Corporate Uses of Social Science

This panel explores how corporate use of social scientific methods and techniques created, transformed, and supported managerial knowledge in the latter half of the twentieth century. Following Taylor (2016), this panel recognizes a range of practitioners who may be thought of as “corporate:” not only the social scientists working within particular corporations, but also a variety of knowledge producers whose work supported or aligned with corporate managerial practices and imperatives, including management consultants and the business press (see also Drezner, 2017). Each of these papers examines how techniques from the social sciences—including personality testing, brainstorming, and interviewing—were adopted in business, as corporations became important sites for producing and circulating social science knowledge. These papers show how corporate social science responded to and influenced the economic and social turbulence of 1970s-1980s America.In so doing, the panel brings to light the organizational configurations, ideological currents, and intellectual lineages that informed the corporate use of social sciences in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Together, the papers consider both the affordances and the limitations of the corporate generation of social science.