Abstract
As we proceed farther along the pathways of what is variously termed the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Work 4.0, or Society 5.0, it becomes clear that the impacts on higher education will be both extensive and large. The degree to which STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics—fields will be impacted and the redefinition of their role within higher education have drawn increasing comment, including detailed consideration of how university/industry partnerships will be changed in the process as each accommodates to the increased role of the other. Of lesser moment have been the kinds of impacts that may engage the social sciences and humanities. This paper explores a variety of dimensions in which the conventional disciplines that constitute the social sciences will be impacted by these dynamics, leading, in my view, to both radically differentiated knowledge activities within them and, perhaps of even greater importance, the emergence of newly differentiated conjoint hybrid fields in which the traditional disciplinary boundaries that have separated such fields are progressively reduced.
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Notes
- 1.
In a previous publication I sought to capture some of this transformational process by noting changes in the various functionalities of higher education institutions and suggesting some of the structural facilitations taking place. In this particular exercise I pointed to what was then termed the changing “dimensions of higher education” of which the following were given note: (1) changes in the characteristics of learners; (2) changes in the roles and responsibilities of faculty; (3) changes in methods of instruction and learning processes; (4) changes in the content and focus of instruction; (5) changes in the political and economic environments of higher education; (6) changes in the frameworks of higher education; (7) changes in the process and values of certification; and (8) changes in the policies that frame and govern higher education and the metrics that are being developed to assess it (Neubauer, 2015). The benefit of such an inventory in my view was the need to update it on a continuous basis, in part to add new elements as they emerged and delete others as they faded from higher education practice (Neubauer, 2015).
- 2.
At the very end of 2019, Computer Hope listed the following jobs in these categories: Assembly-line and factory workers; bus drivers, taxi drivers, and truck drivers; phone operators, telemarketers, and receptionists; cashiers; bank tellers and clerks; packing, stockroom, and warehouse moving; prescription preparation; information gathering, analysts, and researchers; journalists and reporters; pilots; bartenders; stock traders; postal workers; doctors and anesthesiologists, and some surgeons; soldiers and guards; travel agents; chefs and cooks; bomb squads; typists; switchboard operators; bowling ball pinsetters; film projectionists; home and small garden workers; and hotel staff and room service. Perhaps the best way to make use of this list is to see it as a set of generalized activities that is capable of being transformed by the gradual, and in some cases rapid, introduction of robotic activities (Computer Hope, 2019).
- 3.
I suspect many will be surprised to see doctors and other medical professionals being included in such a list, but in some aspects of medical diagnosis and treatment, including certain surgeries and radiology, the evidence is growing that AI may provide better results than humans. See, for example, Medtech Boston (2019).
- 4.
With regard to the first, see Shweta Mayekar’s review “top universities,” so engaged (Mayekar, 2018) in which she focused on MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Harvard, University of Edinburgh, University of Amsterdam, Cornell University, and the University of Washington. Within this set, MIT and Stanford have established centers explicitly focused on Human-centered AI.
- 5.
The Center for Twenty-First Century Universities at Georgia Tech has become a most useful source for an entire range of activities being conducted to effect change within existing universities in response to a broad range of social variables.
- 6.
Google’s effort got as far as scanning 25 million books, at which point the combined resistance of various sources to effectuate the reality of copyright protections effectively stopped the process. See Howard (2017).
- 7.
In doing so, I recognize that the broad term “social sciences” has differing meanings across national and cultural borders and that their institutional organizations within such higher education structures reflect such differences. In general, my usage is framed around the disciplinary foci conventionally embraced (and usually reflected in the structure of international associations) by the disciplines of economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, geography, linguistics, and psychology. In some constructions, units with a strong applied focus, such as urban and regional planning, are included. History is perhaps most often located in a designated “Humanities” unit, along with philosophy. Law, while most often established within a separate professional school, is sometimes included as a social science (and as both undergraduate and graduate programs.) In general, however, the social sciences are most commonly constituted by the disciplines listed above.
- 8.
In part a result of the privileged role of economics within the era of globalization and the symbolic importance provided to it by the giving of an annual Nobel Prize in Economics.
- 9.
An early manifestation of this is detailed in a 2014 book by Dunleaby, Bastow, and Tinkler who posited five dimensions on which the social sciences were gravitating toward STEM fields. A review of this can be found at: https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/01/the-contemporary-social-sciences-are-now-converging-strongly-with-stem-disciplines-in-the-study-of-human-dominated-systems-and-human-influenced-systems/. Accessed: January 30, 2020. The volume itself bears the title: The Impacts of the Social Sciences, published by SAGE.
- 10.
As an early example of this process, see a recent report by Maggie Martin (2019) on innovation-focused programs being developed at the University of Houston in the United States.
- 11.
Often, at least in the United States and Europe, in what is a highly contentious manner. For a singular instance, see Quigley (2019).
- 12.
See this recent piece by van Rijmenam for a telling survey of “why we need ethical AI.”
- 13.
In this regard, note a current research project underway at RMIT University in Melbourne that seeks to re-conceptualize the PhD in the context of the impending climate forecast, which itself constitutes another modality of a near-future disruption as potentially significant as that premised within the framework of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. An edited volume by Robyn Barnacle and bearing the title, The PhD at the End of the World: Provocations for the Doctorate and a Future Contested, is framed around the work of Bruno Latour and his seminal in work seeking to alert audiences to the transformative effects of climate change.
- 14.
For a recent review of university bureaucracy within an American context, see Motyl (2019). The challenge for higher education institutions in most Asian countries to engage necessary change brings into play centralized governmental bureaucracies that are often highly resistant to change.
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Neubauer, D.E. (2023). Redefining the Role of the University and the Social Sciences Within the Emergent Structures of Society 5.0.. In: Yamada, R., Yamada, A., Neubauer, D.E. (eds) Transformation of Higher Education in the Age of Society 5.0. International and Development Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15527-7_2
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