Our New Research Society: Some Warnings for Social Scientists

Abstract

Fieldwork has radically changed in the past two decades with the introduction of massive amounts of federally-related funding. Scientific curiosity, once the driving force of independent scholars, has been replaced with a need-to-know on the part of major institutions in American society, particularly federal agencies which are charged with the administration of large programs with target populations on a national scale. Establishing relationships with these funding sources and performing tasks consonant with the assigned missions they represent is now a major task of research oriented scholars. The idea that knowledge can be gained for its own sake, if it was ever an objective goal of social scientists, has long since been replaced with another agenda. Since the infusion of large amounts of federal funding beginning with the War on Poverty, an unarticulated procedure has arisen whereby both scholars and government officials seeking research information go to elaborate lengths to disguise the manner in which research is conceived, funded and understood. The reason that few critics of this system have emerged is that if one began to sketch out the factors inherent in this new system of authorizing and funding research, it would call into question the actual relationship between the studies produced and the goals and purposes of enabling legislation which demanded additional information, and this would indicate that the research is less than scientific. That is to say, a considerable amount of research today has little to do with the social realities it purports to describe. It could better be characterized as the political rearrangement of facts, figures and slogans to justify continued funding, administration and concern with topical issues. The first important fact of life in our new research society is the recognition that most decisions affecting human beings are made by officials who are dreadfully ignorant of the actual conditions under which people live. Each Congress seems less capable of dealing with social issues than its predecessor, and the major pieces of legislation that are given consideration by Congresses are not grounded in a confrontation with contemporary conditions with an eye to their solution or reconstitution. Substantial portions of contemporary legislation are merely amendments to existing laws to provide for the inclusion of groups, subjects and regions formerly omitted from the operations of ongoing programs. The best example of this tendency is the perpetual amendment of educational laws to include more groups in the federal funding process. Federal involvement with the educational system began with the Morrill Acts to provide land grants to states for agricultural colleges, but has since expanded to include almost every conceivable group and subject which education could be said to touch. Housing, economic development, and even the problem of crime have all experienced the contemporary process of perpetual amendment of laws conceived theoretically and programmatically to resolve problem areas of a different kind of world. The executive branch has expanded so rapidly in the postwar period as to preclude any single group from understanding the scope of its activities. Bureaucrats charged with administering a program have developed extensive survival techniques which allow them simultaneously to claim jurisdiction and disclaim responsibility for their immediate areas and for peripheral areas of traceable relevance. No agency understands the limits of its responsibilities, and no agency seems capable of identifying the specific instances in which it has sole responsibility and is expected to assume a leadership role in resolving problems. The single profile that can be said to characterize public agencies today is the ability to escape liability for any action which might be assigned.