Examining the role of institutions and actors on social actions, new institutionalism constitutes at least four different bodies of thought or analytical approaches across the social sciences: rational choice institutionalism, historical institutionalism, organisational/sociological institutionalism, and ecological institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Immergut 1998; Hall and Taylor 1996; March and Olsen 2005). As an institution is a web of interrelated norms governing social relationships, group performance is produced by social interaction structuring (Nee and Ingram 1998). Rational choice institutionalism argues that actors behave strategically to maximise their preferences while historical institutionalists emphasise a calculus-based approach which claims that behaviour of actors are determined by where they think their life is embedded (Subramanian 2009). Ecological institutionalism
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focuses more on diverse arenas and an adaptive cycle of decision-making (Gunderson, Holling, and Light 1995). Rational choice institutionalism helps to understand the strategic reinforcement of centralised power and resource allocation and the brain drain and professional crisis at the local levels of the public extension system in Vietnam, while seeing agent of change as preferences of individuals.
Historical institutionalism explains the stratification of extensionists under state-functioned or knowledge-served groups and sub-groups notwithstanding their presumed hierarchical positions.
Ecological institutionalism represents a cyclical process of complex, uncertain, and messy interactions in application of top-down versus bottom-up extension approaches and how local demands are processed under state-governed mechanisms (see Section 4.2). An ecological institutionalist analysis needs further time-sequencing data over longer periods of extension system development, which is out of the scope of this research.
Sociological institutionalists focus on norms that comprise informal constraints and acknowledge that informal norms are crucial factors in enforcing the rules of the game (Nee and Ingram 1998). This section, therefore, will discuss a possible transformation from bureaucratic extension system into a learning system through local extensionist interaction and negotiation of the identity of a reflective knowledge worker.
Two types of extensionists
As normally conceptualised, extensionists are typologised by the administrative order from central to communal extensionists and village collaborators. This way of categorising has the bias of positioning grassroots extension system as staff in the lowest and weakest status as analysed above. I would propose a non-hierarchy classification including state-functioned and career-based extensionists; the former with four sub-groups is greatly outnumbered by the latter.
The state-functioned group comprises extensionists who perform the duties of a state cadre (can bo).
This group consists firstly of leaders and managers who attend meetings, write reports, and make state management decisions without an appropriate impact monitoring mechanism. Extensionists who are present during office hours and simply undertake their administration tasks as assigned by managers are also subsumed in this group. Extensionists who are not motivated to work or are forced to take the position without any desire for it to are listed in this group. The fourth sub-group includes part-time information providers at the village level functioning as support workers. They can take multiple state- governed duties apart from extension at villages and have no technical responsibilities.
The career-based group involves individuals who make extension their career. As such, knowledge work is core to their performance and evaluation. This group is small in size, emerging from highly- qualified staff with advanced degrees; they can even hold leadership positions. They have crossed the extension boundary to join the research community through studies that they have initiated or collaborated on with partners. The second sub-group encompasses employees who frequently and directly work with farming communities in dealing with their problems. A distinctive feature of this
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group is that extensionists express their love to learn with and from farmers. They always want to be better equipped with facilities and further education to work more efficiently. The current crisis has shrunk the size of this group.
This conceptualisation of extensionist groups illustrates a biased human resource arrangement for state government purposes in the public sector system, making its farmer-serving goals difficult to achieve.
The career-based extensionist group, though small-sized, is the key to maintaining the work of knowledge-based extension that benefits both community development and feedback loops of the system. These extensionists are able to relate the situations of other people and induce practice-driven cooperation, and can possibly engage in reproducing identity for themselves and rearranging the structural situation.
Sociological institutionalist construction of a learning system
From a sociological institutionalist perspective, an alternative learning system can be sketched out (see Figure 3.11). At the organisational level, this system is based on cultivation of a farmer-extensionist mutual learning culture and competent career-oriented staff at all levels. On this foundation, extension work can create a mutual learning environment, better resource and knowledge governance, and sustainable agricultural and rural community development benefits.
As analysed above, the current institutional environment is categorised by the development paradigm change from modernisation to participatory development and sustainability, opening a new extension era that advocates advisory services and joint learning. In addition, farmers in the Mekong Delta have been further integrated into the international market and face new production process regulations and products standards, which leads to massive demand for high technology and relevant knowledge, whereas further bureaucratised extension system and service have constrained the application of alternative extension methods. The extension landscape prominently features with top-down training and visit approaches. Adopting sustainable and participatory principles has gone no further than a superficial tool-form use. Local needs have not informed extension plans, while a large number of extensionists have worked passively and bureaucratically. Local knowledge is undermined.
I argued in the previous section that learning-reflective and community-responsive extensionists are the agents of change. Assuming that behaviours are derived from “nonrational action oriented to cultural beliefs constitutive of the institutional environment”, for sociological institutionalism, professionals are agents of institutionalization through macro-level state regulation and normative isomorphism and micro-level actions oriented to conformity or decoupling (Nee 2005, 63). While this institutionalism emphasises human agency, the capacity to doing things (Giddens 1984) of all actors, only a few with discursive power more concentrated with stocks of knowledge and resource form social actors (Long 1992; 2001). Through interaction, these agents can activate feedback and learning loops with rural communities, manoeuvre other extensionists into change processes, and create empowerment of local extensionists. This reorganisation stems from extension career identity
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reproduction and in-reality knowledge practice, and interaction between agricultural extension and production communities. The career-based high-qualification extensionists play the role of global and scientific knowledge brokers. The career-based, highly-localised extensionists keep local knowledge transmitted and local needs informed. The process of change has to undergo zigzag and multi- directional courses over years of development. Social skills of agents and change counterforce determine the direction of such development. A real change can be possible only when local knowledge is appreciated and knowledge-based work is the core of cross-hierarchical communities of extensionists, and a reflective learning culture is nurtured and cherished.
My findings are compatible with research by Anderson and Feder (2004): in developing economies, public extension organisations are often inadequately funded and poorly designed, leading to weak links between knowledge extension and generation and “frequent encumbrance of extension agents with public duties beyond those related to knowledge transfer” (Anderson and Feder 2004, 55).
However, I would not recommend either socialisation or commercialisation of the system, which is not supportive to rural community development. A learning system transformation can solve immediate problems as well as longer-term ones because knowledge, not anything else, is the core element of extension conceptualisation, practice, education, and planning. Mulder and Pachuau (2011) are correct in commenting that the “agricultural” element in agricultural extension and education is getting smaller and smaller in the context of general development and society in both Western countries and
“developing” contexts. Extension itself has evolved into a new fourth paradigm that is called facilitation extension, in which extensionists work as knowledge brokers who facilitate the learning process among all types of farmers and rural people (Swanson and Rajalahti 2010).
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Figure 3.11: A model of bureaucratic extension transformation into a learning system
Source: Own presentation Local needs, local knowledge and other resources
Development paradigm change: Modernisation to participatory development and sustainability Extension era change: top-down, training and visit to advisory services, joint learning
Farmer’s further integration into the international market Further bureaucratised extension system and service
Conventional extension methods Superficial use of alternative approaches without learning
Mutual learning environment Better resource and knowledge governance
Sustainable agricultural and rural community development benefits
years of development
Competent staff of all levels
Cultivation of a mutual learning culture at the organisational level
Low qualified bureaucrats as passive implementers Organisational
levels
Institutional environment
Individual/
group levels
years of development
Learning-reflective extensionists Community-responsive
extensionists
Practice of bottom-up learning Exchange among communities of practice
Empowerment of local extensionists Activation of feedback and learning loops
Time span
109 Summing up
This chapter has explored knowledge work under the public extension system. A number of orthodoxies have been highlighted within the bureaucratised agricultural extension system and practices. Extension policies renewed with alternative development principles, become business as usual within the bureaucratic structures and mechanisms in organisation, budgeting, human resource management, and local networking.
The indispensable and increasingly important role of grassroots extension workers in formulating plural local need-reflective planning, platforms, and linkages is largely neglected in the formation of grassroots extension levels as the systems administratively organisational perfection with the poorest qualified staff and least knowledgeable information providers. Extension clienteles more diversified and with increasing needs for knowledge lose their important implications for knowledge interaction transformation before the prominent top-down knowledge transfer and training with reduced quality, due to financial and professional constraints that lead to the farmer’s repudiation of the system.
Within such a bureaucratic extension system, the success of extension projects that managers and professionals frantically pursue ends up with resource concentration among model farmers with better socio-economic conditions, while benefits for the majority of “normal” farmers are ignored, sacrificed, or dependent on vulnerable knowledge-sharing from such model farming. One of the most desperate consequences is the current motivational and professional crisis that grassroots extensionists are experiencing.
Yet, amidst such difficulties, several grassroots extensionists have, though less recognised, managed to work as the knowledge professional that local communities expect them to be (local embeddedness) beyond the basic local information provision assignment by their managers (structural embeddedness). To propose a change, the chapter, from a sociological new institutionalism perspective, discussed the development path of the current extension system into a learning organisation can possibly be relied on to persevere in the promotion of local knowledge practices of groups of learning-reflective extensionists and community-responsive extensionists, rather than administratively top-down technology transfer and monitoring or institutionalisation of a certain change idea wholly borrowed and foreign.
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CHAPTER FOUR
ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE IN BOUNDARY TRANSGRESSION: AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH, POLICY AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT INTERACTIONS
In our scientific research work, we make every attempt to have good quality products.
Such products must be of high applicability for farmers. It is also a failure that our scientific products become commercialised and costly, only affordable to better-off people. It deviates from our ultimate research goal (Interview 152, Agriculture and Applied Biology senior researcher, female, Can Tho, 6.10.2010).
The positioning of science as “the premier knowledge institution throughout the world” (Knorr-Cetina 1999, 1) and the universities’ monopoly of basic knowledge production are thus challenged. Evers (2005, 11) holds the view that science is "increasingly intermingled if not determined by the organisations that govern the knowledge-based world market”. A growing body of literature, under the umbrella of triple helix research, points out that the science, industry, and university in their polycentric relations interact and take “the role of the other”, which is conducive for knowledge production and regional innovation (Etzkowitz 2008; Evers 2005; Zhou 2008). The rise of corporate universities illustrates a new educational role that corporations take when traditional higher education cannot yet provide a model that blends learning and work (Nixon and Helms 2002). Universities are making internal transformations as well, such as increasing their entrepreneurial activities and social development goals in teaching, research, and technology development, which provides spaces for producing polyvalent knowledge with theoretical, technological, and commercial potential49. Several universities extend a new entrepreneurial (Etzkowitz 2008) or developmental (Brundenius and Gửransson 2011) identity.
Knowledge brokering for agricultural development is not new; for example, since 1906, an agricultural extension liaison division has been established at the University of Wisconsin to link local farmers and university researchers50 (Lomas 2007, 131). In Germany, Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, born in Hamm near Bonn in 1818, created self-help, credit, and seed distribution organisations for poor farmers in the 1860s.
Knowledge brokering has recently gained growing importance in development conceptualisation and practice, particularly now that development itself is being redefined as “the ability to generate, acquire, disseminate and employ knowledge, both modern and traditional” (Oldham and McLean 1997). Acting either as knowledge managers, linkage agents, or capacity builders, knowledge brokers make knowledge accessible, understandable, and usable for their audiences, as well as create positive social outcomes by enhancing access to brokered knowledge within a society or community (Oldham and McLean 1997;
Ward, House, and Hamer 2009, 2).
49 Etzkowitz (2008, 30) describes this as the second academic revolution in which universities undertake an economic and social development mission. The first academic revolution occurred from the mid-19th century with transformation from a teaching to a research institution.
50 It is also noted that all land-grant universities in the United States have this kind of work as part of their original charters and the financial and land support of the federal government during the Civil War.
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In developing and transitional countries such as Vietnam, where the private sector is emerging and the development of the triple helix is rudimentary, the third role51 of academic institutions, including universities and research institutes, largely state-governed, maintains the inclination to attach themselves to developmental missions and tasks of the sector and local communities. An analysis by Tran Ngoc Ca and Nguyen Vo Hung (2011) indicates that the majority of academic organisations in Vietnam are not capable of providing sophisticated services to industry, and thus, firms tend to rely on their own or other firms regarding technology innovation. Yet the authors notice that particularly in traditional sectors, such as agriculture, and in some dynamic parts of the country, for example southern Vietnam including the Mekong Delta, academic institutions perform a vital role in diffusing technical solutions to farmers.
Indeed, academic institutions can perform a number of knowledge-related functions that connect and translate global knowledge and scientific research into applied technology that informs locally specified conditions.
Against this background, this chapter in the first section examines the internal transformation of academic institutes in the Mekong Delta in terms of performing the third role. Continuing the discussion from the previous chapter with an expansion of researcher-extensionist-farmer interaction, Section 4.2 analyses the hard realities of participatory development approaches designed and applied in the delta. To explore interactions between academics and farmers metaphorically conceived as a “water and fish” relationship, knowledge diffusion practices and developmental impacts are scrutinised from both “formal” and
“informal” modes and spheres and through cases of farmers as knowledge brokers and generators in Sections 4.3 and 4.4. Section 4.5 revisits the “water and fish” metaphor in the light of partnership development, leading to the concluding section highlighting a transformation that the practice of interaction between academics and farmers with interchanging roles of knowledge producers, brokers, and users is turned into a dimension of the alternative epistemic culture of development in the Mekong Delta.