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The production of social science in developing societies has attracted scholars across the continents. Certain perspectives dominate these studies, like academic capitalism and academic dependency. While these perspectives are useful to assess the position of national social science, they overlook the level of development of social science in a country. Employing institutional and social science division of labor perspectives and using Indonesia as a case, the article argues that the current poor state of the Indonesian university system can be traced to a failure to embrace wide‐ranging reforms on the part of politicians and universities. The causes for this failure can be found in a relatively weak production of the social sciences. This study reveals that shortfalls in state policy on higher education are the source of low academic productivity. Reforming this policy must be made a priority to strengthen social science and make it useful for formulating policy in the public sphere.

Social scientists fear that policy research compromises their objectivity. As a result, policy science is becoming a separate discipline which is accorded lower status that other fields of social inquiry. However, the history, sociology and psychology of science show that the elaboration of robust social theory would be aided by a more intimate relation between policy research and academic social science than currently obtains. The traditional canons of value freedom, which have been invoked to justify the independence of social science from policy, misrepresent the relation between facts and values in science. Objective knowledge is consequent on dispute and triangulation by a many‐valued community of fallible social scientists; but it does not eventuate from consensual value neutralism. Social knowledge interacts with social values to change phenomena our theories represent. This self‐restructuring characteristic of social events warrants singular attention by social scientists. Policy researchers are in a particularly opportune position to provide that attention.