ISSN 2029-7017 print/ISSN 2029-7025 online Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues www.lka.lt/index.php/lt/217049/ 2012, 1(3): 177–185 The General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania Ministry of National Defence Republic of Lithuania World Institute for Engineering and Technology Education Energy Security Center University of Salford A Greater Manchester University EMPOWERING INSTITUTIONS: A CASE FOR CONNECTING BUSINESS AND THE ACADEME THROUGH PHRONESIS Mantas Bileišis Mykolas Romeris University, LT-10101 Vilnius, Valakupių Str. 5 E-mail: mantas.bileisis@mruni.eu Received 22 August 2011; accepted 15 December 2011 Abstract. Arguably World War II had a fundamental and profound impact on the Western culture, practices and institutions. One central feature of this impact was the disillusionment with the capacity of social sciences to help policymakers improve society. he past 60 or so years have seen a major crisis of identity throughout the disciplines of social science. On one hand, positivism stood on the premise that the war was a result of irrational and pseudoscientiic totalitarian social theories; on the other hand, post-modernist (and various other “post- isms”) raised doubts about the possibility of social science being something more than just another variation of totalitarian ideology. his polarization has seen animated polemic and methodological confrontation with seem- ingly no victors. As a result, social science as a whole lost its reputation as a credible source of knowledge for suc- cessful action. A strand of social science reformers in various disciplines are trying to build alternative deinitions of what social science ought to constitute which would accommodate claims of both warring sides. However, persuasive as these integrative attempts may be, such ideas are having a hard time of becoming the mainstream of social science. By borrowing from institutionalist perspectives, this paper constructs an argument that the reason for the lack of relevance of social science in business and policy is not so much a methodological weakness of the science as it is the incompatibility of institutionalized interest between business and the academe. Keywords: Phronetic Social Science, Institutionalism, Positivism, Structure-agency Problem, Applied Social Re- search, Institutional Inertia. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Bileišis, M. 2012. Empowering institutions: a case for con- necting business and the academe through phronesis, Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues 1(3): 177–185. JEL Classifications: B59; D02, H83. 1. Introduction Herbert Simon, a political scientist by training who earned the Nobel Prize in Economics (1978) for a study in what essentially can be attributed to man- agement and/or public administration studies and later expanded on his work by contributing to com- puter sciences and cognitive psychology, is a person whose work transcends disciplines and all disciplines are honoured to having him as one of their own. But at the same time his case is illustrative of the gross inadequacy of any organizational arrangements in social science that are based on subject matter. he very core of the added value of the work of a social scientist is the novelty of inding connections be- tween social phenomena that were not known previ- ously. And this cannot possibly be helped by framing his inquiry within a discipline. Yet, if the statement above is possible to have broad agreement on, why is it that scientiic disciplines persist? Norkus (2008) suggests that formation of social science disciplines is contingent upon the needs of policy makers of other founders of academic institutions. Modern social sci- ence disciplines, such as political science, were only possible under democracy to study democracy; eco- nomics was needed only after capitalism was there to be studied and so on. However, once a discipline is established, it cannot be easily dissolved. here are several attempts at explaining why the phenomenon of institutional inertia occurs. Most of these expla- nations are variations upon a classical social science problem of structure-agency relation. his paper