When one contemplates the remarkable expansion in research interest in African phenomena among social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, the need for an up-to-date inventory of completed, continuing and projected research becomes increasingly apparent. Field research is costly; knowledge should be cumulative; reproduction ought to be systematic; and effective rapport with the human actors concerned should be scrupulously preserved. These and many other considerations dictate closer liaison among scholars everywhere in the organization and planning of future research on African subjects.

The purpose of this report is to provide a brief analytical survey of the character of research on Africa recently completed, or currently being pursued, by social scientists associated with European centers. There is, of course, a certain arbitrariness in focusing upon the state of research in European centers only, particularly in view of the very close organizational links between metropolitan institutions and associated research centers and institutes in the African territories. Moreover, as an increasingly greater proportion of the total research activity is being carried on by agencies established in Africa, a survey of the European centers provides us with only a partial picture of the overall dimensions of research sponsored and supported by the European countries concerned. In this report, however, space considerations unfortunately dictate this narrower focus upon the European side only.

Probably no two of the scholarly works punctuating the past quarter century better exemplify the intellectual voyage that Africanist political scientists have taken than do Thomas Hodgkin's pioneering classic, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (1956), and Crawford Young's recent admirable comparative study of political economy in Ideology and Development in Africa (1982). These two broadly comparative works reflect the major shift from the study of the processes of African self-assertion and decolonization–the quest for and acquisition of state power–which characterized the concerns of the first decade of that period, to the study of how that power is maintained and in whose interest and with what effectiveness it is exercised, foci which have increasingly become the preoccupations of the last decade.

The intention here is to examine some of the features of this intellectual trek–from first generation conventional studies of nationalism, elections, and constitutions to the current preoccupation with the state, class, and political economy–not by a travelogue of the journey, but by focusing upon an enduring issue, namely, the antinomy of universalism vs. relativism. The antinomy exists at two levels. The first is that of the individual scholarly endeavor and product; namely, does the product reflect (a) a generalizing and scientific mode of inquiry in which the scholar's intent and perspective is to identify uniformities and regularities–as well as differences–through systematic comparison? In short, is it nomothetic? Or is it (b), a mode that is idiographic, i.e., that aims to describe and to understand a phenomenon in all its configurative, situational, and cultural-historical particularity and uniqueness? The antinomy at the second and obviously related level concerns the conceptualization of the discipline by a particular set of practitioners as either (a) a social scientific endeavor aimed at generalization and universality, or (b) an intellectual vocation which is essentially descriptive and interpretive of political phenomena that are inherently historically and culturally relative to a particular human group or situation (cf. Fallers, 1968: 576; Pye, 1975: 6).

The study of Africa has helped to further several healthy trends in the development of the discipline of political science. Confrontation with the rich variety of structural forms and modes of human expression of contemporary Africa has compelled the political analyst to look beyond the narrow “political” realm and conventional “political” structures for a more complete understanding and explanation of political phenomena. This African impact upon the discipline has come at a most propitious time—a time of intensive self-criticism from which at least three new emphases in research are beginning to emerge. One is the holistic approach reflected in efforts to classify and to compare political systems as wholes. A second approach, obviously related to the first but independently pursued by its proponents, is an ever-increasing explicit concern with non-political factors (e. g., the family, voluntary associations, the economic system, the social stratification system, cultural values, and so forth) as they may be related to and effect the political system and political behavior. Here, the impact of other disciplines, and particularly sociology, anthropology and psychology, is clearly manifest not only in the type of data gathered but in such neologisms as “political socialization” and “political acculturation.”

I want, in this paper, to examine several specific ways that electronic computers are being used in the study of social organization. But some of this work constitutes a rather sharp departure from established modes of research and theory-construction in sociology, and therefore leads at the outset to a look at these established modes and at the nature of sociology's subject matter (1).

Antibody-functionalized, Au-gated AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) were used to detect Perkinsus marinus. The antibody was anchored to the gate area through immobilized thioglycolic acid. The AlGaN/GaN HEMT were grown by a molecular beam epitaxy system (MBE) on sapphire substrates. Infected sea waters were taken from the tanks in which Tridacna crocea infected with P. marinus were living and dead. The AlGaN/GaN HEMT showed a rapid response of drain-source current in less than 5 seconds when the infected sea waters were added to the antibody-immobilized surface. The recyclability of the sensors with wash buffers between measurements was also explored. These results clearly demonstrate the promise of field-deployable electronic biological sensors based on AlGaN/GaN HEMTs for Perkinsus marinus detection.

The surface of strained InGaAs films on GaAs for selective regrowth of InAs nanostructures is investigated by atomic force microscopy and Rutherford backscattering. Various InxGa1-xAs films were annealed at temperatures between 400°C - 800°C. Significant indium desorption was found to occur at temperatures above 550°C.

We successfully synthesized helical core-shell crystalline SiC/SiO2 nanowires, core-shell crystalline SiC/C nano-crosses and well-aligned core-shell crystalline SiC/C fibers by using a chemical vapor deposition technique. For the helical crystalline SiC/SiO2 nanowires, the SiC core typically has diameters of 10-40 nm with a helical periodicity of 40-80 nm and is covered by a uniform layer of 30-60 nm thick amorphous SiO2. Detailed structural characterizations suggested that the growth of this novel structure was induced by screw dislocations on the nanometer scale. For the core-shell nanocrosses, the crystalline SiC core typically has diameters of 10 to 40 nm and is covered by a uniform layer of 80-110 nm graphitic carbon. The wellaligned SiC/C fibers were shown to be formed by two sequential steps: catalytic SiC growth and graphitic carbon nano-sheets coating. The helical nanowires and core-shell nanocrosses may have potential applications in nano-electronics. The formation mechanism of the carbon fibers suggested that fabrication of field emission filament carbon nano-fibers may be realized by using the aligned crystalline nanowires as templates.

With the development of the division of labor, the household has declined in importance as a unit of economic production. Yet even as the individual wage earner has assumed a central place in modern exchange economies, the household has still been seen as an important unit of distribution, in which wage earners provide for their non-income-producing family members. With the breakdown of the family in recent decades, however, the communal income-sharing function of the family has, in significant part, been taken overby the state.

In this essay, I examine this fundamental change in the structure of production and distribution in modern exchange economies. Going beyond this, I propose a new structure of markets–markets for rights to influence collective decision-making within a society. Such markets, I suggest, wouldprovide a source of income for each member of the society.