Social Science for What?

Charting decades of pitched battles over relevance, accountability, and bias, Mark Solovey brilliantly illuminates the political economy of recent American social science. This is a compelling - and troubling - account of the linked fates of science policy and postwar public culture. - Sarah E. Igo, Andrew Jackson Professor of History, Vanderbilt University This is the goto history tracing erratic NSF treatment of social science, which accounts for worrisome gaps in our science of the human dimensions embedded in current sociotechnological disruptive challenges. Solovey's call for a fix is timely, and urgent. - Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs, Columbia University An impressive account of the fortunes of social science within the American National Science Foundation (NSF). Buttressing and chronologically extending his treatment in his book Shaky Foundations (Solovey 2013), Solovey establishes the NSF's importance as a funding agency for postwar social science and charts the recurring and rhyming challenges social scientists and their defenders faced within and around the foundation. - George Reisch, Metascience Solovey's detailed narrative history offers the reader a wealth of insight into the dynamics underlying choices surrounding the public funding of social science research and lays the groundwork for many future investigations into the broader politics of social scientific knowledge. - Daniel Hirschman, Journal of the History of Economic Thought This book enables the reader to develop a much richer understanding of the NSF, which is not only one essential part of the federal science funding system but also the major source of federal backing for social sciences. - Jialu Xie, Minerva Solovey provides a thoroughly researched and fascinating history of how managers at the National Science Foundation (NSF) overcame scientific and political opposition to create the NSF's social science research programs that exist today. - Zachary Pirtle, Journal of Responsible Innovation Solovey's book represents a major contribution to the history of the human sciences in the United States duringthe 20th century. A must read - Dennis Bryson, Centaurus An engagingly written and timely account of the struggle to win status and secure funding for the social sciences in the United States - Katherine Ambler, British Journal for the History of Science Solovey's meticulous analyses of national political debates over the mertis of public funding for the social sciences in the U.S. have much to offer not only historians of science but scholars of Congress and public policy as well. Especially in this time of austerity, Solovey's story of social scientists battling for a small and often shrinking silver of the NSF pie makes for sobering reading. - Emily Hauptmann, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences [Social Science for What?] convincingly shows how powerful the scientistic view of the 'fundamental unity of the sciences, often accompanied by an understanding that the natural sciences were the golden standard,' has been in shaping the research, social and political trajectory of the social sciences in America. -Massimiano Bucchi, Public Understanding of Science