The political power of research methods: Knowledge regimes in U.S. labor-market policy

Abstract

The topic of the state's use of social science is the site of an immense gap between theoretical expectations and fine-grained empirical work. Theoretical discussions have treated social science alternately as a rational replacement for politics or, in critical theory, as an ideology that presents particularistic policies in universalistic terms. While these approaches contain opposed philosophies of knowledge, and opposed views as to whether the state's use of social science is benign or malignant, they agree that science has or will become the logic of state intervention in the modern welfare state. On one hand, there is the tradition that begins early in the nineteenth century with Comte and the German Polizeiwissenschaften in Europe,1 is found in the work of Progressive movement social scientists in the United States,2 and in manifestos of the policy sciences in the 1950s and 1960s. This embraces science as an engine for benign and universalistic rationalization of state action.3 On the other hand, critical approaches have argued that science does not guarantee universalism in state intervention, but gives the appearance of universalism to intervention that is based above all on the principle of reproducing capitalist relations of production. These critical approaches nonetheless share the expectation of greater use of social science.4 Habermas's well-known passages on the modern state's use of science provide the most penetrating examples of this approach. Science is brought in to balance a legitimation deficit when the state's intervention itself erodes the ideology of "just exchanges" in the market, while traditional ideologies have long been "disenchanted" by capitalist rationalization. The state appropriates science to convert political or practical questions into soluble technical problems.5