to be updated and no clear opportunity for extending and de-
veloping the compilations in response to the evolving needs of the research
community. Although data collectors are generally aware of each others' ma-
terial, there is no mechanism to integrate and compare their results. Much of
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the relevant information that has been produced or gathered by the U.S. gov-
ernment is classified and not readily accessible to scholars. Although many
documents are so sensitive that they should remain secret, many are not. For
declassified information, a system of coordination and sharing of information
. .
IS reqUlreC ..
Support for other approaches is also needed. Documents themselves rarely
tell the whole story and need to be supplemented by structured interviews,
especially with the lower-level officials who have played crucial roles in such
areas as American war planning and the analysis of Soviet military posture-
and, of course, their Soviet counterparts to the extent possible. More extensive
declassification and structured interviewing is in the interest of the government
as well as the research community. It would generate research that civil serv-
ants, even intelligence specialists, do not have the time or skills to conduct.
The greater understanding of current problems that results from careful analysis
of earlier situations would benefit the government as well as the research com-
munity. For this work, it is especially important to develop efficient means of
communication (preprint series, electronic mail and bulletin boards, telecon-
ference systems) and to make arrangements for extended interchange among
people who are working on similar problems.
OPPORTUNITIES AND NEEDS
Research on institutions and cultures, like most of the research areas covered
in the previous three chapters, calls for a diversity of theories, techniques, and
data collections. The study of fertility and migration, for example, uses so-
phisticated models of decision making, complex statistical analysis of demo-
graphic time series, ethnographic study of individuals, families, and commu-
nities, and archival investigations. Despite this diversity, however, nearly all
areas of research on cultures and institutions, including the areas cited in this
chapter, call for historical and cross-national studies: the evolution of human
characteristics, changes in family structure and in the major world religions,
science and technological competition, nations and transnational corporations,
and superpower conflict and cooperation.
Federal and foundation support for historical and cross-national research
has been particularly sparse for the past two decades. The Ford Foundation's
massive support in the late 1950s and early 1960s was both unprecedented
and helpful, but it was short lived; congressional passage of the International
Education Act of 1966 was promising, but funds were never provided. There
have been no new major initiatives since then. We believe it is time to bring
support for this type of research fully back into the research picture, both to
build on the innovations made in recent years and to develop new capacities
to answer the increasing number of complex questions being raised about
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institutions and cultures. Overall, we recommend new annual expenditures of
$S1 million for strengthening research on institutions and cultures.
The biggest need in these areas is for an expansion of support for investigator-
initiated grants. As we have discussed above, such grants have been among the
most fruitful mechanisms for research progress throughout the behavioral and
social sciences; however, there is a particular additional need in the fields
discussed in this chapter. Many of the topics discussed above could now take
advantage of a major expansion of collaborative work. In the study of inter-
nationalization processes, for example, it is very important for small groups of
scholars to work together for continuous periods of 1 year or more or to meet
periodically for several weeks at a time during 2 or 3 years. In the area of
international security, these mechanisms, in conjunction with expanded meth-
ods of rapid communication, are particularly important to make better use of
quantitative and qualitative data resources and to coordinate research efforts.
In the study of science and technology, a fundamental opportunity is emerging
to develop the comparative study of public and private institutions through
team efforts involving senior and postdoctoral researchers and graduate stu-
dents.
There are tangible costs associated with the augmentation of these kinds of
collaborative research. Not only must more than one researcher be supported,
but increased travel is also needed to coordinate research efforts, an expense
that is even greater when the collaboration is international. (We note that
increased support for international collaborative research may make it neces-
sary for federal funding agencies to reconsider and perhaps change existing
rules that hinder or preclude extensive collaborative arrangements with foreign
research agencies.) We recommend that, at a minimum, a total of $13 million
be added to annual expenditures for investigator-initiated grants on institutions
and culture, and that at least $3 million of that increase be directed specifically
toward expansion of collaborative research.
There is a substantial need for more graduate and postdoctoral fellowship
support to restore the flow of new and talented young researchers into these
fields. This requirement is especially marked at the postdoctoral level. We
recommend that $6 million be added to annual support of postdoctoral fel-
lowships for research on institutions and cultures and that $2 million be added
to support of graduate students.
There are unusually strong opportunities for research workshops and ad-
vanced training institutes to be effective in ensuring collaboration, dissemi-
nation of developing knowledge, and the use of new techniques in research on
institutions and culture. A particularly important opportunity is to train more
researchers in the most effective methods of retrieving, coding, analyzing, and
synthesizing widely different kinds of information from historical archives and
less systematic records and artifacts; this kind of training is often provided to
historians during their graduate work, but it is seldom part of the training given
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to other kinds of scientists. Institutes and workshops are the best mechanisms
to develop and upgrade such skills and combine them with other research
approaches. We recommend an additional $3 million yearly for research work-
shops among researchers working on related problems, and $1 million for
advanced training institutes.
Equipment needed for research on institutions and culture consists mainly
of computer hardware and the associated development of software for individ-
ual and group investigators. Two special equipment needs are in archaeological
studies, for which dating and other techniques have become complex and
demanding, and in demographic studies, for which expanded technological
capabilities for data-base management, analysis, and dissemination are needed.
We recommend additional annual support of $6 million for equipment, $5
million of which should be for computer-related expenditures.
Studies of institutions and cultures very often require the creation and as-
sembly of diverse kinds of empirical information: economic and other time-
series data; survey and other interview data; institutional and cultural products,
such as legal codes and documents revealing religious beliefs and practices;
and documentary, calendrical, and quantitative materials relating to historically
important events such as assassinations, political successions, and wars. This
information often presents problems of access.
A similar problem arises in the study of how human institutions and pop-
ulations evolved: a full palette of continuously improving methods, from ra-
diochemical assays to anatomical imaging and reconstruction to symbolic in-
terpretation are used, but overriding all is the need for sustained access to the
geographical locales where rich archaeologically accessible traces of the past
and relevant ethological and ecological comparison sites can be systematically
probed. First-hand geographic access is also needed for the study of fertility
and migrational changes in the developing countries of Africa, the interaction
between political change and religious movements in Latin America, and the
development of state-based institutions for managing relations with transna-
tional corporate enterprises and developing international market strategies in
eastern Asia. Continuity of contact, including the ability to host and visit across
national and regional borders on a regular basis, and a sharing of contacts and
expertise among researchers, are instrumental to sustaining geographical ac-
cess, and these capabilities require explicit underwriting. Geographic access
also includes photography from aircraft or satellite platforms for archaeological
and geographic canvasses.
Many facets of these efforts are in the diplomatic arena, involving agreements
between the U.S. government and other governments, American universities
and foreign governments, American universities and foreign universities, and
individual scientists and other governments. These diplomatic activities are a
critical adjunct to the increases in research support that we recommend for
grants, fellowships, and workshops to advance cross-national and historical
research on institutions and cultures.
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A different kind of access problem involves privileged information that has
been unavailable to researchers because of respondent privacy or anonymity,
national security, or trade secrecy. Classified data of the U.S. government,
acquired at great expense for primarily military or national intelligence pur-
poses, could significantly contribute to substantial advances in the study of
international security and conflict. Procedures of declassification do not now
take into specific account the analytical benefit that may accrue as a result of
opening data resources to research scholars. A joint inquiry by the relevant
agencies and researchers should consider how to build such considerations
into an active declassification procedure. Costs involved at the early stages of
this process would be mainly administrative, but subsequent efforts to process
previously classified information for research would be significant. We rec-
ommend allocating $3 million annually to this effort.
A related kind of data-oriented opportunity is expanded research access to
microdata files held by government agencies, such as the Internal Revenue
Service, the Social Security Administration, and the Bureau of the Census, and
to university-based research files, such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.
There are substantial research programs that depend on research access to
certain portions of the accumulated data (and we have recommended expan-
sion of such programs; see Chapter 31. However, relatively precise locational
information about individual respondents over time, which is critical for the
study of migration and a variety of regional socioeconomic questions, is gen-
erally suppressed or withheld in order to ensure the anonymity of respondents.
We recommend a research program to make this locational dimension usable
for social science research, and we estimate that $1 million annually is needed
for this effort.
To facilitate high-quality comparative research on demographic behavior, it
would also be very useful to develop a central-library-type facility in the United
States, with demographic data bases available on computer tapes. Some de-
mographic data files are available at only one institution and are largely un-
known to researchers located elsewhere, at the same time that many data sets
are duplicated in a dozen or more American institutions. Some centralization
of data is desirable; such a center could also develop into a disseminator of
software and technical expertise on a wide variety of computer-related subjects
in population studies. This is basically a matter of coordination of existing
resources and may be achieved with relatively little net cost.
A final data-access opportunity concerns the historical records of corpora-
tions regarding their proprietary research and development activities, which
comprise a resource of great importance to understanding the development of
modern science and technology. The precedent established by several corpo-
rations in enabling these records to be treated as archives and used for research
under professional auspices is a very encouraging initiative. An expanded pro-
gram of record retention, sampling, codification, and structured interviewing
to supplement the archival record is highly desirable. At early stages the cost
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for the release of these kinds of information would be mainly administrative,
but we recommend that a regular extension of this process, including trans-
lation of the relevant data into forms usable for research, be undertaken at the
level of at least $1 million per year.
Another data resource is the longitudinal, international, quantitative data
file developed explicitly for cross-national studies of industrial, commercial, or
public sector productivity, international security relations, trends in family and
population structure, shifts in religious participation, or the growth of scientific
and technological capabilities. These files can be developed from a variety of
primary and secondary data sources and linked in various ways depending on
the nature of the research questions posed to them. The primary issues con-
cerning these data are stability of support, quality control, standardization
across different sources, completeness across periods and parts of the globe,
and sheer practical experience in using the data by a large enough set of
researchers applying the relevant technical and conceptual tools.
Time-series data over long periods are particularly difficult to kind or recon-
struct. Although the need for such data was first recognized by scientists in the
nineteenth century, and there have been sustained efforts over the last 40 years
by the United Nations and other organizations, it has been only partly met. A
particular need is to strive for improvement of standardized historical series in
censuses, surveys, and medical and educational records. Support for data col-
lection, documentation, and dissemination are essential to ensure that a strong
factual base is available for the next steps in comparative research on global
processes. We recommend that $8 million be allocated annually to develop,
order, and analyze such data sets.
The final category of new research opportunities is the creation of research
centers. international scientific centers are a major avenue for stabilizing access
to overseas sites and enabling the continuous testing and upgrading of theories
and methods in cross-national, historical, and longitudinal research. A new
international center with a strong demographic emphasis, to complement those
in Bangladesh and Guatemala, would be a valuable spur to research. We rec-
ommend support for the planning of such a center, with a requirement for
detailed proposals as the basis for full-scale evaluation. The study of modern
science and technology, including the behavioral and social sciences and their
application, is also ripe for the development of one or more research centers.
These kinds of initiatives can involve substantial costs. The establishment and
the assumption of basic operating expenses for an international center of the
type envisioned could run into several millions of dollars per year, though costs
can be shared with other nations. Taking the various possibilities into account,
we recommend an annual investment of $7 million in new research centers
devoted to the study of cultures and institutions.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
international division
