The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills

It might seem ironic that precisely the people most urgently concerned to develop morally antiseptic methods are among those most deeply engaged in ‘applied social science' and ‘human engineering. ' Since work in the abstracted empirical manner is expensive, only large institutions can readily afford it. Among these are corporation, army, state, and also their adjuncts, especially advertising, promotion, and public relations. There are also the foundations, but the personnel in charge of these often tend to act under the new canons of the practical, that is to say, the bureaucratically relevant. As a result, the style has become embodied in definite institutional centers: since the ‘twenties in advertising and marketing agencies; since the ‘thirties in corporations and syndicated polling agencies; since the ‘forties, in academic life, at several research bureaus; and during World War Two, in research branches of the federal government. The institutional pattern is now spreading, but these remain its strongholds.

The formalism of these costly techniques makes them especially serviceable in providing the very kind of information needed by those capable and willing to pay for it. The new applied focus has typically been upon specific problems, designed to clarify the alternatives for practical-which is to say, pecuniary and administrative-action. It is not at all true that only as ‘general principles' are discovered can social science offer ‘sound practical guidance'; often the administrator needs to know certain detailed facts and relations, and that is all he needs or wants to know. Since the practitioners of abstracted empiricism are often little concerned to set their own substantive problems, they are all the more ready to abdicate the choice of their specific problems to others.