This project has been concerned with the international organising of the social sciences during the early Cold War era, 1945-1960. Empirically, the project was focused on UNESCO's Social Sciences Department (SSD) and Alva Myrdal's period as its Director, 1951-1955. Its more specific aim was to analyse the ideas and practices of the SSD and Myrdal in organisational and geopolitical context. Originally four case studies were planned: 1) “UNESCO’s Social Science Department – a brief history of an international boundary organisation, 1946-1960”; 2) “Alva Myrdal goes global 1945-1961 – a biographical approach to scientific cosmopolitanism”; 3) “Alva Myrdal as Director of UNESCO’s Social Science Department, 1951-1955 – a practice-oriented approach”; 4) “Cold War international social science organisations in geopolitical context – SSD, ISSC, ISA and IIS”.

The overall aim, the research questions and the empirical focus of the project have remained the same. However, a change regarding the project design is that the chronological frame has been restricted, from 1945-1960 to 1945-1955, due to the rich archival sources, the organisational complexity of the topic, and the geopolitical changes during the period under study. As a consequence, the internal balance between the case studies has been slightly displaced, in the sense that the first article has been expanded into a more general and synthesizing study, including research questions (about Myrdal’s role as SSD Director and the geopolitical impact) that were originally planned for the third and fourth case studies, whereas the second case study has been concentrated on Myrdal’s social scientific internationalism in relation to other forms of contemporary internationalism. In practice, this means that the two first case studies cover the most important research questions of the project.
    
THREE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS OF THE PROJECT

The most important result of the project concerns the organisational development of UNESCO’s SSD from its inception in 1946 up until 1955. Existing research on the early history of UNESCO’s SSD has either been narrated from a relatively uncritical insider’s perspective or restricted to the epistemological aspects. By focusing on the organisational aspects, and more specifically on the organizational structuration of agency spaces on different levels – within SSD, in relation to UNESCO and to the UN system at large – and over time, this project discerns four phases distinguished by organizational changes that affected not only the formal aspects of SSD, but also the scope and direction of its activities as such. Taken as a whole, it is shown that UNESCO’s SSD during the period was transformed from a hybrid international organization, which shared the optimistic vision of one-worldism, to an intergovernmental organization considerably more open and vulnerable to external geopolitical pressures.

A second result is that the project offers a systematic and detailed analysis of Myrdal’s role as SSD Director. In the same article, it is shown how Myrdal managed to make use of the relatively wide agency space available – in a different way than her predecessors – by drawing on her earlier experiences of organisational collaborative work and on the organisational overview acquired during her term as Director at the UN headquarters in New York. Moreover, the article argues, that Myrdal’s decision to leave UNESCO should be seen in relation to the discrete but principally important constitutional changes implemented at the UNESCO General Conference in Montevideo in 1954 that in practice meant that the agency space of Myrdal, as well as of all Program Directors, drastically decreased.

A third project result is concerned with a close analysis of Alva Myrdal’s social scientific internationalism, its basic ideas, how it was related to and differed from other forms of contemporary internationalisms, and the way it developed during her term as Director. For instance it is shown that Myrdal – in comparison with her predecessors – emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations, applied social science and a more polycentric approach to international social science. Over time she also tended to refer more and more frequently to the Indian case as a principal ”model” for these issues. It is suggested that this circumstance should be seen in relation to Myrdal’s decision to leave UNESCO in 1955 to take up the position as Swedish envoyé and Ambassador in India.

NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS

A research question posed in the original project plan concerned the role played by private American philantropic foundations such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. This question had to be left aside, like questions regarding different gender aspects. The chronological limitation to the period until 1955 has furthermore meant that questions regarding the increasing importance of ”Third World” issues within UNESCO has been played down, like the question about the lines of continuity between Myrdal’s term as Director of UNESCO’s SSD and her activities as Swedish Ambassador in India.

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION

The international aspects are inherent in the very aim and the research questions of the project. Empirically the most important archive, besides Alva Myrdal’s collection in the Swedish Labour Movement’s Archive and Library in Stockholm, has been the UNESCO Archives in Paris. The results of the project have been continuously presented at international conferences and will be published in international journals.

POPULAR SCIENCE

In October 2014 I was interviewed for a short article published on RJ’s homepage (see list of publications below).

TWO MOST IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS

The single-most important publication of the project is the lengthy and synthesizing article mentioned above on ”UNESCO's Department of Social Sciences as an International Boundary Organization, 1946-1955”. The article is currently under review for the open access journal Serendipities: Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences.

Second-most important is the paper ”Alva Myrdal's Social Scientific Internationalism, 1950-1955". This has been presented at three occasions: Teknik- och vetenskapshistoriska dagarna, Lund University, 15-17 April 2015; The Network for the History of Empirical Social Research, Potsdam University, 25-27 juni 2015; The Uppsala STS seminar, Uppsala University, 21 februari 2017. The manuscript is not yet ready for publication, but will be submitted to an international journal relatively soon.

PUBLICATION STRATEGY

The choice of target journal for the first article was easy, given the suitable aim and scope of the journal Serendipities: Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences, in combination with the fact that it is an open access journal that allows lengthier manuscripts.

The second paper on ”Alva Myrdal’s social scientific internationalism 1950-1955” will be submitted to a journal within the areas of the history of social science or intellectual history. Regardless of which journal, I will make sure that the article will be published open access in accordance with the guidelines of RJ. The same complies to the third article under way, ”Organizational Complementarity and/or Rivalry?: IIS vs. ISA – and UNESCO’s SSD as a (Partly Partisan) Mediator of Early Cold War International Sociology”.