The Possibility of a ‘Korean-style’ Humanities and Social Sciences Think Tank in Light of the Publicness of Agenda-Setting

Since the establishment of the National Research Council for Economics and Social Sciences and the National Research Council for Humanities in 1999, which oversaw state-funded research institutes in the humanities and social sciences, and their merger into the National Research Council of Economics, Humanities and Social Sciences in 2005, efforts to build a “Korean think tank” have been ongoing. However, confusion over the central identity of research institutes’ goals and roles has persisted for a long time. This article argues that a fundamental cause of the repeated confusion is the lack of evaluation of the public nature of the knowledge produced by national research institutes, and suggests that a ‘Korean-style’ path to securing publicity begins with expanding bottom-up agenda setting. First, this paper discusses a theoretical conceptual framework that suggests that the publicness of knowledge produced by think tanks should be evaluated by the extent to which it forms an intersection between the state, civil society, and academia. Then, through a keyword analysis of 796 research projects conducted by the Nationa Research Council for Economics, Humanities and Social Sciences in the 2010s, we show that the institute has almost exclusively produced knowledge with a top-down agenda. In the conclusion, I propose that the institute should secure the publicness of its knowledge by creating a “productive tension” between the state, civil society, and the academic sphere through securing channels for bottom-up agenda-setting, and discuss the issues that need to be addressed in the future of humanities and social science think tanks.