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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.