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Mid-Victorian philanthropy, 1850–80

Hugh Cunningham

in The Reputation of Philanthropy since 1750: Britain and Beyond

In this period philanthropy stood highest in esteem. The Times moderated its stance. Newspapers praised Britain as a philanthropic nation. People wrote of their government as philanthropic in its ... More

In this period philanthropy stood highest in esteem. The Times moderated its stance. Newspapers praised Britain as a philanthropic nation. People wrote of their government as philanthropic in its foreign policy. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert devoted time and resources to much-praised philanthropy. But there were worries. The Social Science Association, with which philanthropy was at first closely aligned, distanced itself from it and became the voice for social reform. The Charity Organisation Society promoted scientific charity; its secretary, C. S. Loch, did not disguise his mistrust of philanthropy. Criticism was still unrelenting: ‘practical philanthropy’ was admired, but too much of it, according to the critics, was ‘spurious’ or ‘pseudo’. In 5% philanthropy there was an attempt to help resolve housing problems but it came to be seen as a failure. Philanthropy was associated with the multiplicity of voluntary organisations to help the needy but they had spawned a body of ‘professional philanthropists’, who ran these organisations and were subjected to ridicule and dislike. Effeminacy became even more linked to philanthropy. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, three books by the era’s most eminent novelists had philanthropy directly in their sights: Middlemarch, The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.Less

The Progressive Roots of the Instrumental University: Public Administration, City Planning, and Industrial Relations

Ethan Schrum

in The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II

Chapter 1 introduces the godfather of the instrumental university, Charles Merriam, and traces the remarkably parallel rise of public administration, city planning, and industrial relations as ... More

Chapter 1 introduces the godfather of the instrumental university, Charles Merriam, and traces the remarkably parallel rise of public administration, city planning, and industrial relations as inherently instrumental academic fields. It delineates contributions to that rise from several sources: progressivism and the New Deal milieu in general, early twentieth century associational movements for planning and government reform, and the nexus of Rockefeller philanthropy and the Social Science Research Council.Less

Facing the Future: Social Science in the First Wilson Government, 1964–1970

Lise Butler

in Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970

This chapter examines Young’s work as founding chair of the Social Science Research Council between 1965 and 1968 in the Labour government led by Harold Wilson. It describes how Young responded to ... More

This chapter examines Young’s work as founding chair of the Social Science Research Council between 1965 and 1968 in the Labour government led by Harold Wilson. It describes how Young responded to increasing anxieties about the nature of planning and expertise in the British civil service by arguing that the social sciences should play a more prominent role in government policy making. The chapter focuses mainly on Young’s Committee on the Next Thirty Years, and his proposals for an Institute of Forecasting Studies, which he unsuccessfully sought to develop as part of a transnational forecasting movement with the support of foreign intellectuals such as the American sociologist Daniel Bell and the French futurologist Bertrand de Jouvenel. The chapter also discusses the intellectual networks associated with the popular social science journal New Society, showing that this group promoted libertarian and state-critical perspectives on urban planning, and radical economic ideas like negative income tax. While the Next Thirty Years Committee was short-lived, it reflected Young’s career-long conviction that public policy should be guided by interdisciplinary social science.Less

Funding for Social Science Research: Government Sources

K. Gayithri and Indrajit Bairagya

in Social Science Research in India: Status, Issues, and Policies

This chapter aims at ascertaining the flows and priorities in accessing funds by various institutions involved in SSR in India from government sources. The analysis is mainly based on the data ... More

This chapter aims at ascertaining the flows and priorities in accessing funds by various institutions involved in SSR in India from government sources. The analysis is mainly based on the data collected from the various ministries, Councils, etc. The study found that the share of expenditure on social science research (SSR) as percentage of total union budget of the central government was 0.025 per cent whereas it was 0.86 percent for pure science research. The share of SSR budget to GDP at market price for the year 2010–11 was 0.0062 per cent whereas it was 0.21 per cent in pure sciences. While estimating the demand supply gap, the study found that supply of funds to SSR is much less than requirement.Less

Islamic philanthropy in Indonesia

Jonathan Benthall

in Islamic Charities and Islamic Humanism in Troubled Times

This Chapter republishes a review of Amelia Fauzia’s book Faith and the State: Islamic philanthropy in Indonesia, originally published in the Asian Journal of Social Science in 2014. Most research ... More

This Chapter republishes a review of Amelia Fauzia’s book Faith and the State: Islamic philanthropy in Indonesia, originally published in the Asian Journal of Social Science in 2014. Most research published in English since 2000 on Islamic philanthropy and humanitarianism has concentrated on the Middle East, South and Central Asia, and Europe and the USA. Fauzia’s impressive monograph on Indonesia bears comparison with any of this research. She explores how zakat (the Islamic tithe) and sadaqa (optional charity) have been implemented in various ways in Indonesia. Her guiding theme is the tension between the private or personal imperatives of the Islamic revelation and public conduct where persuasion or coercion can be effective, including that exerted by the modern state. She gives special attention to the “modernist” Muhammadiyah, founded in 1912. The Chapter proposes an angle for historical research: to what extent did Christian institutions introduced by colonial powers affect the development of Islamic charities in Indonesia and elsewhere?Less

‘Bigness is the Enemy of Humanity’: Political and Economic Planning, Social Science, and Public Policy, 1945–1950

Lise Butler

in Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970

This chapter examines Michael Young’s work as Head of the Labour Party Research Department between 1945 and 1951 in the Labour government led by Clement Attlee. It outlines Young’s early life, ... More

This chapter examines Michael Young’s work as Head of the Labour Party Research Department between 1945 and 1951 in the Labour government led by Clement Attlee. It outlines Young’s early life, discussing his close relationship with the philanthropists Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, his education at the progressive Dartington Hall School, and his work for the think tank Political and Economic Planning (PEP) in the 1930s and 1940s. The chapter discusses Young’s central role in PEP’s ‘Active Democracy’ project, which sought to examine citizens’ experience of local government, the social services, and the workplace from a psychological and sociological perspective. It also describes how Young actively sought to promote the social sciences in government, submitting a series of memoranda that called on the Labour Party to incorporate child psychology, industrial psychology, and psychologically informed understandings of urban planning into policy making, and recommended the creation of a Social Science Research Council. The chapter concludes by arguing that while many of Young’s ideas were overlooked by the Attlee government, the networks which he cultivated through the Labour Party and Political and Economic Planning were important to the development of British social science.Less

The Peripheral U-Turn

David Leheny

in Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline

From 2004-2009, members of the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science undertook a five-year study entitled Kibōgaku (Hope-ology, translated formally as The Social Sciences of Hope). ... More

From 2004-2009, members of the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science undertook a five-year study entitled Kibōgaku (Hope-ology, translated formally as The Social Sciences of Hope). Looking to rebuild hope in Japan after the pop of the economic Bubble, the scholars crafted a survey of Kamaishi, a declining steel town on Japan’s northeastern coast, showing how networks in and out of the city were central to its limited but measurable successes in inspiring local hope for a better future. In the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami that devastated the town, killing a thousand residents, the scholars confronted questions of what hope means and what the connections between rural and urban Japan might mean.Less

Introduction: The Many Crises of Middle East Studies

Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

in Middle East Studies for the New Milleniu: Infrastructures of Knowledge

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to draw a portrait of the issues animating and challenging the field of Middle East studies (MES) in their academic and national ... More

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to draw a portrait of the issues animating and challenging the field of Middle East studies (MES) in their academic and national contexts. The book presents some of the findings of a decade-long (2000–2010) research project organized by the Social Science Research Council in New York, which began with examining Middle East studies and expanded to investigate other area studies fields as well as the thrust toward the global in US universities. It is concerned with three main themes: the relationship between MES and various disciplines (political science, sociology, economics, and geography), current reformulations and new emphases in MES (in terms of university restructuring, language training, and scholarly trends), the politics of knowledge, and the impact on the field of MES of the many crises in the region.Less

International Collaborations as Research Infrastructure

P.K. Viswanathan, R. Parthasarathy, and Madhusudan Bandi

in Social Science Research in India: Status, Issues, and Policies

This chapter examined the availability of the facilities for international collaboration for research, with a focus on two prime organisations, the University Grant Commission (UGC) and the Indian ... More

This chapter examined the availability of the facilities for international collaboration for research, with a focus on two prime organisations, the University Grant Commission (UGC) and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), which are engaged in promoting international collaboration. Beside this data also collected from various central and state universities. The study found that UGC has cultural exchange program with 48 countries, which include joint research project, exchanges of faculty, fellowship such as post-doctoral project-based exchange, and exchange of scholar programmes with several countries.Less

Governing for happiness: Mark Abrams, subjective social indicators and the post-war explosion of ‘middle-opinion’

Scott Anthony

in Scientific Governance in Britain, 1914-79

In the 1970s Mark Abrams led a pioneering attempt to develop ‘subjective social indicators’. His research team at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Survey Unit aimed to map perceptions of ... More

In the 1970s Mark Abrams led a pioneering attempt to develop ‘subjective social indicators’. His research team at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Survey Unit aimed to map perceptions of social conditions (such as housing, education, poverty) against an ‘objective’ measurement of the same. As well as attempting to develop tools to improve the implementation of governmental policy, the Survey Unit’s work was influenced by a number of ideological, methodological and institutional trends that stretched from anti-Empiricism to the influence of Europeanisation. While rival social scientists used data collected from this research to posit the coming of a progressive post-war ‘silent revolution’, Abrams instead speculated that Britain’s ‘radical’ white collar middle-class were becoming ever more impatient and materially acquisitive in their attitudes. The SSRC’s experiments represented a triumph of public sector efforts to utilise sophisticated insights from the social sciences to govern ‘democratically’. At the same time they also highlighted (as it was felt at the time) the practical, intellectual and political difficulties that made it increasingly precarious to do so.Less

The Study of Society

in The Disinherited Society: A Personal View of Social Responsibility in Liverpool During the Twentieth Century

This chapter examines the history of the creation of the School of Social Science at the University of Liverpool in the 1920s. It describes the author's own experience as one of the first students of ... More

This chapter examines the history of the creation of the School of Social Science at the University of Liverpool in the 1920s. It describes the author's own experience as one of the first students of the study of society and discusses her observations in unemployment centres and community councils that reveal the slow process of community development. This chapter also evaluates the impact of the voluntary or the social work movement on the emancipation of women.Less

Résumé of the Discussion of the Negro Problems: 1897

W. E. B. DU BOIS

Nahum Dimitri Chandler (ed.)

in The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays

This chapter describes events during the Forty-fourth Scientific Session of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, Charles C. Harrison, ... More

This chapter describes events during the Forty-fourth Scientific Session of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, Charles C. Harrison, LL.D., presided at the meeting, which included an address by Dr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois on “The Study of the Negro Problems.” Other speakers discussed topics such as the need of accuracy in statistics relating to the mortality of the Negro, and the varied aspects in which the Negro problem may be viewed in different localities. At the end of the meeting, a communication was read from the Negro Educational League, an organization to aid and encourage certain colored schools in the South.Less

Towards a Theory of Structural Discrimination: Cultural, Institutional and Interactional Mechanisms of the ‘European Dilemma’

Tom R. Burns

in Identity, Belonging and Migration

Tom R. Burns’ ‘Towards a Theory of Structural Discrimination: Cultural, Institutional and Interactional Mechanisms of the ‘European Dilemma’’ draws on a wide range of material in order to interrogate ... More

Tom R. Burns’ ‘Towards a Theory of Structural Discrimination: Cultural, Institutional and Interactional Mechanisms of the ‘European Dilemma’’ draws on a wide range of material in order to interrogate the concepts of structural and institutional discrimination, which the author argues are particularly pertinent concepts when attempting to understand the nature of the discrimination faced by many migrants.Less

Conclusion

Lise Butler

in Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970

The conclusion describes how the Social Science Research Council, and in particular the discipline of sociology, came under increasing attack by Conservative policy makers in the 1970s and 1980s. It ... More

The conclusion describes how the Social Science Research Council, and in particular the discipline of sociology, came under increasing attack by Conservative policy makers in the 1970s and 1980s. It briefly outlines Young’s biography and career after 1970, and summarizes the key arguments of the book as a whole. The conclusion cautions against populist and communitarian arguments which idealize nostalgic visions of community, pointing out that Young’s portrayals of the East London working class were ideologically and politically motivated, and did not fully account for changing gender norms or the impact of immigration. The book concludes by re-emphasizing the importance of the social sciences in twentieth-century politics and political thought, and argues that historians should continue to take their role in modern British history seriously.Less

What Is This Thing Called Research?

Zachary M. Schrag

in Human Subjects Research Regulation: Perspectives on the Future

This chapter explores various ways of distinguishing research that should and should not be covered by human subjects regulations. Aligning regulations to the underlying statute, which only covers ... More

This chapter explores various ways of distinguishing research that should and should not be covered by human subjects regulations. Aligning regulations to the underlying statute, which only covers “biomedical and behavioral research,” would return scrutiny to the areas of concern identified by Congress. Alternatively, defining “human subjects” more narrowly as those people in the power of an investigator might focus energy on the prevention of the abuse of power. By contrast, relying on distinctions between generalizable knowledge and nongeneralizable knowledge is the very worst strategy, for in three decades policy makers have proved unable to agree on what this distinction means.Less