Cross-disciplinary research ventures in postwar American social science: Six case studies (Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan and MIT). – ISS

In recent years the decades following World War II have often been presented as an era of critical transformation in American social science, with the changes occasioned by the war being consolidated during the Cold War. Whether one considers increasing disciplinary autonomy, the avoidance of ethical considerations, the progress of secularization, the move away from political commitments or a form of distancing from society, the history of American postwar social science is often told as a movement towards greater academic professionalism and uniformity.

One way to shed light on this era of critical transformation is to focus on cross-disciplinary research ventures. There were indeed highly significant cross-disciplinary research ventures in American research universities such as Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan and MIT after the Second World War. In those places, inspired by the natural sciences, a number of eminent social scientists came to see the development of new approaches centered on transversal competences as an important step forward in the understanding and solution of practical problems such as family disorder, labor-management conflict, social maladjustment and international tensions.

In the secondary literature, it is commonplace to oppose interdisciplinarity and specialism. One is supposed to prosper at the expense of the other. Historical accounts are often victims of such presupposition. The Second World War and the two decades following it are thus contrasted with either the prewar era, which many rightly see as a time of consolidation of the departmental structure of the American university (Abbott 2001, p. 122), or with the post-1965 era, which witnessed a change in the patronage system for social science with discipline-oriented patrons somehow supplanting problem-oriented patrons (Crowther-Heyck 2006, p. 446). As a result of that development, it is argued, higher priority was placed on technical and methodological innovation within disciplinary structures, which in turn weakened those research ventures that defined themselves around specific problems.

Yet, when characterizing the American research university in the twentieth century, commentators often conclude that, despite a few mergers and separations between social science disciplines, its departmental structure “has remained largely unchanged since its creation between 1890 and 1910” (Abbott 2001, 122). Chandler, for instance, points out that “this American model has established itself quite successfully before the outbreak of the First World War, and it has persisted with remarkable tenacity to the present moment” (2009, p. 736). All this seems to suggest that the contrast between interdisciplinarity and specialism is problematic to some extent. It could be argued indeed that the whole idea of interdisciplinarity implies disciplines and that it is therefore misleading to contrast the former with disciplinary specialization, but the best way to approach this issue remains to investigate the nature and scope of cross-disciplinary interactions themselves.

Drawing on archival work and structuring itself around 5 case studies, the present project means to do just that.