The Short and Happy Life of a Research Consultantship

Abstract

Even had I pondered deeply the meaning of this little passage by Znaniecki and the section on Technological Experts which it introduces, I doubt if the sequence of events which marked my first brief experience as a research consultant would have been seriously altered. It may, however, provide amusement, and perhaps even instruction for some of my equally virginal colleagues if I fill in the salient details of my own case history. It is a case which has the further function of documenting the situation Znaniecki was writing about. I had received my initiation into the mysteries of political science in the accepted fashion and emerged certified as a journeyman. I, of course, did not see myself as an expert, and especially not in the affairs of state government. However, I had studied diligently under two men whom I believe to be among that field's most illustrious adornments. This was the period immediately after World War II. This meant that I had participated in the reaction against chartism, management, the short-ballot school, and a coterie of allied notions which suffered in the doldrums between the decline of scientific and the rise of mathematical approaches to Theory. Organization Man had not yet arisen, nor had his theoretical rationale. We postwar Ph.D. candidates confidently dismissed all of the old administration doctrines as shibboliths. We cracked clever jokes about these woefully unsophisticated legalisms and formalisms. The newer social science disciplines, we agreed, led to more realistic (or, as we put it, fruitful) results than did the empiricism of the man-hole cover counters. Politics, we agreed, was more revealing about the process of administration than was the structural literature of traditional Public Administration. Inevitably, Leonard White emerged as our scapegoat; the symbol of error. We were embarrassed for him. But magnanimously we agreed that he had served a useful function for a less perceptive age. All that was happily behind us. Nor was all this mere second-hand erudition pirated from the creative younger faculty members. Most of us in that postwar graduate training period had previously been administrators of one sort or another. Or at least, we had