Rafael Pardo Avellaneda
Biography
Rafael Pardo Avellaneda, has a degree and doctorate in Political Science and Sociology from the Complutense University, obtaining the extraordinary award for bachelor's and doctoral degrees (1976 and 1985). Full professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology of the Complutense University (1987-1991). Fulbright-MEC Scholar at MIT (1987 to 1989). Professor of Sociology, UNED (1991-93); Professor of Sociology, Public University of Navarra (1993-1996); Visiting Scholar (1996) and Visiting Professor (1998), Stanford University; A1 Researcher at the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography of the CSIC (1996-2000); President of the Social Sciences Presentation of the National Agency for Evaluation and Prospective (1996-1998); Member of the Editorial Board of ARBOR Magazine (CSIC) for a decade; Member of the Editorial Board of the RIS for three years; principal investigator of the INTEL study in the United States, “American Views and Uses of Technology” (1996); Member of the Advisory Board of the Autonomous University of Madrid (2009-present); Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the CSIC (from 2010-present); Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Science Communication (2010-present), Honorary Member of the Spanish Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SEBBM, 2022). Director of the BBVA Foundation from 2001 to the present.
His main lines of research are: business organizations and their role in modeling labor relations; social and organizational dimensions of information technologies; Artificial Intelligence and its social dimensions; the innovation; network organizations; the comparative analysis of scientific culture and attitudes towards science in advanced societies; values, worldviews and attitudes towards biotechnology, cloning, stem cells, synthetic biology and the environment; empirical bioethics relations and social analysis; methodology and statistical techniques in social sciences. He has conducted 29 surveys (19 international) on values, scientific culture, environmental culture, trust and associationism, social profiles and values of university students.
Co-author of three international books (1997, 2003, 2009) and more than fifty articles and chapters, the vast majority of them in international magazines and works, with high impact on specialized international literature. Co-editor with E. Lamo de Espinosa and J. Tusell of the book Between two centuries. Reflections on Spanish democracy (1996) and with M. Garcia Ferrando, Ecology, industrial relations and business (1994). With Michael Greenacre he has developed the variants of the Correspondence Analysis technique, “Simple Subset Correspondence Analysis” and “Multiple Subset Correspondence Analysis”, available in the statistical packages R and XLSTAT for the analysis of subsets of a data distribution.
Lord, Your Majesty, Your presence today at this academic event that rewards the best in their areas of knowledge is always an honor and a joy. Thank you very much always.
Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts; President of the CIS, academic authorities, juries, award winners, colleagues, distinguished guests:
It is a pleasure and a privilege for me to pronounce a few brief words of laudatio for Rafael Pardo, awarded the 2022 National Prize for Sociology and Political Science by the jury of academics appointed by the CIS.
Let me first make a personal note. I always remember the arrival of Rafael Pardo to a Seminar on methodology and ideas, in the second half of the seventies, at the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology; There we read ancient and modern classics in a small and heterogeneous group (which lasted several years); Perhaps Rafael was the youngest who joined the moment we joyfully began to study.
to the great classic of philosophy, Immanuel Kant. That somewhat shy and discreet young man spoke with simplicity, wisdom and brilliance, without missing a hint of irony and natural affability. What was most admirable from the beginning was the precision and richness of the language, a conceptual architecture that has continued to grow over the years. A conceptualization of reality and its interaction with sciences - natural and social - and knowledge.
Since then, in addition to following his academic and professional career, we have maintained a constant dialogue in which books, ideas, philosophy, science in general and the social sciences in particular, as well as issues of the public sphere, have been recurring elements. Without prejudice to the specific trajectories of each one, we have shared coordinate systems to analyze issues of the present, always taking a detour through the universe of ideas and theories.
Rafael Pardo, graduate and doctor in Political Science and Sociology, in both cases with an extraordinary award, was initially trained in said Faculty of Political Science and Sociology, when sociology was beginning among us and was institutionalized in our country. It was a faculty that was also greatly influenced by history, law, and economics, with great teachers and a history of resistance since the mid-sixties and of encouraging freedom of thought and openness to the outside world. In the seventies, great teachers such as [Díez del Corral, D. Luis García Valdeavellano, Maravall Casesnoves, ...] followed [along with some sociologists who had acquired specialized training in American and French universities]. They were years in which the political context continued to affect what happened in the classrooms and outside them, in which the so-called Western Marxism - French and Italian, mainly - influenced the debates and guidelines. The winner, who knew this literature, was also interested in the work of Max Weber and especially in the political philosophy and methodology of Karl Popper, to which he would dedicate his doctoral thesis. In those years, he linked up with an external influence, that of the school of logic and philosophy of science and language of Manuel Garrido and his disciple, Alfonso García Suárez. These are the years of Teorema magazine (it is still exciting to see the bookshelf
of the yellow spines of the magazine that opened intellectual and scientific doors), in which the great Anglo-Saxon authors of the analytical tradition offered perspectives completely different from those of the stagnant official philosophy, and which converged with questions of science and scientific knowledge of the society. Rafael Pardo was also a pioneer in his interest in computing, following the courses offered at the Computing Center of the Complutense University, attended especially by physicists and mathematicians.
The winner joined the Department of Social Structure as an assistant professor directed by Professor Salustiano del Campo, assigned mainly to the subject of Formal Organizations and subsidiarily to that of Social Structure. There he began empirical research through surveys, collaborating with Robert Martínez, a disciple of Juan Linz, who came from the United States to carry out the first study of the structure and functions of the business organizations grouped in the CEOE. With Dr. Martínez I would publish some articles and chapters
dedicated to interest representation organizations, later expanded to the analysis of the corporatist paradigm within the framework of a large international study directed by Schmitter and Streeck and in Spain by Professor Pérez Díaz. This line would later be expanded by Rafael Pardo, in collaboration with Dr. Fernández Castro, to the unions and the industrial relations system.
His stays of several years at American universities, first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1987 to 1989 as a Fulbright Scholar and at Stanford, first as a Visiting Scholar in 1996 and later as a Visiting Professor in 1998, in both cases within the framework of the programs labeled Science, Technology and Society, are indicative of their interests and specialization: the social and interdisciplinary analysis of science and technology and in particular of artificial intelligence and the life sciences. In the United States he designed for the
INTEL company a study on the vision and uses of technology by American society, on the occasion of the launch of the Pentium processor. The result of this stage are several hundred pages written by Rafael Pardo, dedicated to artificial intelligence (among them, more than 100 pages written and published in 1993 in a CIS book, edited by Emilio Lamo and J E. Rodríguez Ibañez) and others in the Revista de Occident and in Arbor.
One of the most notable focuses of his research work and publications has been the comparative study of the scientific and technological culture of various societies, with some pioneering works highly cited in international literature, which are part of the canonical literature of the field. He participated along with four other social scientists from other countries in the design of the European Commission's first major survey on scientific culture in Europe, published a book and several papers and chapters in international books with reference figures such as Jon Miller.
and Fujio Niwa on the comparative profile of knowledge, values and attitudes towards science in Europe, the United States, Japan and Canada. He has also collaborated and published with prominent biomedical researchers, such as Professor Schnieke (signatory of the paper on the cloning of Dolly the sheep), being co-author of three international books on issues related to life sciences, papers and chapters.
diverse, the last one published a few months ago in an international book under the title “The moral status of the embryo and its uses: Bioethics and social perceptions”, which illustrates very well his interest in dealing with social facets of frontier scientific developments and doing so in , in some cases, through interdisciplinary collaborations.
His continued interest in methodology has also led him to develop with the professor of Statistics at the Pompeu Fabra University, Michael Greenacre, a variant of the statistical technique of Correspondence Analysis used in numerous disciplines, allowing its application to subsets of a distribution. of data. That variant is available in the R and XLSTAT statistical packages.
Rafael Pardo was a professor at the Complutense University and at the UNED, professor of Sociology at the Public University of Navarra and A1 researcher (equivalent to research professor) at the Institute of Economics, Demography and Geography of the CSIC. For two decades he has directed the BBVA Foundation, promoting a program of support and recognition of science in numerous domains, those magnificent Frontiers of Knowledge awards (which have become precedents for the Nobel Prizes) and other programs such as the Leonardo Scholarships. In its
This work has distinguished itself by dealing centrally with social facets of science and technology, by emerging and innovative issues, by doing so in the international space and by always adhering to a combination of theory and empirical analysis.
Summary and conclusion: A social scientist known internationally by his peers and a person who combines intelligence, courage and humanity in the highest degree of excellence. You always learn when you talk and converse with Rafael, or read to him; It always surprises by revealing the transversal paths and intersections that are possibilities for a deeper understanding of the topic in question; always that ability to conceptualize and interact between data about reality and analysis and concepts. As Albert Camus said of one of his teachers: “There are people who justify the world, who help to live.” Rafael Pardo is one of them. Very congratulations.
Thank you very much, Lord, for being with us.
Thank you very much to all.
Carmen Iglesias
Director of the Royal Academy of History
Full academician of the Royal Academy of Language.
