Here are two important roles of academic social science:
1. To provide theoretical and social justification for existing power structures.
2. To be oppositional, questioning existing power structures.
At this point you might be saying, No, I’m doing social science, not advocacy in either direction. To which I reply, Sure, that’s me too, when I do social science research I let the chips fall where they may. Nonetheless, our work often does fit into the above two categories, even if it is done transparently and without prejudgment.
The two roles of the academic social scientist arise, whatever we happen to be working on. On one hand, our research is supported by government grants–and, even when we don’t have that sort of outside support, we’re being paid to teach at public or quasi-public universities. (I’d call Columbia University a quasi-public institution, in the same way as other regulated institutions.) On the other hand, we have the academic freedom to work on what we want and say what we want. For example, I can criticize Columbia University for employing people involved in research fraud, without worrying about retaliation from the boss. More to the point, I can conduct research that questions the power structure that supports me. Not that I necessarily will do that, but I have the freedom to do so; indeed, that’s one of the main things I’m being paid to do.
Academic social scientists play the role of ombudsmen, or maybe a better analogy would be the Fool in the medieval court who’s supported by the king to say the uncomfortable things.
I don’t have much more to say about this. Some social scientists are really into providing theoretical and social justification for existing power structures, so they take the money and say the right things. Others are so oppositional that they can’t comfortably remain in the academic system. But most of us play this dual role, and I think we should be aware of this. An outside observer might take either of the two roles and consider it to be the whole story, but they’re both happening at the same time.
P.S. Also relevant is this post from 2006, Politically committed research.
Should you not be familiar with the following paper I recently came across it and immediately thought of it as a result of reading this blog post: “Scientific fraud and the power structure of science” (Martin, B., 1992).
Some quotes that might be relevant here:
“A host of things go on in scientific research that could be open to suspicion. Some of these are accepted as standard practice, others are tolerated, and some are considered unacceptable. Why? There are a number of reasons, but here the focus is on the power structure of science, namely the interest groups that fund science and reap disproportionate benefits from it.” (p. 84)
“Also tolerated are biased viewpoints, including those linked to powerful vested interests. Many scientists are employed by or receive research funds from companies or government bodies, and both expect and are expected to come up only with results useful to those bodies. Scientists receiving money from chemical companies to study pesticides seldom draw attention to the limitations or dangers of pesticides: they simply do studies within a framework which assumes that using pesticides is the appropriate thing to do.” (p. 87)
“Science basically operates the same way. There are internal audiences and external audiences. The preferred way to handle shoddy research is to quietly deal with the serious offenders and to ignore the widespread minor cheating. In such a situation, cheaters do not bring science into public disrepute whereas, ironically, those who blow the whistle on cheaters are perceived as posing a threat to business as usual.” (p. 90)
Certain things made much more sense, or were much more plausible, to me after reading this paper. For instance, why certain questionable practices may be present and sustained, and why certain players or entities in the entire thing might be both victim and perpetrator at the same time in different situations. It also underscores the idea for me that the game might at least partly be rigged so to say, and that certain people with certain personality characteristics might be more willing and able to play along and participate in it all.
Reminds me of this article:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/05/26/rfk-jr-anthony-fauci-and-the-revolt-against-expertise
Far too charitable to RFK et al, I think, but I wanted to point out this quote:
“In 1967, amid revelations of napalmed villages, C.I.A. misdeeds, and official mendacity, Noam Chomsky influentially declared that the true responsibility of intellectuals wasn’t to advise policymakers but to “expose the lies of government”…”
Most people seem to think that the responsibility of scientists is to advise the powerful.
I think the term “role” could use some clarification. If you mean that social science research (or any research for that matter) will indirectly influence advocacy, I have no problems with that.
But if you’re saying that advocacy is part of the job (rather than as a consequence or externality), I wholeheartedly disagree. As a thought experiment, if you remove the advocacy aspects, you can absolutely still be a scientist doing science. But if you retain only the advocacy, you’re no longer “doing science”.
Richard Dawkins is a good example for this I think. Was a (very good) scientist but now an activist. Nothing wrong with that, but if you have a field consisting of only the latter, I think there are some real problems. You can’t say that about the other way around. There are plenty of people who can be effective advocates and activists, or even better, but the research part is not so easily replaceable.
Anon:
I’m not saying that advocacy is “part of the job” for any particular researcher. I’m talking about academic social science as a whole.
For example, there are social scientists who study international relations with an eye toward helping the U.S. navigate foreign policy or helping the U.N. or international organizations work toward peaceful resolutions of conflict. This work can shade into advocacy: if you find that a particular approach seems to work better than others, you might publish academic papers explaining this, you might also write op-eds and even give advice to governmental officials. In other settings, you might find evidence suggesting that certain government policies or proposed policies have bad effects, and you could advocate against them. Or, even if you don’t directly do the advocating, you can make your work available and accessible to advocates.
I don’t think any of this advocacy is necessarily a bad thing, at least not in principle, although of course I might disagree with the advocated positions in any individual case.
That said, I don’t think advocacy is necessary. It’s fine to just do straight-up research; indeed that’s most of what I do at work. But even research that is not directly advocacy can serve the interest of, or be in opposition to, existing power structures.
“Others are so oppositional that they can’t comfortably remain in the academic system.”
I would be interested to hear of examples of this.
Norman Finkelstein would be an example.
Unless your boundaries for “the academic system” include think tanks, Charles Murray would be another. Indeed, he started in private research from the time he got his PhD. And I don’t think he would have been a good fit at his alma maters (Harvard and MIT) or at any other US university.
Another way to look at it is that, back in the day, lots of important social science work was done outside of academia. Academic social science was some sort of scholarly-focused subset of social science. Nowadays, with the decline of the news media and various other institutions, academia has become more of the default home for social science. Although in recent years I have the impression that there’s been a growth of advocacy organizations (sometimes called “think tanks” but I think that term is misleading, given that most of the time these organizations have pretty clear agendas).
As a practicing clinical psychologist, I like to think of myself as an applied social scientist, in the sense that I try to use my understanding of psychological theories and research to guide my practice. Over the years, I have come to realize that that this practice is never detached from the social context (e.g., expectations about patient provider roles, how people access healthcare, etc.) and power structures (e.g., insurance reimbursement in a for-profit healthcare system, laws about mandatory reporting, etc.). Sometimes I feel like I am supporting these systems; at other times, I feel like I am opposing them. It often feels like an uncomfortable, shifting balance. At best, I can be honest with myself and with my clients about this, but it’s hard, and it sometimes feels like these important discussion get in the way of the other therapeutic work that we are doing (i.e., addressing the concerns that bring the clients into treatment).
“I can criticize Columbia University for employing people involved in research fraud, without worrying about retaliation from the boss.”
I presume this was written months ago like most of the posts, but my oh my, the timing is bad. You lost the ability to criticize Columbia University on certain topics, like, yesterday.
Matt:
I can’t remember when I wrote this post. A couple months ago is my guess. This blog software doesn’t seem to have version control, which can be annoying sometimes.
“Power structure” itself is some made up social science word intended to further an agenda.
ok boomer
Huh? I’m not a boomer and that wasn’t a boomer comment.
It’s like that saying, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” We could all be boomers here!
Seriously, all social science words are “made up.” According to Merriam Webster, the first use of the term “power structure” was in 1938. I think it’s a useful term and I don’t see why it would need to be tied to any agenda. But if you don’t like it, you could use some equivalent phrase such as “a group of persons having control of an organization” or “the hierarchical interrelationships existing within a controlling group,” those being the definitions offered by Merriam-Webster. Whatever.
Quote from above: “Academic social scientists play the role of ombudsmen, or maybe a better analogy would be the Fool in the medieval court who’s supported by the king to say the uncomfortable things.”
This reminds me of that one time when I just graduated and the Diederik Stapel fraud case came to light and subsequently the Levelt et al. (2012) report concerning this case was presented. I became aware that many things I had just learned (about) during my education may have been nonsensical or even scientifically questionable, and that many things in psychological science and academia might be wrong or sub-optimal. I decided to make this all clear to some staff members in a collective e-mail conversation I started.
With the exception of three people, I seemed to notice the same lack of scientific attitude and responsibility-taking as might have been depicted in the Levelt et al. (2012) report in most of the staff members. That is if I were to take their complete silence, or in a single case the content of their reply, as an indication of this possibility. Apparently I wasn’t clear enough and/or the staff members didn’t think much of what was written in the Levelt et al. (2012) report, so to make things more clear I compared my recently acquired diploma to toilet paper.
As a result of the above quote from the blog post, I now wonder whether I have been a Fool or (merely) a fool by doing so. And, I wonder who the king is in my case, and whether there even is one. I have since tried to use different words to make things clear, but I think I might still have said, or say, the uncomfortable things…
It isn’t just social science; it’s science generally. Consider climate science, as an obvious example.
The Trump Administration agrees: https://blog.ucs.org/jules-barbati-dajches/from-the-courtroom-to-the-internet-the-fight-over-federal-science-is-on/
Why not link to the two models of pop micro-economics? https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2011/07/19/one_of_the_easi/
What is politics?
The podcast. Start with “Worbs” then binge listen as a precise taxonomy of politics is defined. You’ll find it useful in order to reason about social structure.
I don’t understand the motive of the OP. Is it to say, in a system of free inquiry some will support the status quo and others will challenge it? If so, yes but so what. Surely there’s a deeper intent.
To dig a little further, I think we need some help from the sociology of knowledge and the theory of ideology. The most important input I can think of us the notion of naturalization: a major function of ideology is to naturalize the contestable features of a society like income and social stratification. Racism is a familiar if crude example. So called scientific racism naturalizes these inequalities by rooting them in “objective racial differences”. That stuff is easy to criticize even though it persists no matter what, apparently. Most naturalizing social science is less crude. I’m probably guilty of it myself in my work on clientelism, which can be taken (not be me) to suggest that clientelist hierarchies are “natural”.
The reason I bring this up is that naturalization in the social sciences actually takes effort to avoid! We have to have a second mind looking over our shoulders, so to speak, to question whether the assumptions we base our work on are essentially extrapolations from the societies we live in. This is very hard to do, and I sympathize with everyone who slips in a bit of naturalization unintentionally.
There’s a meta discussion to be had about why naturalization plays such an important role in our society, whereas sacralization (approval by god) was a big deal in the past. Modernity and all that.
Good thoughts Peter. Naturalization is in some sense a heuristic people use to not have to think. “it’s just the way we’ve always done it” or “it’s the natural way things are” is not really thinking about the thing. Imagine what that would have have looked like say 200,000 years ago (hunter gatherers), 20,000 years ago (hunter gatherers), 6000 years ago (hunter gatherers), 5000 years ago (~ introduction of the state, writing, and agriculture), 1000 years ago (medieval / feudal) , 500 years ago (renaissance / mercantile), 100 years ago (Jim Crow, post WWI), 50 years ago (Cold War). Massive changes through time, but “it’s always been like that”. Well, always on the scale where 20 or 50 years is infinity maybe.
Things change, everything is a choice. Material conditions determine many things. Most people are like fish who don’t notice the existence of water.
Peter:
The motivation for this post was that, in preparation for a new course I’ll be teaching, I recently read “The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963,” a book from 1965 in which historian/sociologist Christopher Lasch expresses the view that academic social scientists have typically played a leftist oppositional role which became more complicated in the postwar environment of increased funding of academia and the role of academics in the government. Marx and Dewey join the Rand Corporation, as it were.
My new course is called, Rationalizing the World: The Hopes and Disappointments of American Social Science from 1900 to the present, and it’s all about the tension between the two meanings of “rationalizing”: social science as a way of making sense of the social world, and social science as providing a rationale for existing social structures.
I had not heard of the term “naturalization” which you are using here. This fits directly into what I want to be discussing in this course. Do you have any good references for this?
Regarding the idea of what is natural, I read an interesting article by Alan Hollinghurst reviewing two books about queer life in Britain in the twentieth century. One thing that came up was the intellectual and political effort of anti-gay campaigners to argue that being gay was a sign of unnatural decadence, while at the same time arguing that gay behavior had to be suppressed or it would catch on. In this case, “naturalization” went both ways: the contestable societal feature of queer people was contested by de-naturalizing it, presenting it as an unnatural cosmopolitan abomination, but it was also naturalized as being presented as a human impulse that needed to be violently suppressed.
Andrew, let’s see what I can do. First off, I’m a terrible scholar, more interested in delving into ideas than keeping track of who said what. Whenever I write a paper I have to devote almost as much time to scrounging around for references as expositing what I’m saying.
Second, while I’ve been interested in theories of ideological influence all my life, I’ve had little formal training in it. I took a course in the sociology of knowledge ages ago as an undergrad and studied privately with Hans Gerth, which left a big imprint. Above all, I acquired a framework that made it easier to read and catalog critical theorists and others working along similar lines. I read this stuff for decades but never wrote on it and do not consider myself an adept.
I think the way into your question is with the evolution of the concept. There are three versions of Marx’s theory of ideology and class interests. (He used the word “ideology” in a more general way than we do today, BTW.) There’s the so-called vulgar version, where ideology is used as an overt justification for your class interests. The most vivid example is the John Galt thing, which is with us more than ever these days. A more sophisticated version takes the form of representing the actions of your class as generally the same as the actions of other classes. This has typically gone under the rubric of “generalization”: your ideology generalizes what is characteristic about you to others who are actually different. For the past 50 years Marxists have jumped on the concept of human capital as illegitimate generalization in this sense, although of course “capital” for Gary Becker is not the same as “capital” for Marx. The third and most encompassing is reification, in which the social relations of a specific time and place are conceived as being natural and ineluctable.
Over the course of the twentieth century it became increasingly obvious that class divisions were just one element in a much broader set of distinctions and hierarchies, so now we have race, gender, nationality etc. For these differences, generalization doesn’t always work very well. People who try to legitimate gender inequality don’t generalize, say, male behavior to females or vice versa. But reification can be awkward too. The references cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for Ideology don’t make it clear just what the difference is between reification and naturalization, but my take would be that reification applies to contexts in which there is a consciously generated social structure, but participants deny or fail to see their agency in its creation and reproduction. I can see how this fits into a Marxist paradigm about capitalism, but it is problematic for social structures in which agency is harder to identify. This may be why naturalization is preferred by lots of modern students of ideology. At least, that’s why I prefer it.
An obvious reading for your course is Berger and Luckman’s The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge from th mid-60s. Back then, everyone was reading and talking about it. Its thesis is overstated, but that’s probably true of every book that makes such a large splash.
Although this is unrelated to your course, I’ll add that, in statistical contexts, I think generalization applies especially as a cognitive barrier to recognizing, well, generalization problems in sampling—the WEIRD bias etc. Naturalization enters in primarily as a problem with construct validity, such as the tendency to make 65 the lower bound of an “elderly” age bin. As far as I know, nothing has been written applying these concepts to statistics; it’s all been about conceptual biases in economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, etc. There’s a project for someone.
Not sure that these two faces captures the reality of most academic social science, which is careerism. I am not saying that other fields are different.
Careerists don’t care what the “power structure” in the sense of the larger society thinks. They care about the people just above them on the power ladder: journal editors, gatekeepers for grants, etc. Sometimes this careerism looks like opposition to the power structure (think: all the stuff after the police murdered George Floyd). But it’s just another kind of conformity motivated by a desire to kiss up to those who control access to career goodies.
It’s a dialectic, bro
Richard:
Interesting. I guess it makes sense that Lakatos’s active life as a Communist informed his philosophy of science and mathematics.
Ken Griffin Department of Economics at Chicago.