Western Impact and Social Mobility in China

Abstract

positive relationship between scientific productivity and academic competition may be noted. According to the present explanation, this relationship is due to the impetus provided by competition for entering promising but undeveloped fields of research. This, however, suggests that the growth of discoveries in any field may be limited by the capacity for expansion of the institutional framework (jobs and facilities), a suggestion which seems to be worth further exploration. Another question concerns the quality of the impetus given to science by competition. The present hypothesis suggests that competition increases the gross amount of discoveries of all kinds through the thorough exploitation of potentially fruitful fields of research. It says nothing about the conditions conducive to the creation of fundamentally new ideas, and it is quite possible that the social conditions that stimulate basic innovations differ from those that facilitate the exploitation of fruitful ideas already discovered.47 Finally, nothing has been said about the conditions that maintain scientific competition. Political decentralization gave rise to competition in Germany, and political decentralization enhanced by private financing and administration of higher education led to competition in the United States. It is not argued, however, that competition is the only possible outcome of any state of decentralization, or that competition, once established, is self-maintaining. Decentralization may lead to collusion or mutual isolation as well as to competition; and competition may be replaced by either of these alternatives. Determination of the general conditions that ensure competition, therefore, is another problem which needs further study. 46 This is the subject matter of A. Zloczower, Career Opportunities and Scientific Growth in 19th Century Germany with Special Reference to the Development of Physiology, unpublished M.A. thesis, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, 1960. 47 Cf. Joseph Ben-David, Roles and Innovations in Medicine, American Journal of Sociology, 65 (May, 1960), pp. 557-568.