Per Wisselgren: “'A machinery for internationalizing social research': Alva Myrdal, UNESCO, and the Bureaucratic Making of International Social Science"

UNESCO’s Social Sciences Department (SSD), set up in 1946, quickly became one of the transnational key institutions in the rapidly expanding field of international social science in the early Cold War era. In an ongoing book project, I am investigating SSD’s ideas and practices in their organizational and geopolitical contexts during Alva Myrdal’s directorship in 1950-1955. This chapter draft is having its thematic focus on the everyday bureaucratic practices and administrative routines of the SSD (whereas the other three main chapters are concerned with the organizational, visionary and geopolitical aspects, respectively). The chapter makes three central claims: first, that the single most important aspect to take into account in order to understand the seemingly messy day-to-day activities of the SSD, as well as its broad range of projects and other activities, is the program-making procedure; second, that the very design of this procedure also defined the more exact role and agency of the SSD staff by large, as well as its individual members, Myrdal and her predecessors included; third, that our focus on the bureaucratic practices at the same time gives us reason to pay special attention to the systematic but less recognized efforts of the SSD to improve the communicative infrastructure for international social science.

Illustration: Alva Myrdal in a meeting with staff members in her office in the UNESCO House, Paris 1955 (Idun, 39/1955).