Research Capacity and Network Structure

The SRI survey reveals extensive networking among Asia-area researchers in Australia. Most, however, involve networking with other scholars. Historically there has been a palpable wariness among Australian researchers in the humanities and socials sciences about collaborating with "industry partners" and "professional practitioners" in related fields. This wariness is reflected in the low ranking accorded to professional interaction relative to more pressing concerns within the academy itself, bearing on inter-disciplinary and inter-regional collaboration, and on research training. On the basis of anecdotal evidence, the problem appears to less acute among Asia-area researchers in North America where philanthropic organisations, think-tanks, private firms, and government departments provide ample opportunities and resources for cross fertilisation between the academy and Asia-area "professionals." This is not the case in Australia.

All the same, Asia-area researchers in Australia are far from satisfied with their current rate of networking outside the academy. Asked whether current levels of interaction between scholars of Asia and professionals dealing with the region are adequate only seventeen percent were inclined to agree. More than two-thirds of respondents (sixty-nine percent) believed interaction between the academy and industry and the professions was inadequate. Fourteen percent did not know. See chart for Q7.3.

These findings are in no sense contradictory. They do however highlight a formidable challenge facing any proposed "network of networks" in the Asian Studies field. The general sentiment among Asia-area researchers, that inter-professional networking in inadequate, sits uneasily alongside a foreboding that increased interaction might distract from more pressing concerns of research and research training in their disciplines, areas, and institutions - particularly among researchers already hard-pressed for time. Core academic issues rank higher as priorities among the most effective researchers. The challenge for the network is to respect researchers’ priorities by designing a network that encourages inter-disciplinary and inter-regional research through collaboration with government, industry, and the professions.

The challenge may be met by establishing self-evidently useful connections between existing networks of scholars researching regions and regional issues, on the one hand, and existing networks of "thematic constituencies" on the other. As we conceive them, thematic constituencies are not equivalent to industry partnerships of the kind generally referred to in ARC grant programs and guidelines. By thematic constituencies we refer to existing networks of researchers outside the Asia-area research community who are already collaborating with practitioners and industry partners (in health, governance, environment, security, immigration etc) and who themselves recognise a need to network more closely with Asia-area specialists possessing specialist field knowledge and expertise.¹

The great majority of Asia-area specialists recognise the need for a meeting place that brings together law researchers and lawyers, health researchers and health workers, art specialists and artists, IR specialists and diplomats, social scientists and NGOS, media studies researchers and journalists. They particularly welcome inter-disciplinary collaboration with academic researchers in other fields and making contact with different theoretical communities of scholars whose research may or may not have a regional or spatial focus, and whose research-questions are primarily driven from outside the spatial scale of their research. On the basis of preliminary survey analysis, Asia-area researchers would work to establish and maintain such connections if their networking enhanced rather than detracted from their more pressing research and research-training concerns.

¹ See the remarks of Professor Michael Archer, the new Dean of Science at the University of New South Wales, who lists as a high priority, "building research and development links with Asia." Australian, 4 February 2004, p. 29.