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The article discusses value of cross-cultural research in social psychology. The author states that he agrees with many points presented by researcher Claude Faucheux's, in his paper titled "Cross-Cultural Research in Social Psychology." The author however has an epistemological disagreement with Faucheux. It is addressed to the central theme of Faucheux's paper, which is the question regarding what constitutes a valid scientific approach to social sciences and more particularly to social psychology.

This paper explores the concepts of knowledge culture and epistemic culture against the background of contemporary transformations in global society. Studies of knowledge culture came to prominence in the 1970s, with the trend towards laboratory fieldwork and direct observation in the new sociology of science. If the focus in such early studies was on knowledge construction, the focus in an epistemic culture approach by contrast is on the construction of the machineries of knowledge construction, relocating culture in the micropractices of laboratories and other bounded habitats of knowledge practice. Not all places of knowledge, however, are bounded spaces, and there is a case to be made for including in the empirical agenda more distributed locations. This is done here by introducing the concept of 'macro-epistemics', to describe wider networks of knowledge generation such as what is often known as 'the global financial architecture'. The discussion concludes by moving out from macro-epistemic circuits to questions of the cultural environment of epistemic settings, and of the more general knowledge culture in which specific knowledge processes are embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I draw on Piaget and Habermas to underline the importance of the theoretical distinction between social relations of constraint and social relations of cooperation for reflecting upon inter-institutional projects. I argue that the socio-cultural approach to collaboration has some important limitations that restrict ideological critic and emancipatory research. The limitations of this approach can be located in its epistemological assumptions, a homogenized notion of culture and a weakness in articulating the intrapersonal, inter-personal, inter-group/positional and social representational/ideological levels of analysis. As an empirical example of this I discuss the Sloan centres for family research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]