Established in Manhattan in 1923, it maintains a headquarters in Brooklyn Heights[2] with a staff of approximately 70, and small regional offices in other parts of the world.
[citation needed] The SSRC offers several fellowships to researchers in the social sciences and related disciplines, including for international fieldwork.
Other national associations—in anthropology, history, and psychology—designated representatives to the new entity, named the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), in the year following its incorporation on December 27, 1924.
[5] The SSRC was part of a wider Progressive Era movement to develop organizations of expertise that could dispense disinterested knowledge to policymakers.
These organizations would tap leading thinkers in various fields to think creatively about how to address the social and political ills brought on by the Industrial Revolution.
In his 2001 history of the SSRC, Kenton Worcester highlighted four aspects of their founding vision that remain central to this day:[9] Starting in the mid-1920s the Council sponsored annual conferences and launched its Research Training Fellowships program.
As early as 1923, the SSRC cooperated with the National Research Council in a study of human migration from a social standpoint, said to be the institution's first global endeavor.
[14] In the wake of World War II, there was widespread consensus on the need for the United States to invest in international studies.
Liberals and conservatives alike viewed the creation of a large brain trust of internationally oriented political scientists and economists as an urgent national priority.
In this context, the postwar SSRC had two separate agendas, which to some extent were at odds with each other because they entailed very different sets of methodological commitments: ideographic versus nomothetic.
On the other hand, the SSRC also wished to promote behavioralist social science—an agenda that directly descended from Charles Merriam's prewar concerns.
In the words of SSRC historian Eldrige Sibley: "[T]his committee served as the primary planning, coordinating and evaluating agency at the national level for the entire foreign area and language movement in the United States.
[20] Even when area studies occupied center stage, the SSRC continued to support advanced research on social themes of the day.
But the growing tide of American conservatism, begun in the 1950s, eventually led to a populist backlash against federal funding of social research.
[22] The end of the Cold War and the quickening pace of globalization turned the future of area studies into the number one issue for Council management in the concluding years of the 20th century.
Under the stewardship of four successive presidents—David Featherman (1989–1995), Kenneth Prewitt (1995–1998), Orville Gilbert Brim Jr. (1998–1999), and Craig Calhoun (1999–2012)—the SSRC closed down its area committees in favor of a reorganized international program with thematic, trans-regional, and cross-cultural components.
Most SSRC fellowships are conducted through peer-reviewed competitions and offer support for predissertation, dissertation, postdoctoral and other research work.
The Hirschman Prize laureates are Dani Rodrik (2007), Charles Tilly (2009), Benedict Anderson (2011), Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (2014), Amartya Sen (2016), Sheila Jasanoff (2018), and James Scott (2020).
Throughout the decades, SSRC research committees have produced edited volumes that helped to crystallize new fields and invigorate existing ones.