Become a member of Scholar Square, our online digital community where we put our ethos into practice - and get access to all editions of The Scholarly Letter for free.

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to receive weekly letters rooted in curiosity and connection.
 
Know someone who will enjoy The Scholarly Letter? Forward it to them.

All previous editions of The Letter are available on our website.

Online Thumbnail Credits: National Gallery of Art Open Access Collection

Hi Scholar,

We came across a poem recently called ‘My First Memory (of Librarians)’ by Nikki Giovanni and we thought we would share it with you:

If you’re a social sciences researcher in the UK, then chances are you know the ESRC – the Economic and Social Research Council. It is the largest body through which publicly funded research in the “economic, social, behavioural, and human data sciences” is administered.

And I, being a social science researcher myself, have wanted – rather desperately, at times – for my research to be funded by it. To receive ESRC funding is to acquire a certain legitimacy. It carries prestige, signals that your work matters, that it has weight, and that it is, in some official sense, worth something.

For the past few years, therefore, I had known the ESRC.

Or so I thought.

Because when I took a moment to actually consider it, apart from my desire – my rather anxious desire – to be recognised and funded by the ESRC, I realised that I knew next to nothing about it. It was, to me, simply a body with money (a pot I knew was increasingly shrinking in recent years) which awarded grants for social science research in the UK. That was all.

I had never considered the historical conditions in which it was formed, the political circumstances that brought it into existence, the assumptions upon which it rests. All this I had taken for granted, as one takes for granted the existence of walls or foundations of a house.

So when I recently came across a chapter – Desmond King’s ‘The Politics of Socially Funded Research’ – which talks about the ESRC from a socio-historical perspective, it made me really think about what it means for social science research to be funded by a government body. 

**

It's not so long ago — only eighty years — that the British state began to seriously consider what social science might be for. After the Second World War, in a period marked by reconstruction, planning, and the building of the welfare state, there emerged the sense that modern societies might require, alongside their engineers and physicists, a systematic knowledge of their own populations, their society and sociality.

In 1946, the Committee on the Provision for Social and Economic Research, chaired by Sir John Clapham, suggested that just as industrial societies had come to rely upon the natural sciences, so too might their “smooth running and balance” come to “rest upon a knowledge of social needs and responses”. State support for social research, the Committee argued, was therefore desirable.

And yet, even as it encouraged greater funding, the Committee hesitated. 

It refused to recommend the creation of a dedicated research council for the social sciences. This hesitation was due to scepticism surrounding the scientific status of social science: 

According to the Committee, social science had

Eighty years ago social science was regarded as uncertain – perhaps even fragile, its scientific status not entirely secure.

But uncertainty hardly prevented usefulness. 

Because even as doubts persisted about its scientific character, there was a growing sentiment that social research might actually be valuable to government – a tool for planning, administration, and the management of populations.

Some twenty years later, the Heyworth Committee was established in 1963 to review existing social science research and to consider how it might better be supported and coordinated. By this time, a mood of optimism had begun to gather across the post-war intellectual and political landscape. Civil servants, public intellectuals, politicians, and academics shared the sense that deeper empirical knowledge of society — of demography, behaviour, and economic life — might lead to better policy and more effective governance. The private sector, too, began to endorse the expansion of social research.

There was something to celebrate: social science research was gaining approval more widely. 

And yet the celebration carried a shadow. For the terms under which social science would be supported were being forcefully determined: the research was to be applied, practical, useful – oriented toward solving problems rather than posing fundamental questions.

Still, the Heyworth Committee recommended the creation of a dedicated body.

And so, in 1965, the Social Science Research Council – the SSRC – came into being.

This was a formal victory for social science research. 

However, by 1979, under the New Right government of Margaret Thatcher, the very legitimacy of social science was again under scrutiny. 

Within the Conservative Party were influential figures who doubted not only its value but its very scientific validity. They questioned, once more, whether the study of society could properly claim the status of science at all.

In 1981, Lord Rothschild, a natural scientist, was appointed to review the SSRC. The symbolism can hardly be missed. The scientific credibility of social science was to be judged from outside its own intellectual traditions. Its future – its methods, priorities, and of course, its continuity –  rested in the hands of another discipline.

Rothschild, fortunately, reported in its favour, warning that to dismantle the council would be an “act of intellectual vandalism.”

An act of intellectual vandalism was prevented. The council survived. 
But not unchanged.

Soon after, the SSRC was renamed the Economic and Social Research Council – a small alteration, perhaps, but one that reflected ongoing scepticism about the status of social science as a science. By excising ‘science’ from the name of the council, a symbolic victory for the Conservative critics of social science was secured. 

More importantly, the Rothschild report contributed to the consolidation of a particular trajectory for social science research and its committee. In his report, Rothschild placed significant emphasis on the ‘customer’ and ‘end-consumer’ of publicly funded social research. It encouraged social research to be more closely connected to its “users” – to industry and government. And overtime, this has meant that the ESRC has increasingly pursued applied social research over pure or basic research. Alongside this, there has also been a shift toward more quantitative and positivist approaches, almost undeniably in an attempt to make social science research more securely scientific. 

More than thirty years have passed since then.

And over these decades, this trajectory has only taken on a more definitive shape. 

Since the financial crisis of 2008, and in the climate of austerity that followed, publicly funded research has been required to demonstrate usefulness, measurable impact, and clear economic or policy returns. For the ESRC, this has meant an even greater push toward research that is practical, instrumental, and policy-relevant. With its strategic themes increasingly articulated in tandem with government priorities, the ESRC now risks further narrowing the role and ‘end-users’ of social science. 

For the most part, the ESRC has avoided falling into an excessively pro-government stance. However, as its emphasis on research that “influences behaviour and informs intervention” strengthens, it is coming perilously close to becoming a sure and secure handmaiden to government.

**

What, then, is one to make of all this?

To see the ESRC in this light – an organisation that I had previously regarded as an unambiguously positive force for social science – does not exactly evoke pleasant feelings.

Such utilitarianism, the kind being decisively advanced by the ESRC for social science research at present, is expected – perhaps even the norm – among research councils in the STEM fields. But social science occupies a different kind of position. It is a form of knowledge that does not simply help systems function more efficiently but also helps us to examine the structures of power, governance, and inequality that shape our social world. Yes, social research can, should, and does inform public policy and improve government decision-making. But its role is also to question the assumptions upon which policies rest, to challenge prevailing ways of understanding economic, social, and political life, and, at times, to contest the system rather than merely advance it.

As ESRC funding priorities become narrowly aligned with usefulness, there is a risk that only a certain kind of criticism will remain possible – an institutionalised form of critique that improves existing arrangements without fundamentally questioning them.

None of this is an argument to abandon ESRC-funded research.
Nor is it a denunciation of the council itself.

Perhaps, if anything, what has shifted is simply my own perception – the loss of a somewhat naïve image of an institution that once appeared uncomplicatedly benign.

That naïvety lay in assuming that research funding could ever be insulated from politics, economic pressures, or the priorities of government. And, furthermore, in assuming that any research council could exist without tensions or contestation. Such complexities are present in the makeup of every research council and every discipline. It was naïve to think that the social sciences – and the bodies that fund them – could somehow remain immune to the forces of politics and government. Social science, after all, is embedded within the very social contexts it seeks to understand.

Perhaps, then, what matters is simply this: recognising that these research councils – whose existence is so often taken for granted – carry important histories that shape what and how we research today. They certainly do not exist in a historical vacuum; and their histories continue to shape not only our present but also the future of publicly funded research.