ABSTRACT
There are many reasons why evidence-based research in the social sciences is making little headway in the preservation world. Crossing the border between research and practice is always difficult, and the addition of a disciplinary boundary raises the hurdle. Perhaps, too, the social scientists are not always doing the research that would be most useful to practitioners. This chapter shows that resistance to research is an affliction rooted deeper, in the very structures of the preservation discipline. In many policy-related fields, traditional teaching departments have been supplemented in recent decades by research centers or institutes. The mission of these entities is explicitly and single-mindedly to generate research. Employers offer the inducements of dedicated fund-raising machines and also tempt many faculty members with the promise of transcending the disciplinary boundaries imposed by their departments. Together employers form the primary sources for the author diagnosis of the ailment that he has called Resistance to Research.
