Prometheus bound: The limits of social science professionalization in the progressive period

The problem with professionalization theory is that it stops where we think it should begin. In the case of the new social scientists, we have argued that their need for massive resources opened them to collaborative cooptation by resource controllers. The two central principles to be drawn from our analysis are that during a crisis of ideology intellectual workers seeking to create new roles must worry about resources, and align themselves accordingly, and that resource holders, for their part, will support intellectuals who deliver something of value to them. Table I outlines how those principles might be applied to three likely “knowledge and power” alliances that might have occurred during the post-Civil War ideology crisis. The “traditional” social scientist role shown there reflects our understanding of the model American one existing before the influence of the German Historical School. The “radical-populist” role represents one of several routes not taken. It is presented to make clearer that significant alternatives did exist.

How does role complementarity sum up how the new social science aligned itself with corporate capital? The new social scientists rejected the role content and alliances established by the traditionals; instead, they saw themselves offering a competitive expertise to the public. When the new social scientists under AEA auspices entered a resource exchange relationship with the nascent, national corporate leadership supporting the Spanish American War and the trust as a form of economic organization, they chose to ally themselves with the same resource controllers the traditionals were explicitly opposing in their anti-war, anti-monopolist stance. Indeed, the domestic and foreign positions secured by the new social scientists in the wake of the war provided a significant and large scale opportunity for exercising their expert role. In choosing an alliance with national capital and its managers, the new social scientists clearly differentiated themselves from the traditionals. They identified the strategic value of the resource rich corporate center, eschewing, as AEA President E. R. A. Seligman put it, the extremes of laissez-faire and socialism. Their analysis of the opportunity structure presented by the war and the trust question proved correct, as their version of professionalization informs us today.

Of course, some new social scientists had at first been willing to align themselves with left of center and populist groups. However, the early academic freedom cases seem to have offered a powerful lesson. In particular, the new social scientists seem to have learned that even mildly popular actions were severely sanctioned and academics engaging in such actions would have extreme difficulty practicing their profession. These cases also made clear that left of centerists did not have many resources to exchange for new social scientific role performance in their causes. Economic radicals did not usually control the jobs or funds required for academic careers and professional development. As a result, the new social scientists did not create roles that complemented the radical popular movements. The few that did were not leaders of the associations. Having rejected the traditional and the radical expert roles for lack of sufficient complementary resources, the leaders of the new social scientists sought instead the indirect influence of expert advisers to businessmen, public figures, the new federal agencies, and national policy forums. From their collective biography as expert advisers, we may identify four aspects of their roles that seem to complement those of the new, nationally based corporate leaders. We see in the complementarity of the roles of the new social science leaders and the new corporate elite a significant shaping of modern social science expertise.

The four aspects of the expert adviser role are these of technician, policy adviser, legitimator, and independent policy maker. Technicians solved problems, especially data problems, set by others. They gained access, or an opportunity to show their competence to those higher in the role system. The corporate leaders gained an opportunity to look over, and socialize “new boys”. Policy advisers had the ear of decision makers in the corporate sectors and in government, and managed technicians. The advisers gained prestige and some influence, while decision makers gained reliable management in the policy and reform sectors of an emerging state capitalism. Legitimators were often recruited from the ranks of well-published policy managers. They lent their greater public prestige as well as their reputations for non-partisan impartiality to particular policies or reforms. The corporate leaders gained public approval for policies in their perceived interests. Finally, a few new social scientists achieved positions of independent policy making after long years of expert service. Corporate leaders gained policy making congruent with their needs, often developed without their active participation. In short, when the new social scientists looked outside of academics to find the resources required to institutionalize their new skills as social scientists, they found at least two groups willing to complement their role performances. The left of centerists did not have sufficient resources to help establish the new social scientists' role performances within academics. But the new corporate leaders did, and they had the resources to act as social and political sponsors for the new social scientists' roles as expert advisers. In return, the new social scientists accepted as socially necessary the task of rationalizing the turn of the century economy and defusing social unrest.

Our analysis of these cases — the Spanish American War and the trust (the Chicago Conference, the ICC, the NCF) — raises almost as many questions as are answered. These queries fall into two sets. The first involves theoretical issues, particularly the utilitarian assumptions implicit in our exchange analysis, and methodological issues, especially concerning the limits of available data. The second set of problems is substantive. Were the new social scientists the creatures of corporate capital, collaborative partners, or social actors with some independence? If they were willing and able to act independently, what defined the parameters of their action — professional interests, their own class interests or a commitment to the truth? If they were forced to act opportunistically to meet some constellation of class and professional interests, was opportunism confined to establishing a firmer resource base for the new social science? Were they later able to use their then established fields and positions to assert independent views of what was in the best interests of the nation as a whole? And, finally, was the expert role established by economists and political scientists accepted fully by sociologists? Our use of an exchange framework to organize the data in this paper might be read as bordering on a radical utilitarianism that assumes both individual and collective actors have a fulsome sense of their objective situation and its exigencies. Accordingly, there is little possibility for symbolic mediation of perceptions and motivations to intervene between social science leaders and their environments. At the risk of being thought unfashionable, reductionistic, and even economistic, we take a utilitarian position. Indeed, we stop short of radical utilitarianism only since perfect knowledge and information are inherently unattainable, especially in a world of rapid social and economic transition such as that occupied by the new social scientists.

Rather than radical utilitarianism, we take a position of reasonable utilitarianism, viewing the collective efforts of social scientists assembled in their associations as often compensating for all manner of informational and behavioral imperfections at the individual level. We take this position for several reasons rooted in the detail of the period. (1) Organizing occupations (like the new social scientists in the AEA) have the clear possibility and capability for creating more nearly rational plans for collective action than do their individual members. This occurs when occupational associations gather together experiences and analysis from all their members and then, through full, frank, and candid discussion discern the proper joint actions required for success in their common enterprise. This is precisely what the new social scientists did. They used the AEA as an occupational forum to define collectively the expert role required to procure professionalizing resources from the industralizing American political economy. Thus, Hadley's speech quoted in the Spanish American War study is not an isolated exercise in role exploration. Instead, it is part of twenty years' detailed discussion on the expert social scientist's role. (2) As a group, the new social scientists themselves subscribed to and articulated a utilitarian or pragmatic view of their role and their science. In this they upheld and, in turn, were supported by the dominant American business ideology which, although varying with economic development, and regional and industrial interest, espoused a materialistic approach to contemporary problems. Indeed, AEA leaders usually presented a pragmatic, materialistic interpretation of the growth of economics as a science. As E. R. A. Seligman said in a presidential address: “Economic science is an outgrowth of economic conditions ... of social unrest... of an attempt to unravel the tangled skein of actual conditions, and an effort to solve the difficulties of existing industrial society.” Although the new social scientists worked collectively to develop their occupation along rational lines, there were, of course, all manner of cognative informational and behavioral imperfections at the individual level. Thus, the young Carter Adams saw Marx as a Christ-like figure, J. R. Commons and R. T. Ely early worked with the social gospel movement, and AEA leader Jacob Hollander accepted an investment bank's commission of $100,000 for placing a Santa Domingan bond issue while on the island for imperial duty. But all eventually came to accept and act on the associations' collective definition of the expert adviser role, finally perceiving theoretical Communism, militant Christianity and ad hoc greed as hinderances to sustained resource procurement and career development. Thus, rather than a radical utilitarianism assuming perfect knowledge and information on objective situation and environment, we posit imperfect individual knowledge and action with the reasonable possibility of collective utilitarian action by occupational associations acting after considered discussion.

If we accept in principle the possibility of a reasonably utilitarian exchange analysis, what data limits do we encounter when we consider the professionalizing new social scientists in their associations? Following the Bernards' methodological imperative of reading the associations' own texts fully and carefully, we find the AEA, APSA and ASS's dusty tomes filled with heat and light on the substantive questions before us: What is the proper role of the social science expert? Who and how should he serve? In contrast with the fullness of organizational tests, our principle data limit is the thinness of historical analysis both of the period and the central actors. For example, there is no schematic synthesis of social structure for the period; nothing like Jackson Turner Maine's work on pre-Revolutionary America or Sidney Aronsen's on the Age of Jackson. There is, of course, a richly contested historiography of the period with Hofstader, Weibe, Williams (and their followers and critics) providing insightful chronological commentaries from center and leftist positions. But these chronicles rest more on sound judgments and intuitive leaps rather than on the details of sufficient biographical and organizational analysis. For example, there is one solid, historical treatment of the ASSA, and Sanborn, its most important figure, has no full biography and only a half-done autobiography. The new social scientists' lives are better recorded, but the coverage is still incomplete. These data limits make difficult precise and comprehensive answers to questions about the exact social mechanism — such as class, mobility and occupational status — working to create social scientists' biographical intersection with their associations' rich records. For example, A. T. Hadley's father was a Yale Classics professor, the father of fellow Yale economist Henry Farnam was a railroad president, and E. R. A. Seligman's father was a German-born New York investment banker. Are these professors upper class by social origins or by occupation? What is the direction of their mobility in an expanding, industrializing society? And what of the many professors on whom there is less detailed information, whose fathers were “merchants,” or “publicists”? Since neither the social structure at the time of their birth nor their entry into career is clearly agreed upon by scholars, we must answer our substantive questions somewhat more provisionally than we prefer.

First, what was the relationship between resource holders and intellectual workers, particularly between new social scientists and corporate capital? Was there much room for independent action? Comparison of old and new social scientists gives some indication of the latitude possible in the period. Both sets of social scientists provided hegemonic idea systems for different sets of capitalist elites. The old were linked by sponsorship to New England capital throughout the nineteenth century. Sharply regional in composition and social base, they opposed many of the other social alternatives available, most notably the Southern sociologies legitimating slavebased agrarian capitalism, and the protective-tariff economics produced in the more industrial mid-Atlantic states. Tied to regional resources and definitions of social and economic problems through well-established cohort, friendship, and kinship networks, the old social science was faced with crisis when its region was. The rise of the mid-Atlantic states, especially New York, as a center for emerging national industrial finance capital made ASSAers face the choice of supporting relatively immobile New England merchant industrial capital or forging a new extra-regional alliance. By maintaining their original networks, as did much of their region's business elite, ASSA leaders effectively cut themselves off from acting as intellectual guides and legitimators for those rising national industrial finance capitalists creating the present social order. While ASSA leaders were tied to their region's resources, they seem relatively independent when compared to discipline association leaders. Their social science required fewer resources; they seem, on the average, much less dependent on academically contained careers and the favor of university managers for their livelihood. Their generalist training and experience, combined with their familiarity with the material and cultural allocation apparatus of New England meant they were not confined to the academy for the exercise of specialized skills. Sanborn, for example, translated classics, wrote biographies, founded secondary schools, and taught at Boston University when not directly serving New England capital as ASSA secretary. In contrast, new social scientists were most often located permanently in the academy. Even after incurring the displeasure of university managers, they invariably sought other specialized positions, preferably in emerging graduate centers, although this sometimes meant holding their tongues and changing their location. In short, given their institutionally based, specialized social science, the newer, national academics seem to have had less room for independent action than the old.

Yet, the new had some room to maneuver because they had something to exchange for resources: the technical capacity both to create a new corporate ideology justifying monopoly capital (witness the Jenks address and the Chicago conference) and the skill to organize production efficiently (recall Adams on railroad accounting procedures and new social scientists' participation in the ICC). The nascent industrial finance corporate sector well understood its objective need for these skills. Widespread popular agitation and unstable pooling arrangements had taught them — and indeed, the nation — the dangers of centralizing capital without specialized academic assistance. And if the rising elite's instruction in its need for social science was direct, the nation's was no less detailed. Beyond its own participation and observations of industrialization, a wide range of extra-academic cultural workers offered lessons. For example, Daniel DeLeon's The People offered a continuous commentary countering the new social scientists' ideological positions. And the readers of Frank Norris' The Octopus (1901) found Lyman Derrick, a representative of newer social arrangements, advising his father, an older agrarian capitalist, on the technical accounting problems of monopolistic integration.

The man who, even after twenty years' training in the operation of railroads, can draw an equitable, smoothly working schedule of freight rates between shipping point and common point, is capable of governing the United States. What with main lines, and leased lines, and points of transfer, and the laws governing common carriers, and the rulings of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the whole matter has become so confused that Vanderbilt himself couldn't straighten it out.... Cut rates; yes... any fool can write one dollar instead of two, but if you cut too low by a fraction of one percent, and if the Railroad can get out an injunction, tie you up and show that your new rate prevents the road being operated at a profit, how are you better off?

Clearly in the increasingly complex American situation, the new social scientists had important ideological and technical skills to exchange for the resources held within the rising monopoly capital center. And they had, thereby, some degree of freedom in their negotiations with its leading figures. Their latitude for independent action becomes clearer when we ask, given the emerging corporate center's need for intellectual support and their willingness to supply resources, why didn't they employ established New England practitioners? In part, as previously indicated, the ASSAers were unavailable, being integrated into their own region and tied to their own sustaining, if relatively immobile, elite. Further, the older social scientists offered a slightly different intellectual product. Although both new and old social scientists were ideologues of state intervention designed to conserve capitalism, they differed on where regulation should occur. In the main, ASSAers worked for government intervention at the state level, while AEAers called for state solutions at the national level out of their shared German Historical experience. Finally, even though old social scientists often possessed much the same technical skills and used the same rhetoric of science as the new, they usually lacked graduate degrees, the prestige of university employment, and the growing authority of specialization in a society where credentials were increasingly seen as critical to success. These differences between old and new — availability, product, and certification—in all probability expanded AEAers' capacity to drive a harder bargain with capital.

Given the ASSA's reluctance to break sustaining regional ties, the unsuitability of populist and socialist intellectual workers, and their own certified technical and ideological skills, the new social scientists had some latitude in their negotiations with national corporate capital. Yet they chose to serve power, fundamentally since this maximized their own career and professional interests while meeting the objective demand for resources outlined above. In this, academics were probably no more greedy or selfish than lawyers in the ABA or doctors in the AMA, but neither were they less so. We see the new social scientists' decision to serve power most clearly in their careful and collective clarification of opportunity, identifying and seeking service in that sector of the economy most likely to deliver sustained resource support — national corporate capital's leadership. Thus, new social scientists generally accepted corporate capitalism per se as the framework “indispensable” to “conditions of human progress”. Then all other social issues (labor unrest, urban crowding, plutocracy) became technical problems defused of interestladen content, and they could perform latent ideological and legitimation functions while correctly claiming a manifest value neutrality. That they understood the implications of grounding social and economic theory on acceptance of modern monopoly capital is made clear in Hadley's presidential address following his Spanish American War speech; it focused on the relation between “Economic Theory and Political Morality.” The address and following debate stressed the inadvisability of economic theory's acknowledging questions of class if social scientists were to have a role in public affairs. Instead, the impartial pursuit of an empirically artificial construct, the “common interest,” was deliberately substituted for any consideration of specific class interests. Thus, disinterested objectivity, the cornerstone of professionalization theory, became an artifact of career.

With fashioning the expert role in the AEA's forum, the new social science became a collaborative partner in creating monopoly capitalism in the Progressive period. In return for their work in ideology production and technical amelioration, the economists insured the continued procurement of the resources required to industrialize US social science. What happened afterwards? After acting opportunistically to meet their professional and career interests, did establishing a firm resource base liberate the new social science from future opportunistic behavior? And could the established social science in time become resource independent, enough so to act in its own right; for example, participating in counter-hegemonic ideological and technical enterprises? In order to address these questions, we must move beyond our available data, guiding our speculations by the outline of our exchange analysis and our incomplete reading of the years following the fashioning of the new social scientists' expert role. We think that once accepted into collaborative partnership, opportunism was curbed by an emerging strategy for enhancing the long term interests of the profession. Consider, for example, the foundations then being invented by corporate capital. Russell Sage was lauded at birth by social science leaders, some of whom sought its funding, as did the American Political Science Association's leadership for their work rationalizing urban police forces. The Rockefeller Foundation, however, failed to attract the new social scientist leaderships' participation when it set up offices to offset the ideological cost of its victory in the Colorado Coal Wars. Seeking resources to perfect urban social control was professionally acceptable; justifying the Ludlow Massacre was not. Resource procurement continued to be crucial, but the new social science was not simply for hire to any corporate capitalist offering a subsidy. The critical point of distinction was perhaps whether or not accepting resources and projects made a mockery of professional claims to serve the public good.

If opportunism declined with the institutionalization of new social scientists' expert role and the stabilized exchanges it created, did the new social science find within its ranks the voices and actions of independent, even counter-hegemonic views, speakers and agitators against monopoly capitalism? In the Progessive period there were few, and they either left the academy out of a sense that active opposition was not permitted (as was the case with Daniel DeLeon) or were forced out (as was the case with Scott Nearing). We cannot answer this question exactly for the several decades since the expert's role was put in place, but we have listened hard for oppositional voices and have failed to hear them. As sociologists, we were somewhat surprised, in part since our sense of the radical timbre of our field was heightened by repeated and well-reported surveys of faculty opinion placing this specialty at the left margin of academic attitudes. We have no particular quarrel with the survey results and know that individual sociologists have on occasion spoken forcefully against the established center of the American political economy. Still, sociology as a profession seems to have fully accepted the expert role and exchanges created long ago by the new social scientists, if organized counter-hegemonic activity is accepted as a fair index. Even if we accept sociology's somewhat self-conscious claim to be the left wing of academia, it is difficult to hear much counter-hegemonic (as opposed to countercultural) flapping going on. Perhaps the matter will be clarified by a more detailed analysis of resources and role for this later period.

We would like to re-emphasize that the burden of this paper is the inadequacy of professionalization theory as an explanation for the modern social scientist's role. Although using an exchange framework, one in which disinterested technical expertise is offered in return for a monopoly of knowledge, it fails to explore fully its own implications. The resource demands of intellectual workers dependent on institutions for occupation are not considered; neither is the intent, function, and location of resource suppliers. By pointing to the importance of role resources through locating abstract entities (the profession, the community-at-large) in concrete groups (the leadership of social science organizations, specific groups of resource holders contributing to institutionalizing knowledge), we hope to focus professional attention on the material conditions for role emergence and the way in which complementarity can be negotiated. By continuing this examination of resource transactions surrounding role development, perhaps we will more fully understand the possibilities and limitations of the career structures in which we labor.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

   Edward T. Silva & Sheila Slaughter

2. Curriculum and Instruction Division, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Virginia

   Edward T. Silva & Sheila Slaughter

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