Patterns in Recent Social Research

Abstract

r nHIS PAPER is an attempt, through the review of actual research work published recently OI still in progress, to trace a definite, repeated ^ , pattern in methods of social inquiry: furthermore to establish three positive and three cosTesponding negative propositions about this pattern. The positive propositions are that it integrates several branches of the social sciences, that it follows the research procedure normal to the natural sciences and, in so far as the inquiry is used for practical purposes, that it lends itself to operational research. The corresponding negative propositions are that the older-established economic and political sciences have not integrated but on the contrary have been isolationist if not snobs both in their own claims and in the humble submission of the other social sciences; that economics and political science have not followed the natural science pattern of research; and that when undertaken for practical purposes they do not lend themselves to operational research, but rather follow the pattern of applying principles and doctrines already fixed. The practical bearings of research and examples of applied and operational research will be left till later. In putting forward the more fundamental two positive and negative propositions I start with the isolationism of economics as against other social sciences as the most striking of the negations.