Business Organizations, Foundations, and the State as Promoters of Applied Social Sciences in the United States and Switzerland, 1890–1960

Abstract

Social scientists who have tried to apply their expertise in fields of professional practice have left – and are still leaving – a rich legacy behind them of published and unpublished texts. Sometimes they have left other artefacts too, psycho-technical test devices, for example. Despite this, textbooks on the history of the social sciences often ignore what really happened in the many practice-orientated sub-disciplines of the sciences whose history they recount. Surely, most of these textbooks do not practise ‘disciplinary Whiggism’ any more:1 in other words, they do not construe the history of a social science as the unfolding of cumulatively more powerful descriptions and explanations, the origin of which may be discovered in the embryonic political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology of classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Instead, the development of the modern social sciences is increasingly perceived as a ‘continuous struggle by multiple participants to occupy and define a sharply contested, but never clearly demarcated, discursive and practical field’.2 The resulting contents and borders of a discipline are ‘the product as much of national cultures, local circumstances, and accidental opportunities as of intellectual logic’.3KeywordsIndustrial RelationIndustrial PsychologyBusiness OrganizationDirect DemocracyHarvard Business SchoolThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.