The Short and Happy Life of a Research Consultantship

• Author: Harvey Wheeler
• Date: 01 September 1960
• DOI: 10.1177/106591296001300357
• Published date: 01 September 1960
• Subject Matter: Articles

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associations. But in an especial way, it is an obligation of the universities and
of the people in universities who profess expert knowledge and competence.
The Short and Happy Life of a Research Consultantship
HARVEY WHEELER*
All the expert has to do is to furnish whatever special knowledge the leader lacks and
needs before he decides. The character and the amount of knowledge that is demanded of him
is relative to what the leader himself is socially supposed to know and believes he knows; but in
any case the leader alone determines what use he will make of the expert’s knowledge to supple-
ment his own.f
t
Even had I pondered deeply the meaning of this little passage by Znaniecki
and the section on &dquo;Technological Experts&dquo; which it introduces, I doubt if the
sequence of events which marked my first brief experience as a research con-
sultant would have been seriously altered. It may, however, provide amusement,
and perhaps even instruction for some of my equally virginal colleagues if I fill
in the salient details of my own case history. It is a case which has the further
function of documenting the situation Znaniecki was writing about.
I had received my initiation into the mysteries of political science in the
accepted fashion and emerged certified as a journeyman. I, of course, did not
see myself as an &dquo;expert,&dquo; and especially not in the affairs of state government.
However, I had studied diligently under two men whom I believe to be among
that field’s most illustrious adornments.
This was the period immediately after World War II. This meant that I
had participated in the reaction against &dquo;chartism,&dquo; scientific management, the
short-ballot school, and a coterie of allied notions which suffered in the dol-
drums between the decline of &dquo;scientific administration&dquo; and the rise of mathe-
matical approaches to Organization Theory. &dquo;Organization Man&dquo; had not yet
arisen, nor had his theoretical rationale.
We postwar Ph.D. candidates confidently dismissed all of the old scientific
administration doctrines as shibboliths. We cracked clever jokes about these
woefully unsophisticated &dquo;legalisms&dquo; and &dquo;formalisms.&dquo; The newer social science
disciplines, we agreed, led to more realistic (or, as we put it, &dquo;fruitful&dquo;) results
than did the empiricism of the &dquo;man-hole cover counters.&dquo; Politics, we agreed,
was more revealing about the process of administration than was the &dquo;structural&dquo;
literature of traditional Public Administration. Inevitably, Leonard White
emerged as our scapegoat; the symbol of error. We were embarrassed for him.
But magnanimously we agreed that he had served a useful function for a less
perceptive age. All that was happily behind us.
Nor was all this mere second-hand erudition pirated from the creative
younger faculty members. Most of us in that postwar graduate training period
had previously been &dquo;administrators&dquo; of one sort or another. Or at least, we had
* Washington and Lee University.
† Florian Znaniecki, The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge, New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Lectures, 1940, p. 47.

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tussled mightily with pathological military chartism - an especially virulent
form of the disease. We had fought the good fight against chartism on the
bureaucratic barricades before learning the new and exciting jargon of informal
organization, group dynamics, and applied anthropology.
In our eyes it was the scientific management boys who were the academi-
cians. We were the true realists, they were the &dquo;scholastics.&dquo; We knew, we
assured ourselves, whereof we spoke.
It was with this orientation that I became engaged a few years back in the
preparation of a preliminary report on the office of governor. My report was to
serve as...