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Understanding Social Change
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Ihe Ogbu~n Vision
Fifty Years Later
NEIL J. SMELSER
The occasion for the symposium on which this volume is based was to
note trends in knowledge in the behavioral and social sciences since the
publication in 1933 of Recent Social Trends in the United States. That
massive book was the report of a special committee of social scientists
commissioned in 1929 by President Herbert Hoover to conduct a survey
on the subject. It was a monumental undertaking, the last in a series of
efforts of the Hoover administration to augment the knowledge base for
social policy. My assignment is to try to capture the main vision of the
report and to indicate the ways in which that vision has changed in the half-
century since its publication.
President Hoover's own account of the reasons for deciding to launch
the commission is terse. He spoke of the requests of "a number of interested
agencies" (Myers, 1934:193), and he said that "the country [in 19291 was
in need of more action in the social field." He added, however, that "our
first need was a competent survey of the facts in the social field." Then,
upon its completion he described it as "the first thorough statement of social
facts ever presented as a guide to public policy," adding, however, that
"the loss of the election prevented me, as President, from offering a program
of practical action based upon the facts" (Hoover, 1952:312~.
Hoover's account reveals his engineering view of social life: first the
facts, then application based upon the facts. Later I will show how closely
this mentality corresponded to that of the Ogburn committee itself.
21
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NEIL J. SMELSER
READING THE OGBURN COMMITTEE REPORT TODAY
As indicated, my main task is to interpret the broad vision of the Ogburn
committee reports and the subsequent vicissitudes of that vision. I should
like to begin, however, by reporting a few reflections that occurred to me
while plowing through the 39 chapters and 1,568 pages of the report.
First, some things apparently never change. In a chapter on "Recreation
and Leisure Time Activities," J. F. Steiner (President's Research Com-
mittee on Social Trends, 1933:931) assured the reader that
football can hardly be regarded as a passing fad which will soon give way to something
else. The huge investments in stadia, which must be paid off in future years, make
almost inevitable the continual approval of the game by college administrative author-
ities. Its capacity to generate gate receipts and its value as an advertising medium are
assets that cannot be ignored.
In his chapter on "Education," Charles H. Judd quoted with approval
Henry Pritchett's condemnation of the consequences of competition in sports
(p. 3771:
=.,__. ~11~ ~;~rA_~;t~r lactic' fat A Inning trim
lively ~11~O U1 UlllV~lalL' tw''so Eva ~ ~AA111AAA~ _. . . . The coach is on the alert to
bring the most promising athletes . . . to his college team. A system of recruiting and
subsidizing has grown up.... The system is demoralizing and corrupt ... the strict
organization and the tendency to commercialize the sport have taken the joy out of the
game.
Second, and in like spirit, there were many other statements that also
might have been written today, even though we know how much things
have changed in 50 years. In one of the chapters, entitled "The Activities
of Women Outside the Home," S. P. Breckinridge concluded that "wom-
en's role in the American community has undergone redefinition during the
past thirty years" (p. 7091. She mentioned industrial advances, the rise of
specialized services, and the decreased size of the family as having elim-
inated many of women's household activities. As a result, she noted that
"large numbers of women through necessity or choice are seeking a new
place in the economic system." Moreover,
the shift is not being made without revolutionary changes in attitudes with regard to
women's responsibilities under the changed surroundings of their lives. Their new
position . . . is giving women a share in the entire life of the community.
Third, and with the aid of historical hindsight, the reader cannot fail to
The report was identified with the name of Ogbu~n even at the time of its publication (Duffus,
1933).
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THE OGB URN VlSlON FIFTY YEARS LATER
23
notice some obviously slighted topics. The committee acknowledged that
the Great Depression of the time "is not explained," though apprehensive
mention of its ravages appears from time to time. A generous interpretation
of this is that the Great Depression struck only a few months before the
committee was formed, and that the committee was as confused as the rest
of the nation by the tragedy. Also, many ideas (Keynes's theory of un-
employment) and measuring techniques (national economic accounts), help-
ful in understanding depressions, were not yet invented. In addition, however,
the Depression was the largest political issue of the day, and Ogburn was
insistent on presenting facts neutrally and avoiding politically sensitive
issues, whether by temperament or out of deference to the President.2
The same reason might account for the virtual absence of materials on
race and ethnic relations- though one chapter dealt with racial conditions-
which seems surprising in light of the presence on the committee of Howard
Odum, the day's leading sociologist of the South. It is inconceivable that
such a report could be written today without major attention devoted to
racial and ethnic issues. In addition to the possibility that race and other
controversial areas were soft-pedaled, it should be remembered that race
relations were then still largely regional rather than national, that the political
mobilization of blacks was in its infancy, and that neither politicians nor
social scientists had begun seriously to challenge the racist foundations of
American social life all of which would contribute to the low visibility
of racial problems.
THE OGBURN VISION OF SOCIAL PROCESS
One reviewer of Recent Social Trends remarked that "the Committee
findings are so unified and eloquent as to give the impression of single
authorship" (Mallery, 1933:2111. That authorship was largely Ogburn's.
It is remarkable to observe the degree to which he dominated the committee
report. Its main statement echoes his perspectives and theories published
earlier and later, and the chapters by others frequently echo those perspec-
tives and theories. It is generally fair, therefore, to treat the report as
manifesting the Ogburn vision of the social sciences.
How best to characterize this vision? It is a view that begins with the
identification of social anomalies and problems that arise through irregular
20n this subject, and on Ogburn's conflicts with fellow committee members Wesley Mitchell and
Charles Memam on the question of the independence of the committee from presidential involvement,
see Harold Orlans (1982) and Baby D. Karl (1969, 1974). Among the chapter authors, Robert Lynd
broke most conspicuously from Ogburn by insisting on stressing normative and political issues.
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NEIL J. SMELTER
social change and ends with the informed amelioration of the anomalies
and the consequent improvement of society.
It is possible to produce a graphic representation of what I have extracted
as the main ingredients of that vision:
Social ~ Social ~ Documer~ta- ~ Social
change (dis- problems lion by oh- invention
continuity jective facts
and lags)
Application Social
by policy amelioration
change
Each ingredient leads to the next, and thus constitutes a more or less
articulate theory of change. In the remainder of my remarks I intend to
take up each ingredient (as well as the transitions between the ingredients)
and present a capsule statement of the committee's view, then indicate how
that view has altered over the decades, mainly as the result of ongoing
social science research and theory development.
SOCIAL CHANGE
One of Ogburn's most notable contributions as a social scientist is the
notion of "cultural lag," which enjoyed great influence in the social sci-
ences for a long period and is still important in the literature on social
change (Ogburn, 1922~. The kernel of this theory finds expression early in
the report itself (p. xiii):
Not all parts of our organization are changing at the same speed or at the same time.
Some are rapidly moving forward while others are lagging. These unequal rates of
change in economic life, in government, in education, in science, and religion, make
zones of danger and points of tension.
More particularly, Ogburn saw changes in technology as well as economic
and governmental organization leading the way of change in modern times,
with the family and church having declined in social significance.
The image of society evoked by this notion is what sociologists call "the
functionalist view," namely, that the different parts of social organization
stand in systematic whether harmonious or disharmonious relationship
to one another, and that changes in one call for changes in another. This
view of society, in various forms, dominated a number of the social sciences
for several decades and still represents a major theoretical position. Sub-
sequent research and theory development, however, have demonstrated it
to be both overdrawn and incomplete. Comparative research on the rela-
tionships between economy and family, for example, have demonstrated
that even in the face of very rapid industrialization, some traditional family
forms, far from being "zones of danger and points of tension," persist and
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25
even facilitate economic development through recruitment and other mech-
anisms. The Japanese family is the classic case in point. The implication
of this kind of research is that the notion of "fit" among the various parts
of society is weaker than the functionalist view would imply, and that many
more diverse combinations of structures are possible. A second line of
criticism and reformulation runs as follows: It is not so much the "fit" or
"misfit" between different structures that account for pressures for persis-
tence and change as it is the power positions of groups or classes with
vested interests and the outcomes of political struggles among these groups.
This second line of development is seen as exposing and correcting for the
political naivete, if not conservatism, of the functionalist position.
SOCIAL PROBLEMS
According to the Ogburn vision, social problems emerge as manifesta-
tions of objective social situations-i.e., discontinuities and lags. For ex-
ample, the automobile, a material advance, generated an outward drift of
the population into suburban areas; the consequent problem was that the
central districts were "left to the weaker economic elements and sometimes
to criminal groups with resultant unsatisfactory social conditions" (Presi-
dent's Research Committee on Social Trends, 1933:xlii). In another ex-
ample, the committee attributed increasing divorce rates to the fact that the
family had fewer economic and other functions, which weakened personal
ties among its members.
In the ensuing decades social scientists have become more sophisticated
in their understanding of what constitutes a social problem. We now see
that social problems emerge as a complex process of interaction between
"objective" social conditions, the criteria people bring to bear in evaluating
those conditions, and the success or failure of efforts of interest groups to
push their particular criteria forward. Consider another example from the
report. In their chapter on "The Population of the Nation," Thompson and
Whelpton brought up the topic of the quality of the population. They argued
that the differential birthrate among the social classes had resulted in "some
deterioration in the biological soundness of the national stock" (a social
problem). Their position on this matter was simply that "as soon as any
agreement can be reached about the method by which 'undesirables' can
be selected from the population, they should be prevented from propagat-
ing" (President's Research Committee on Social Trends, 1933:561. We
would now regard this view as hopelessly naive. The quality of the pop-
ulation is not some kind of objectively given problem. It is a problem for
some (eugenicists) and not a problem for others (the right-to-life movement)
because the ideological priorities of the two groups in the name of which
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NEIL J. SMELSER
problems are identified are different if not contradictory. Whether the
quality of population gets officially identified as a social problem calling
for action depends on the outcome of a political struggle among these and
other interested groups in society.
Social problems, then, can be defined by the presence of "objective
facts" only if there is consensus about the meaning and significance of
those facts. The Ogburn committee, in regarding social problems as the
objectively determinable result of objectively observable lags and discon-
tinuities, was, in effect, imposing a kind of imagined consensus on society.
That kind of consensus rarely exists. We now know that social problems
are not matters of objective fact but matters of an uncertain, disputed set
of both facts and principles. Recognizing this, we can appreciate why such
a large proportion of the debates about social problems are debates not
about the existence of facts but about symbols, about the legitimacy of the
competing sets of criteria by which a factual situation will or will not qualify
as a genuine social problem.
DOCUMENTATION BY OBJECTIVE FACTS
In his introduction to Recent Social Trends, Herbert Hoover spoke of his
desire "to have a complete, impartial examination of the facts" in the
report. In a way this phrase encapsulates the mentality of the social sciences
in the early twentieth century the acme of positive science, which regarded
empirical facts as objective things, waiting to be observed, recorded, and
quantified. This mentality manifested itself in a variety of different ways.
To name a few:
· the pioneering efforts to develop measures in psychology and education,
including the work of Thurstone on measurement of attitudes and Terman
on the measurement of intelligence.
· the reaction of the institutional economists (among them Veblen and
Commons) against what they regarded as the abstract, disembodied theory
of classical economics; as part of this polemic they insisted on the empirical
study of economic life in concrete institutions.
· in anthropology the reaction of He diffusionists (especially Boas) against
classical evolutionary theory, and their insistence on detailed, empirical studies
of the movement of cultural items and artifacts from culture to culture.
· Ogburn's own dismissal of classical evolutionary theory as speculative
and wrong,3 and his insistence that the study of evolution must rest on the
30gburn wrote that the theory of "the inevitable series of stages in the development of social
institutions has not only not been proven but has been disproven" (Ogburn, 1922:57).
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27
"actual facts of early evolution" (Ogburn, 1922:661. Ogburn (1929) cel-
ebrated the rise of scientific social science in his presidential address to the
American Sociological Society in 1929, stressing its emphasis on objective
measurement, verification and truth, and its separation from methods in
other areas such as ethics, religion, education, and propaganda.
Not everybody found comfort in this position. Pitirim Sorokin, sociologist
at Harvard, in a savage review of Recent Social Trends in 1933, bemoaned
what he called "holy and immaculate quantification":
In the future some thoughtful investigator will probably write a very illuminating study
about these "quantitative obsessions" of a great many social scientists, psychologists,
and educators of the first third of the twentieth century, tell how such a belief became
a vogue, how social investigators tried to "measure" everything; how thousands of
papers and research bulletins were filled with tables, figures and coefficients; and how
thousands of persons never intended for scientific investigation found in measurement
and computation a substitute for real thought....4
Be that as it may, Ogburn's preference for stressing objective facts, apart
from opinions and value judgments, held sway in the report itself. The
chapters and monographs, the committee said, "present records, not opin-
ions; such substantial stuff as may serve as a basis for social action, rather
than recommendations as to the form which action should take" (President's
Research Committee on Social Trends, 1933:xciv). The contributors, more-
over, were "bound strictly by the limitations of scientific methods," and
if they occasionally strayed beyond these limitations the reader could see
clearly when they were giving their own opinions (p. XCV).5
Even at the time, this "factual-statistical" representation of the world
was regarded by others besides Sorokin as wanting. Adolph Berle, a member
of Franklin D. Roosevelt's brain trust, commented that the report "has the
barrenness of . . . statistical measurement . . . the desire for objectivity
has been carried entirely too far." And Charles Beard, the historian, re-
marked that "the results [of this report] . . . reflect the coming crisis in
the empirical method to which American social science has long been in
bondage" (Orlans, 1982:91. And in the decades since the acme of Ogburnian
positivism we have come to view the world of empirical facts not so much
4Throughout his review Sorokin assaulted the Ogburn committee report for its multiplication
of meaningless quantitative tables and citations. In a rejoinder Ogburn countered with the assertion
that "only one-tenth of the space is taken up with tables," a statement that constitutes a kind of
ironic confirmation of Sorokin's plaint.
SOgburn wrote a short methodological "note" on the necessity to separate facts and opinions
sharply from one another, but this was not published as part of Recent Social Trends, probably
because not all of the members of the committee subscribed to his position (Bulmer, 1983).
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NEIL J. SMELTER
as a realm of observable and measurable things but rather more as the
purposeful creation of human agents and investigators. This realization,
moreover, has resulted from developments both at the level of theory and
of empirical research. At the theoretical level, early critics of positivism,
such as Talcott Parsons (1937), argued that facts could not be viewed apart
from the conceptual framework by which they are evoked. In his influential
work on the history of science, Thomas Kuhn (1970) argued that both
scientific facts and scientific knowledge are relative to the kinds of para-
digms invented and employed by scientists. And more recently critics like
Jurgen Habermas have hammered away at exposing the ideological and
political foundations of "objective science." The cumulative effect of these
kinds of intellectual development has been to effectively erode the positivist
dream of the early twentieth century.
At the level of social research our assessment of "facts" has also become
more sophisticated. The dominant approach, of course, is still that the
behavioral and social sciences are empirical sciences above all, and we
have improved our measurement techniques and data bases enormously.
But social scientists no longer conceive, as a Durkheim or an Ogburn might
have done, of the crime rate as a "social fact" to be observed. We know,
on the basis of empirical research, that a "crime rate" is a vastly different
phenomenon, depending on whether the investigator consults police records,
observes police in action, asks people whether they have ever been victims
of crimes, or whether they have ever committed crimes. We know also that
every one of these measures is defective in different ways.
We know that there is no such "thing" as public opinion, which can be
measured scientifically by randomly sampling a portion of the population
and interviewing them on a given set of issues. Research has shown that
results of such surveys vary significantly depending on how the questions
are asked, what kinds of people do the asking (whites or blacks, men or
women, investigators dressed in suits or investigators dressed in dirty jeans),
and how people distort their responses on sensitive issues (such as how
much they smoke, drink, or use drugs) (Cannel! and Kahn, 1968~. We have
also come to acknowledge that certain ideological assumptions or biases
are built into some of the measures we use. For example, the fact that, in
the sample suney, we give equal weight to all respondents in analyzing
data reflects a kind of "democratic" assumption that each person's voice
counts as much as another-an unrealistic assumption given what we
know about actual patterns of participation, influence, and power, even in
democratic societies; it is the (perhaps unwitting) translation of the electoral
principle of a democracy into a "one-person, one-response" assumption.
Interestingly, these kinds of acknowledgments make simultaneously for
both greater humility and greater sophistication on the part of social ~n
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vestigators. We are cognizant of the many sources of measurement error
that are generated in the creation and study of social data and in its as-
sessment by investigators (Turner et al., 19841. By the same token, how-
ever, investigators are now equipped systematically to take measurement
errors into account when representing and statistically manipulating data,
by using techniques that would not come to mind within a simple positivistic
perspective.
SOCIAL INVENTION
According to the Ogburn vision (President's Research Committee on
Social Trends, 1933:1xxi) the massive accumulation and description of
social facts can reveal the broad range of social problems generated in a
society undergoing rapid and irregular social change. These problems,
moreover, "can be solved only by further scientific discoveries and practical
inventions."
The imagery of a scientific invention as well as its application per-
vades the Ogburn vision of social reform and the amelioration of social
problems. In the chapter on "The Influence of Invention and Discovery,"
Ogburn and S. C. Gilfillan wrote that "there are social inventions as well
as mechanical ones, effective in social change" (p. 1621. They gave as
examples the city manager plan, group insurance, installment selling, the
passport, and universal suffrage.
The committee (1933:1xxiv) envisioned the need for a massive effort in
the field of social invention:
If one considers the enormous mass of detailed work required to achieve the recent
decline in American death rates, or to make aviation possible, or to increase per capita
production in farming, one realizes that the job of solving the social problems here
outlined is a job for cumulative thinking by many minds over years to come. Discovery
and invention are themselves social processes made up of countless individual achieve-
ments.
Read today, this link between knowledge about social problems and social
invention appears somewhat mechanical and politically naive. First, little
attention is given to the exact mechanism that provides the transition be-
tween the accumulation of knowledge and social invention. In his presi-
dential address to the American Sociological Society in 1929, Ogburn
(1929:5-6) outlined a simple model. Science, he said, is an accumulation
of thousands of verified "bits and pieces of new knowledge. " He envisioned
that this would occur through careful, patient, and methodical work, much
of which could and would be carried out by "dull and uninteresting per-
sons." Once in a while, "one of these little pieces of new knowledge
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NEIL J. SMELSER
becomes of very great significance, and it is then called a great discovery
or a great invention." Ogburn predicted that when the social sciences
became truly cumulative, all social scientists would be statisticians, and
social theory "will have no place in a scientific sociology, for it is not built
upon sufficient data."
This account of what constitutes a scientific discovery does not square
with our more contemporary understanding. We appreciate that the "very
great significance" of an empirical finding derives from the fact that it
demands a substantial change in the way we formulate our general under-
standing of the world- in short, in the way we formulate theory. Typically
a "discovery" is the verification of findings that cannot be accommodated
by an accepted scientific framework. Or, alternatively, a "discovery" in-
volves a reformulation at a theoretical level, such that heretofore unrelated
empirical findings can be related to one another and explained within a new
framework or by a new principle. Put another way, scientific discovery
always involves a relation between empirical findings and theoretical for-
mulation, not an accumulation of empirical findings (Kuhn, 19701.6
Furthermore, with respect to "social inventions" a different set of
processes needs to be invoked. Consider the social invention of universal
suffrage- one of Ogburn's examples. It is an invention in the sense that
it is a contrivance designed to facilitate the operation of the democratic
process. But the role of knowledge in the crystallization of such an
invention is a limited one. Much of the "knowledge" involved has not
been scientific in the sense of having been proven or verified; it has been
more in the nature of lore associated with democratic philosophies, which
takes the form of assumptions about the workings of political influence
and power. Furthermore, the dynamics of the invention were not the
dynamics of assembling knowledge so much as the historical struggles
of different kinds of classes and groups for access to the political systems
of democracies.
More generally, social inventions appear to be the invocation of estab-
lished or imputed knowledge in relation to some desirable social goal or
social value. Consider the historical "invention" of desegregated education
by the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in
1954. In that decision, justices cited a wide variety of social-science findings
to the effect that separate facilities engender feelings of inferiority in blacks.
6For an earlier statement of the relations between empirical findings and theory in the social
sciences, see Robert K. Merton's two essays, "The Bearing of Sociological Theory on Empirical
Research" and "The Bearing of Empirical Research on Sociological Theory" (Melton, 1968:139-
171).
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But as Judge David Bazelon (Eisenberg, 1969:374) argued, reliance on
these findings might have misstated the true basis for the case:
In 1896 the court had approved the '~separate but equal" doctrine. While the country
might then have lacked the sophisticated studies available in 1954, any honest person
would have conceded at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation undoubtedly
would have made Negroes feel inferior. The assumption of inferiority was the rationale
for the practice; no black man could help but perceive that separate train cars and
separate schools kept him in his place.
Since we already knew what Kenneth Clark and others told us, the public could justly
ask of the Supreme Court in 1954, why the law had changed. The answer, of course,
was that our values had changed. Plessy v. Ferguson was discarded not because social
scientists told us that segregation contributed to feelings of inferiority, but because by
1954 enough people in this country believed what they did not in 1896 that to thus
insult and emasculate black people was wrong, and intolerable, and therefore, a denial
of the equal protection of the law to blacks.
In the area of social inventions, as in other areas, the committee's in-
sistence on the neutrality of scientific knowledge and on its separation from
matters of opinion involved a cost. In this case the cost was to miss a great
part of the intricate interplay between knowledge whether imputed or
established-and the political and cultural dynamics of society.
APPLICATION BY POLICY CHANGE
Toward the end of its main report, the committee (p. [xxiii) noted with
approval the "increasing penetration of social technology into public wel-
fare work, public health, education, social work and the courts." In ad-
dition, it called for the formation of groups through the Social Science
Research Council to bring technical advice to decisionmakers, and perhaps
the formation of a national advisory council to focus on "the basic social
problems of the nation."
We have seen, in the discussion immediately preceding, that to invoke
the imagery of technology in the formation of social policies is both limiting
and misleading. The same can be said when that imagery is carried over
to the implementation of social policies. Two observations are in order on
this score.
The first has to do with the adequacy of knowledge in the name of which
policies are implemented. The putative knowledge cited in the Brown v.
Board of Education case was that integrated school facilities would lead to
a decrease in feelings of inferiority on the part of blacks. Scores of studies
on the self-esteem of black children in diverse settings tell us that so many
contingencies affect self-esteem-class, neighborhood, the behavior of in-
dividual teachers, the fortunes of the movement to improve conditions for
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NEIL J. SMELSER
blacks in the larger society, to name a few that it is impossible to posit
a single, direct link between type of schooling and the self-esteem of its
pupils (Smeller and Smelser, 19811. Speaking more generally, most sci-
entific knowledge of all sorts is organized in the form of contingent
predictions, that is, connections between variables (such as government
deficit-spending and rate of inflation, or type of educational arrangements
and self-esteem), with other things held constant. This is the way knowledge
is generated by holding various factors constant, whether by experimental
or statistical manipulation, in order to establish precise causal linkages. But
in the ongoing flow of social life, other things are not constant, and precise
prediction of consequences is impossible because of the interaction among
multiple forces.
A second complexity arises through the fact that any kind of policy,
when implemented, is likely to generate a variety of unanticipated side
effects, not all of which are predictable or likely to be beneficial. Consider
only one example, that of attempting to ameliorate the incidence of suicide
in society. One feasible policy would be to attack intensively the social
conditions of certain high-risk groups, such as the elderly, with the aim of
reducing feelings of isolation, desertion, and despair. In implementing this
kind of policy, a community might embark on a program of establishing
senior citizen clubs as social centers, and making individual agencies, such
as suicide prevention centers, more available to them. Integrating the elderly
into more meaningful social communities might decrease the incidence of
suicide. But in addition, it might facilitate the formation of more definite
political groups among the elderly, which are traditionally antipathetic to
educational programs that call for the passing of school bonds, as well as
to community health programs such as the fluoridation of drinking water-
to programs, that is, that represent the implementation of other social goals,
usually considered also worthy by the planners sponsoring the suicide-
prevention efforts. Knowledge of the diversity of consequences of different
programs may in fact result in more intelligent setting of priorities in plan-
ning. In any event, it provides a different and better model for planning
than that of the direct application of bits of knowledge toward the solution
of specific problems.
SOCIAL AMELIORATION
The last link in the chain of social process is the ultimate impact of
knowledge on society's welfare. As indicated earlier, the committee (pp. xlii-
xliii) was apprehensive about the trend toward higher divorce rates in
American society; "our culture may be conducive to further increases in
divorce unless programs are instituted to counteract this tendency." The
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THE OGB URN VlSlON FIFTY YEARS LATER
problem arising for society is "how . . . to make marriage and the family
meet more adequately the personality needs and aspirations of men and
women and children." And in pointing the way to dealing with such a
problem, the committee once again turned to the importance of knowledge:
"the study of marriage and divorce may not only aid in stabilizing the
family but may also help us on the road to happiness."
My comments up to this point should indicate how many unstated, un-
acknowledged, and contingent steps there are between the objective study
of a social state of affairs and its improvement. But it should also be pointed
out that "happiness" or improvement as a consequence of purposive plan-
ning and programs is itself a contingent matter. Just as the Ogburnian vision
of what constitutes a social problem rests on the committee's imagined
consensus on values, so does its notion of amelioration. In areas where
widespread consensus on values obtains in society for example, the health
of the population-programs like mass immunization are likely to be un-
controversial and widely regarded as ameliorative. When, however, such
consensus is lacking, one group's amelioration is another group's deteri-
oration. Even the Ogburn committee's invocation of the value of "family
stability" as a consensual matter could be and has been challenged by those
committed to communal and other arrangements believed to be superior to
the traditional family. When consensus is lacking, moreover, debate comes
to focus not only on the consequences of programs but on the relative
legitimacy of the competing cultural values by which we judge those con-
sequences. In this respect, the assessment of consequences is as deeply
embedded in the political and cultural dynamics of a society as is the
identification of social problems.
33
A CONCLUDING NOTE
We end with a kind of paradox. Even though the Ogburn report seeks
legitimacy mainly from the framework of positive science, its vision of the
social process is characterized by a number of items of faith: faith in the
capacity of objective knowledge to identify social problems, faith in the
capacity of cumulative knowledge to result in social inventions, and faith
in the capacity of those inventions to solve the social problems. That par-
ticular set of faiths permitted the committee to be simultaneously naive and
pretentious at least as judged by our contemporary understanding about
We role of the behavioral and social sciences in social policy. The same
set of faiths permitted the committee to define social and behavioral sci-
entists as simultaneously disembodied from the political process and es-
sential ingredients to that process. Such are the paradoxical consequences
of the positivist-utilitarian view of the relations between science and society.
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34
NEIL J. SMELSER
Today I believe we would acknowledge the tremendous importance and
utility of the social sciences in the social and political life of the nation. In
its first report (Adams et al., 1982), the Committee on Basic Research in
the Behavioral and Social Sciences acknowledged this and pointed to three
areas in particular: technical contributions in the information-generating
process, such as sample surveys and standardized testing; changes in the
way we do things, such as administer therapy, predict economic trends,
and run organizations; and changes in the way we think about things such
as poverty, race, social justice, and equity in society. Yet the present
committee, mindful of the kinds of complexities and contingencies that
have been touched upon in this discussion, regarded these not as utilitarian
applications of bits of scientific knowledge, but rather as arising from and
intertwined with the social purposes and cultural aspirations of Me nation
as a whole. As a result of change in our Winking about the relations between
science and society, I believe we have become, paradoxically, bow more
sophisticated in our research design and measures and less pretentious in
our aspirations Man we were 50 years ago.
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THE OGB URN VISION FIFTY YEARS LATER
35
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
social scientists
