Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

718 Eric Trist
Foundations in other countries have not been conspicuous though their number
and resources are growing in Western Europe.
44. The oldest American foundations such as Rockefeller have acquired
immense experience in discerning innovations meriting support in the social
sciences. Russell Sage, Carnegie, Field, 20th Century Fund, Foundations Fund
for Psychiatry are other classical names. Such foundations are selective. They
also tend to change fields when lines of work they have been supporting are
taken over by universities or federal agencies. Sometimes they do this too
quickly.
45. The advent of the Ford Foundation with resources on another scale
from any of the others has changed the character of the foundation world. It
and certain other foundations have recently been tending to see themselves as
an independent force for the promotion of change in American society, whether
in relation to current crises or the longer-term future.27
Multiple investigations of policy issues
46. With the gathering internal crisis and the increasing visibility of the social
sciences, concern over their policy implications and more effective utilization
is rising in the Congress and in the scientific community. The social sciences
have become big science, yet even if sums in the neighbourhood of a billion
dollars a year are about to be spent, few genuinely large-scale programmes have
emerged. American social research exhibits what the British economist Peter
Wiles has called ‘investment scatter’* - which, carried beyond a point, arrests
growth. A plethora of investigations may proceed but few are pushed through
to the limit of what is conceptually, methodologically and empirically possi-
ble. Tactical resource allocation by uncoordinated means has reached the
point of diminishing returns.
47. If this can no longer continue, what best to do raises issues of immense
complexity. To reach sufficient agreement among the many scientific and
public interests concerned on how to fashion better and more coordinated
policies for the social sciences in a country so vast and many-sided as the United
States is likely to prove a difficult and lengthy process. It has, nevertheless, be-
gun and in a way which is characteristic of the American pluralistic tradition.**
48. A number of inquiries are proceeding which in one way or another involve
the Congress and the President’s Office. Three relate to bills brought before the
Senate in 1967 concerning the establishment of:
a. ‘A Select Committee on Technology and Human Environment’- introduced
by Senator Edmund Muskie (Maine) with the co-sponsorship of 19 senators.
b. ‘A National Foundation for the Social Sciences’ - introduced by Senator
Fred Harris (Oklahoma) with the co-sponsorship of 20 senators.
* i.e. there is too much ‘work in progress’ proceeding simultaneously in too many pla-
ces in too many directions; too little gets completed and there is too little ‘cumula-
tion.’I42
** An account of how American science as a whole has developed in terms of this
tradition is given in the study of National Science Policies of the U.S.A. prepared for
UNESCO by NSF.31