Social Research and its Organisation

Abstract

THE report of the Clapham committee¹ just issued has to a hend several controversies about the promotion, financing and organisation of in the social sciences. This committee on “the Provision for Social and Economic Research”, of wnich the late Sir John Clapham was chairman, was appointed by the Lord President of the Council and the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Coalition government and consisted in leading social scientists, economists and economic historians. But they cannot be accused of overstating the case for developing their own sciences on a scale bearing comparison 369 with the development of the natural sciences. Just before the Second World War, as the Committee shows, there was virtually no comparison at all. In 1938–9 universities other than Oxford and Cambridge spent £987,000 on pure science, £886,000 on medicine and £116,000 on the social sciences, and probably a much lower proportion of these sums went into research in the case of the social than the natural sciences.