Applying Institution Building Concept to Field Research

Abstract

I am not well aware of the contents and result of the formal discussions starting from the days of the graduate seminar at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs of the University of Pittsburg to the research meetings of the Inter-University Program in Institution Building. I have not had the chance to read Hans Blaise's and Yong Whan Hahn's doctoral dissertations. My reading is limited to such references as Milton Esman's "Institution Building and National Development," in Dynamics of Development, edited by Hambidge and published by Praeger, NewYork, 1964; and Esman and Hans Blaise, "Institution Building Research: The Guiding Concepts," published by Inter-University Research Program in Institution Building. I have also read in the past the research reports by my colleagues at the Graduate School of Public Administration who applied this model on the two national ministries of Korea. A few years ago, I also had the opportunity to skip through a colleague's copy of the interim appraisal of the Inter-University Program on Institution Building in an airplane from Seoul to Bangkok. 2. Institution building model has not matured enough to allow us a rigorous testing of causality between variables. Only correlational studies can be attempted either through surveys on measurable indices or through the collection of case histories. 3. The model as presented in the above Esman, Blaise paper does not explicitly contemplate on the relationships between categories and subcategories of variables. Only implicitly the relationships are sometimes suggested. Such loaded terms as "political viability," "doctrine," "consistency," "stability," etc. all suggest the existence of some relationships between these variables and the relevant categories of institution building model. For more effective and efficient execution of research projects a wiser strategy will be to derive a series of explicit propositions on the relationships among the variables of different levels before launching field studies. This would mean that the field studies will aim at the testing of these propositions by proving either existence or non-existence of correlations among the variables. 4. The concepts of the model as they stand currently have not yet been operationalized to suit to the empirical testing of the theory in the field. For each variable, operationalized indices should be developed before embarking of the field study. Otherwise, each researcher in the field is likely to choose only those phenomena which will suit his purpose of either proving or disproving the relevant propositions. The other phenomena will be arbitrarily neglected by the researcher as irrelevant to the variables under consideration.