Funding of Social Science, History of

Thomas Konig, Vienna Science and Technology Fund, Vienna, Austria

2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

The history of funding in the social and behavioral sciences can best be described along different types of funding regimes.
Starting with dening the term funding, the article sets out to discuss those regimes and their emergence over the past two
hundred years. It concludes with some remarks on recent discussions on the relationship of funding and research in the social
and behavioral sciences, as well as some recent trends in their funding.

Introduction foremost, the data are simply lacking. Current OECD data sets,
for example, do not reach further back than to the early 1980s,
To state the obvious right away: Science costs money since the Frascati Handbook, which is the internationally
(Stephan, 2012: p. 1). As in other elds, funding has been binding categorization system for science and technology
crucial for social and behavioral sciences from the very begin- statistics, included the social sciences only from 1976 (Godin,
ning. Surprisingly, however, so far its undeniable impact on the 2005a: p. 73).
social stratication of science (Merton, 1988) has not Even for this rather short period, the gures displayed in
induced comprehensive attempts to investigate the relation- Table 1 should be regarded with caution. First, the four coun-
ship of the disciplines toward funding. Reection on the topic tries were selected simply because they are the only ones where
is restricted on case studies, which will be briey discussed numbers are detailed along scientic elds, including the social
later. sciences. Second, in the original table, every single data point
Why are the social and behavioral sciences so timid when it contained a remark about specic methodological problems.
comes to their endowment? One reason might be that there is Furthermore, it is not clear what all costs really include,
a commonly shared uneasiness to talk about funding might because the data collecting relies on national administrations
expose the disciplines as being compromised or manipulated. and their standards are usually varying. Statistics on science
Any historical assessment of the social and behavioral sciences,
however, cannot rely on the assumption that there can be any
pure form of social knowledge, uncontaminated by the situa- Table 1 Expenditures in natural sciences and engineering
and social sciences in four selected countries (in percent of total
tion in which it is created; rather, it should be situated in the
expenditures)
context of the longer-term historical development of the rela-
tion between knowledge production and sociopolitical insti- Australia 1981 1986 1992 1996 2002 2006
tutions (Wagner, 2003: p. 546). The following sketch, as
fragmented as it may be, is also an attempt to contribute to Natural sciences 69.64 69.55 68.52 72.72 73.22 73.94
a history under such assumption. and engineering
Social sciences NA 18.80 21.86 19.33 20.59 20.00

Germany 1981 1985 1991 1996 2001 2006

Definition and Restrictions
Natural sciences 75.53 76.10 78.08 77.96 78.23 NA
and engineering
A working denition of funding in the social and behavioral
Social sciences 7.92 7.73 7.39 8.46 8.62 NA
sciences encompasses the allocation of resources to allow
trained personnel, for a time, conducting research on topics Sweden 1981 1985 1991 1997 2001 2006
with relevance to social and behavioral sciences, and/or
teaching those topics for training purposes. It would also Natural sciences 85.48 85.59 83.62 80.85 79.37 80.51
include accompanying activities, such as advising and dissem- and engineering
Social sciences 9.31 9.18 10.86 11.10 12.51 12.07
inating the results of the research, and fullling administrative
requirements. Given this broad denition, it is tempting to The USA 1981 1985 1991 1996 2001 2006
sketch a simple, straight forward history of funding based on
numbers: how many resources (valued in a standardized, Natural sciences 89.68 88.73 90.93 90.93 91.08 NA
aggregated currency) were allocated to the social and behav- and engineering
ioral sciences? If it were possible to answer this question, it Social sciences 6.96 5.25 5.68 6.23 5.98 NA
would provide a comprehensive overview about their relative Sector of performance: higher education; units for expenditure: million 2005 dollars
worth, not only at a given time in a certain place, but also across constant prices and Prices and Purchasing Power Parties: type of costs: total (all
regions and nations; in historical perspective, it would also types of costs).
Own calculation, based on OECD, 2014. Other National R-D Expenditure by Field of
allow to see allocation uctuations over time. Of course, such Science and by Type of Cost (Database). OECD Science, Technology and R&D
a history cannot be written, at least not for now. First and Statistics, OECD.

550 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 9 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03014-2

and innovation remain marked by signicant methodological
limitations (Godin, 2005b: p. 15). That being said, thinking
about the history of the social and behavioral sciences from the
perspective of their funding might still yield some interesting, if
not provocative insights.
At this point, it is helpful to distinguish also between
different types of funding. The rst type concerns direct, regular
expenses, such as annual budgets for outtting social science
departments at universities, etc. The second type concerns
direct, extraordinary funds, such as grants for social and
behavioral research projects, or onetime investments to build
up new infrastructure for teaching and research. The third type
concerns indirect (mostly), regular expenses, including costs
incurred through providing places at higher-education institu-
tions for studying social sciences at different education levels. If
the topic of funding has sparked interest at all among historians
of social sciences, they have dealt with issues related to funding
type number two. This is understandable, since this type of
funding usually is the one most explicitly stated in historical
records, as it is often the center point of concern in public
discourses. For the remainder of this contribution, too, the
main focus will be on the this type. For all its advantages that
make it prone to historical analysis, however, it should be
mentioned that, in relation to the two other types of funding,
direct, extraordinary funding has to be considered rather small
in size. If one were to discuss the public relevance of social and
behavioral sciences in general, therefore, one would have to
aim at an all-encompassing perspective.
Funding Regimes
From the point of their funding, the history of the social and
behavioral sciences is to be written not only as one of
remarkable growth in size. Over the past two hundred years, it
also witnesses an increasing number of different procedures of
allocating and accounting of funds. Those procedures can be
described as funding regimes: As such, each of them implies
a set of certain political purposes and addresses specic scien-
tic practices, even though this may not be openly declared.
Each regimes purpose is founded on ethical principles; the
addressed scientic practices express specic epistemic expec-
tations. Over time, more and more funding regimes evolve
(with older ones usually being continued, albeit often signi-
cantly modied), offering more and more different sorts of
funding and contributing to todays dense fabric of the social
and behavioral sciences. Broadly, then, the history of funding
can be described along different regimes of funding, each of
which consisted of a unique mixture of ethical principles and
the epistemic expectations.
Initially, there were basically two funding regimes: direct
allocation of funds within state bureaucracies and philan-
thropic activities. Since the emergence of the social sciences is
closely related to the rise of the modern state (Wittrock, 2000),
the direct application of statistics became a crucial feature of the
then still nascent state bureaucracy. Its purpose was to describe
numerically the populace of a given territory, and it relied on the
epistemic expectation to describe, rather than to analyze, the
totality of the states subjects (Desrosires, 1998). Census
bureaus and statistical ofces were usually directly connected to
Funding of Social Science, History of 551
state apparatuses. In the beginning, at least, funding for this
kind of activity was not yet on a regular basis.
Complementary, in all industrializing countries during the
rst half of the nineteenth century, individuals with a philan-
thropic background began addressing the need to respond to
pressing social issues. Their curiosity was predominantly
satised through social surveys, and it was clearly stimulated by
political interest. For Friedrich Engels, comprehending the
present state of the English proletariat was synonymous with
his political sympathies for socialism (Engels, 1892). Others
based their ambitions to engineer the scientic management
of the poor on their religious beliefs, perceiving disciplined
ordering of the self and of the social world as the only possible
bulwarks against the ever-surging sea of sin (Yeo, 1991: p. 51).
Soon enough, however, surveying also reached the policy
arena: in England, Royal Commissions were established in
order to investigate a range of issues, from the condition in coal
mines to the trafc problems in London City. Here, surveying
was no more the concern of afuent individuals but was
intended to provide empirical evidence for public policy,
particularly in its regulatory form.
When other forms of early funding emerged, they were
based on a different set of core assumptions. As a sort of
transitory vehicle, the efforts of the German Verein fur
Socialpolitik contained the political interests of its members,
but those were nonetheless intertwined with the social
political program of the German Reich (Stremmel et al.,
2006). As the social and behavioral sciences made their way
into universities, they gained in autonomy (Shils, 1992); the
relation between ethical principles underpinning the political
purpose of funding changed, as did the epistemic expecta-
tions, but the strong connections were not lost. Nor did the
older funding regimes lose traction. The statistical ofces
remained important centers of knowledge production and
politically relevant, even though their practices were no longer
considered the vanguards of research. With others, a division
of labor was taking place. The philanthropic individual con-
ducting research on his own (since its exponents were
predominantly male) in the nineteenth century was replaced
by the philanthropic foundation (based on the wealth of
a philanthropic individual, nonetheless) that gave grants and
fellowships to scholars (Bremner, 1988; Lingelbach, 2011).
The nancial means of the foundations were often enormous;
their scientic philanthropy relied on the idea that the
development of fair, objective, expert knowledge would
enable all Americans [and eventually citizens of other nations,
TK] voluntarily to coordinate and rationalize their actions
(Lagemann, 1992: p. 29).
As the last quote already indicates, the foundations were
partly responsible for a major spatial shift of the center of social
and behavioral sciences. From the 1920s on, that center was in
Northern America, and no longer in Europe. In particular, the
American foundations were critical in establishing what could
be called big science in the social and behavioral sciences
through funding large projects (at least in comparison to other
budgets in those disciplines), and in establishing new research
institutions, within the US as outside (e.g., Hauptmann, 2012).
Not surprisingly, thus, the processes of disciplining and
professionalizing were strongly enforced by the foundations
funding activities (e.g., Capshew, 1999).
552 Funding of Social Science, History of
The US were also the rst to see the advent of yet two other
funding regimes that emerged during the rst half of the
twentieth century: independent funding agencies and research
councils, and research commissioned by governmental insti-
tutions to (formally independent) research institutions. Before
World War II, funding agencies and research councils relied
mostly on privately raised money; only after the war, they were
endowed by public funds. Despite the considerable differences
that those funding agencies had in their national setting of
science policy (Braun, 1997), they all were based on the idea
that spending taxpayers money through independent inter-
mediary organizations would foster technological innovation
and thus eventually stimulate economic growth.
The funding agencies established two important features of
research in the social and behavioral sciences: The rst feature
was that research practices could be distinguished into basic
and applied research. As they were supporting the former, the
main purpose of funding agencies would become known as
policy for science (Pulparampil, 1978: pp. 4345). The
second feature was that research should be done primarily in
the form of projects. The social and behavioral sciences were
often at the fringes of agencies funding portfolio, since their
main focus was on the natural sciences (although in the US and
in the UK, research councils dedicated to the social and
behavioral sciences also emerged). Still, agency funding prob-
ably had important effect on the developments particularly of
psychological and economics research that successfully claimed
to fulll the epistemic expectation of scientic projects.
At the same time, the political agenda of governments was
diversifying, and the applied side of funding was taking off,
too. Ministries and executive agencies commissioned research
projects, either within their own administrative bodies, or to
independent research institutions; sometimes they also sup-
ported entire institutions through block grants in order to
facilitate long-term research on a certain subject. The most
powerful funder became the U.S. Department of Defense,
including its subbranches, such as the Air Force, which founded
the RAND Corporation and its system analysis; other examples
were intelligence analysis and counterinsurgency (Project
Camelot). Yet another state-funded activity that became
widespread in that period concerned academic exchange not
only a cheaper version than institution or project funding, but
also differently framed under the key word of cultural diplo-
macy (Arndt, 2006). Commissioned research became a stan-
dard practice of governmental departments, and a major source
of funding for social and behavioral sciences.
Obviously, the split between knowledge produced
primarily for academia and knowledge produced primarily for
political usage can be found in those two new funding regimes.
Since then, no new funding regime has emerged sensu stricto.
Rather, as the existing funding regimes were growing in number
and size, they were increasingly subjugated under an all-
encompassing metaregime of performance, with evaluation,
assessment, and accounting as its basic means. In Great Britain,
for example, the Research Assessment Exercise was established
with the hope to channel funding more effectively, essentially
rewarding more productive researchers; in the US, a program
called Star Metrics now wants to verify how many jobs are
created by grants of the National Science Foundation. In
general, science policy has made a fundamental change in its
focus, its principle now being science for policy. Even basic
research funding now must prove its impact, either in the
academic world or through societal relevance.
A very popular recent categorization distinguishes research
activities along two axes: whether or not the result is intended
to be useful, and whether or not it aims at answering a funda-
mental scientic question (Stokes, 1997). From the four types
of research that are constructed through this scheme, the one
falling into Pasteurs Quadrant is expected to be the most
relevant, because it is supposedly advancing fundamental
knowledge and at the same time expected to solve practical
problems. Consequently, this kind of research is nowadays the
most sought-for through funding schemes. For the social and
behavioral sciences, this has on the one hand opened up new
elds of activities such as accompanying research, because it
is supposed to help knowledge produced by research in the
natural sciences to better relate to the public. On the other
hand, It has increased doubts about the usefulness of research
in some domains of social and behavioral sciences, as the
recent debates in the US as well as in Europe bear witness (for
Europe, see Mayer et al., 2013).
Controversies of Funding
The overview in the previous chapter treated the emergence of
funding regimes as if they were unilaterally the same across the
world. In some sense, there are indeed remarkable similarities
across the globe, probably due to the internationalization of
the academic world and the intrinsic power exerted by the US.
That should not imply, of course, that funding regimes should
be perceived as historical phenomena without links to political
narratives and powers; quite the contrary. It would be inter-
esting for more detailed historical analysis to nd out the
nuanced differences between similar funding modes in
different regions of the world.
In historical terms, the different funding regimes (and their
underlying ethical principles) have had impact on the shape of
the social and behavioral sciences, at least in a very general
sense. The regimes themselves came not into being without
active shaping of social and behavioral scientists; one (in terms
of funding involved) minor, but well-investigated case study
that makes this very clear was the (failed) project of Max
Webers Presse Enquete (Weischenberg, 2012). The funding of
big science projects in the twentieth century would not have
happened without crucial lobbying by representatives of
economics, sociology, political science, psychology, and
neither would have new institutions be founded. Similarly, the
developments regarding the broader relationship of science
and politics since the 1950s briey outlined in the previous
chapter are unthinkable without the theoretical concepts of
economists and scholars in the eld of science and technology
studies, as they provided the basis for the narratives of science
policy (Godin, 2009).
Often, the impact of funding is discussed within the social
and behavioral sciences only on a polemical level. Two such
controversies deserve to be looked at more closely. One
concerns the (mostly historical) question whether research
funding had any sort of impact on the shape of social and
behavioral science disciplines; the other concerns the question

(focused primarily on the present) what the current forms of
legitimation procedures of research funding decisions imply for
research in those disciplines.
Has dedicated funding inuenced the development of
disciplines and elds in the social and behavioral sciences? Not
surprisingly perhaps, this question has been posed in several
disciplines in parallel and is always closely related to the issue
of methodology. As is known today, there have been different
phases of social research methods (Crothers and Platt, 2010). It
seems natural to ask if those phases were connected to the
emergence of new funding regimes. In sociology, the debate
was sparked by the question whether the Rockefeller Founda-
tion for a long time the most afuent foundation active in
funding social scientic research had been preferred certain
methodical approaches over others (Fisher, 1993). The allega-
tion is difcult to get away with, although studies show that it is
not vindicable (Platt, 1996). Similar allegations have made in
political science, where the exclusion of political theory as one
subeld of the discipline were supposedly the result of the
work of foundations and political scientists alike (Hauptmann,
2006). Those historical debates, of course, have to be seen as
one means in a broader context of redening the disciplinary
eld in the present and in order to change them for the future
(cf Engelmann, 2010). However, the larger issue at stake
reecting the role of funding for social and behavioral
research in face of historically shifting purposes and practices
remains underdeveloped.
Similarly, the current metaregime of performance begs the
question how the shape of social and behavioral sciences is
affected by it. While most scholars in the disciplines will not
deny that meritocracy is an important feature in the academic
world, there is often disgust displayed when the procedures
established nowadays for legitimating the distribution of
funding projects and researchers are subject of many such
procedures, from peer reviewing, evaluation, reporting, to
accounting are discussed. It is assumed that the research-
funding apparatus established today has massive inuence on
language, style, scope, and behavior of researchers (Billig,
2013). Again, however, research is rather limited on that issue.
Changing Modes of Legitimacy
An important, though still underdeveloped question on the
relation between funding and research activities in the social
and behavioral sciences concerns the rhetoric of legitimacy of
funding distribution over time. Lutz Raphael has recently
suggested to divide the history of the social sciences into four
congurations, in which not only the ideas and discourses and
experts are taken into considerations, but also clients, institu-
tions, and technologies prevalent in each of those periods.
According to Raphael, the period of social reform lasted until
1910 and was superseded by the period of social engineering.
From the 1950s on, planned modernization took place, which
was replaced by the age of therapy, from the 1980s on
(Raphael, 2012: pp. 5054). Broadly, those periods correspond
with waves of new funding regimes as shown in the previous
chapter. It is useful to look at those congurations also as a way
to broadly understand the respectively accepted form of legit-
imacy for funding during each of those periods.
Funding of Social Science, History of 553
In the rst conguration, when experts and clients were
often close if not the same, and institutions as well as tech-
nologies not much advanced, funding required hardly any
legitimation. The next period of social engineering, which
saw the rise of the foundations, brought an important
innovation. The large funds of the foundations required some
sort of decision-making instrument. In the case of the Rock-
efeller Foundation, this was done by in-house and indepen-
dent scholars who had gained the trust of the foundations
administrators (Fleck, 2011). Here, networks of trusted peers
fullled the task of justifying the distribution of funds to
scholars and researchers. When states entered the domain of
research funding on large scale, the need to legitimate was
further advanced. In the case of the agencies funding basic
research, where the decision-making was basically left to
(social) scientists, peer reviewing became the ultimate
procedure of justication. In the case of commissioned
research, the issue remained more in the dark, but it is
obvious that it was left to a good part in the common interest
between researchers and those commissioning the research.
In the age of therapy, the metaregime of funding performance
has given procedures such an important role that some of
them, in particular decision-making, have become a topic of
research themselves. Occasionally, a study in this eld even
makes it on the best seller list of social science literature (cf
Lamont, 2009). Such studies bring great value to our
understanding of legitimation procedures in the academia.
What is missing, so far, is how those procedures inuence the
daily practice of scholars in the social and behavioral
sciences.
See also: Academic Research and Employment: Recent
Changes in Europe and the United States; Awards, Public
Recognition, and Evaluation; Cold War: Impact on Social and
Behavioral Sciences; Methodology of the History of the Social
and Behavioral Sciences; Quantication in the History of the
Social Sciences; Social Science Infrastructure: European Union
(Resourcing and Funding); Social Science and Universities.
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