As academic disciplines, the social sciences are quite young in China, having been banned in the People’s Republic from 1952 until the early 1980s. At the same time, they trace back to an extensive tradition, especially the sociological research in China that, along with North America and Western Europe, formed a third flourishing center during the 1930s. During the period of its abolition, Chinese social science became a forgotten chapter in the international history of science. Social scientific study of China fell into oblivion not only because it was neglected for so long in China itself and because of language barriers, but also because of the self-reference of American and European research.

This chapter deals mainly with institutionalized social science in China, which, in a strict sense, includes also studies that do not deal specifically with China. It is concerned especially with what I will call “the Chinese social sciences,” referring to those approaches that aim to sinicize or indigenize the social sciences, as well as with approaches seen as a distinct “Chinese school” of social science. I emphasize specific aspects of this definition, and describe some central junctures in the development of the social sciences in China. The chapter starts with the native domains of learning of the Chinese scholars during the Qing Dynasty; it aims to describe these domains as the intellectual space that served as the framework for the reception of Western sciences as a new body of knowledge. The second section shows how a social space for scientific development was created after the abolition of the imperial examination system during the 1920s, and how sociology, economics, and political science became academic disciplines.

Survey research has a relatively short history, since the systematic practice of aggregating preferences dates back only to the nineteenth century. Scholars, statesmen, and businessmen had an interest in the nature of public opinion long before the nineteenth century, of course, but technically sophisticated attempts to quantify popular sentiment trailed far behind theorizing and discussion of it. In the twentieth century, most Western democracies witnessed a tremendous surge in survey research with the emergence of large commercial firms devoted to counting individual opinions, preferences, and attitudes. This chapter will focus on three moments in the development of survey research: the proliferation of the straw poll in mid nineteenth-century America, the vital period between 1930 and 1950 across several national settings, and contemporary debates over the uses of opinion research in a democratic state.

The meaning of the term “public opinion” itself is tied to historical circumstances, as are methods for measuring it. These days, we have all become accustomed to the constant flow of polling data in our mass media, and to their underlying assumption – that public opinion can be defined as the aggregation of individual opinions. But public opinion has not always been conceptualized or measured in an aggregative fashion. For example, Jacques Necker (1732–1804), the finance minister of France, proposed that public opinion was equivalent to the “spirit of society.” Public opinion was a wise court, embedded in communication and conversation, which made societies stable, rising up slowly and rationally when necessary in response to important events. Necker viewed the salons of the period (elite drawing-room discussions of politics, art, and religion) as manifestations and indicators of public opinion – a far cry from the polls and surveys of today.

History plus the social sciences: This has been a common formula for more than a century. It has produced extensive discussions and an enormous literature, often quite repetitive, seeking to explain what the relationship between history and the social sciences should be, could be, and cannot be. Still, the terms of the debate have not stabilized. At once epistemological and methodological, the debate also involves power struggles among disciplines and the social representations that they nourish and reflect. For this reason, experiences differ from one country to another. This essay will concentrate on three principal experiences, those in Germany, France, and the United States.

THE PROBLEM POSED

Despite some distant precedents, the problem was not attacked directly until the period when the social sciences were recognized as autonomous disciplines and institutionalized in academia. This was the period from the 1870s to the 1880s – the American Gilded Age – For the sciences of politics and economics and to a lesser degree for sociology, and from 1880 to 1900 in France’s Third Republic, where university reforms opened the way for the scientific disciplines of geography, sociology, psychology, and economics. In both America and France, these new sciences embodied the demands for objectivity, method, and positive knowledge, and they expressed the dominant ideologies of progress. The German disciplines provided models for many other countries, but the German social sciences developed in the Humboldtian university within a cultural system built around philosophy, and their ascent appeared threatened at the end of the nineteenth century by the unity of the ideal of Bildung, or cultivation.

Since European explorers first began studying Africa, the continent has served as a testing ground for theories central to the development of science generally and of social theory in particular. Research conducted by sociocultural anthropologists, economists, and political scientists in Africa has generated concepts and theories of great importance to the disciplines. The impact of the social sciences on Africa has been equally far-reaching. Policy makers and development planners have tried to employ the social sciences as a means of bringing about social transformation since the colonial days. The development of the social science disciplines by Africans – the subject of this chapter – has been crucially shaped by all these efforts.

Writers on the social sciences in Africa can be divided into two polemical camps. The first is made up of Afrocentric scholars who are preoccupied with correcting unequal power relations in knowledge production. They try to show that there are other ways of knowing than those taught by conventional science. They also try to expose the exclusion of African knowledge systems from university curricula and the history of science, as well as the marginalization of African scholarship in the global academic community. The other side downplays the significance of these power relations and advocates a universal system of scientific knowledge production, one that includes an African role. Lacking a common language, the two camps effectively talk at cross purposes and are engaged in polemical nondialogue. Rather than taking a position in this debate, I will discuss features of the social sciences in Africa that both sides must take into account.

How do we write the history of social science? There are problems even with the name. In English alone, “sciences of man,” “moral sciences,” “moral and political sciences,” “behavioral sciences,” and “human sciences” have been among its many predecessors and competitors. Their proliferation reflects the unsettled nature of this broad subject matter. All are capable of giving offense, both by exclusion and by inclusion. Many have long and contradictory histories.

Consider the career of the “moral sciences.” The phrase “sciences morales et politiques” was introduced in France about 1770. In 1795 it was enshrined as the official label for the “second class” of the Institut de France (the former Académie des Sciences was the first class), until this nest of critics was reorganized out of existence by Napoleon in 1803. Restored in 1832, the official institution of the moral and political sciences was now suitably conservative, emphasizing philosophy and individual morality. John Stuart Mill, an admirer of Auguste Comte’s “sociology,” included in his enduringly influential 1843 treatise on logic a section aiming to “remedy” the “backward state of the moral sciences” by “applying to them the methods of physical science, duly extended and generalized.” A German translation of Mill’s work rendered “moral sciences” as Geisteswissenschaften – not the first use of that German term, but an influential one. It referred to the sciences of Geist, which could be translated back into English as “spirit” or “mind.” In German, this remained a standard label until well into the twentieth century. It was understood to indicate that such studies had a moral and spiritual character, quite unlike the sciences of nature.

During the late nineteenth century, geography was institutionalized as a discipline with ties to both nature and culture, but it was divided into several distinct national schools and competing currents of thought. The chronology of ruptures over the past century also differed by country: The notion of a “modern” geography took hold in the early 1900s, while the diffusion of what was called the “new geography” occurred during the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, and during the 1970s in continental Europe. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the expansion of geography had not altered the segmentation of the discipline. Nonetheless, several general tendencies – geographic, epistemological, and institutional – transformed the discipline during the second half of the twentieth century. Geographically, the center of gravity of the discipline shifted after the Second World War from the countries of “Old Europe,” where it had first flourished – in Germany, France, and Great Britain – toward the United States and the Anglophone world. Beginning during the same postwar period, geography was incorporated into the human sciences rather than the earth sciences, to which it had earlier been attached, inaugurating a greater variety of practices and interactions with the social sciences, especially economics, although after 1980 geography also began to explore its links with the humanities. Finally, the development of new markets after 1950 diversified this formerly professorial discipline, so that training in geography became oriented toward spatial planning, the environment, geopolitics, and social expertise.

Accounting is one of the most influential forms of quantification of the late twentieth century. It creates the apparently objective financial flows to which certain Western societies accord such significance, and it makes possible distinctive ways of administering and coordinating processes and people. For a vast range of occupations, from shop floor workers and divisional managers to doctors and teachers, the calculative practices of accounting seek to affect behavior and to constrain actions in a manner and to an extent unimagined a century ago. Yet accounting is also one of the most neglected and least visible of all the quantifying disciplines. While the concepts and practices of the economist, the statistician, and the actuary have received detailed academic scrutiny, those of the accountant have been left in the shadows or relegated to a subsidiary role within a larger story. Only recently has this begun to change.

When accounting does become the object of public scrutiny, this typically concerns the external face of accounting, the reporting of the financial condition of business enterprises to shareholders and other outside parties, and the auditing of such reports. But accounting also has a “hidden” dimension: the financial monitoring, reporting, and evaluating that takes place inside an organization, and is typically treated as confidential even within the firm. This aspect, called management or cost accounting, is made up of practices such as budgeting, costing, and investment evaluation. It is the focus of the present chapter.