ECSRC (was SSRC)

<a href="http://www.esrc.ac.uk/files/news-events-and-publications/publications/ssrc-and-esrc-the-first-forty-years/">http://www.esrc.ac.uk/files/news-events-and-publications/publications/ssrc-and-esrc-the-first-forty-years/</a>

Education and Social Science Research Centre

However the story of the birth of the ESRC –

known originally as the Social Science Research

Council – represents a frustrating tale of delay

and procrastination. ‘Time and again, rational

arguments for establishing a Council encountered

a mixture of prejudice coupled with ignorance of what the social sciences were really about,’ is how Lord

Moser, a founding member of the SSRC Council and one of Britain’s most distinguished social scientists,

described the long battle for recognition.

The story begins in earnest in 1944, when the Government’s Department of Scientific and Industrial

Research (DSIR) suggested that post-war development would require the appointment of a council to look

into the ‘psychological reactions imposed by modern life’. But the proposal was swiftly killed off by one of the

DSIR’s existing institutions; the Medical Research Council. ‘We should have some difficulty in accepting the

view that sociology had arrived at such a stage of scientific development that an Advisory Council for

Sociological Research could be justified as an official Government body’, they warned.

Undaunted, in the same year Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee asked Sir John Clapham, a

Cambridge economic historian, to chair a committee to ‘consider whether additional provision was necessary

for research into social and economic questions’. After two years of investigation the Clapham Committee

concluded that social science research in the universities was in a poor state, with just 52 social science

professors and readers throughout the UK (compared to 296 in pure sciences and 176 in medicine). Yet

crucially they recommended against the founding of a Social Science Research Council. Whilst it was

suggested that such a body might be required at some

stage in the future, the immediate priority was for more

resources to be directed to the university social science

sector. Furthermore, the Clapham Report warned, setting

up a council could lead to ‘a danger of a premature

crystallisation of spurious orthodoxies’.

Despite this disappointment the voices in support of a council pressed on and the Labour Party’s Research

Department (led by Michael Young – to become the SSRC’s first Chair) took up the case. They lobbied

Herbert Morrison, then Lord President of the Council and responsible for Government research. Morrison

was sceptical asking at one stage ‘What is social science?’ and the Treasury was, for reasons of both cost and

intellectual snobbery, downright hostile. However, Morrison did initiate a Government Human Factors Panel

which, as part of its drive to improve productivity, identified a need for more research on a wide range of

what today would be called human resource issues.