The Poor Relation: A History of Social Sciences in Australia

by Stuart Macintyre

What are the social sciences? What do they do? How are they practised in Australia? The Poor Relation examines the place of the social sciences - from economics and psychology to history, law and philosophy - in the teaching and research conducted by Australian universities. Across sixty years, The Poor Relation charts the changing circumstances of the social sciences, and measures their contribution to public policy. In doing so it also relates the arrangements made to support them and explains why they are so persistently treated as the poor relation of science and technology.

416 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2010

About the author

Stuart Macintyre was Emeritus Laureate Professor of the University of Melbourne and a Professorial Fellow of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. He was president of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia from 2007 to 2009 and a life member of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. With Alison Bashford, he edited the Cambridge History of Australia (2013). His last book, published posthumously, is The Party: The Communist Party of Australia from heyday to reckoning (2022), the second volume in his history of the Communist Party of Australia.

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was funded as a history of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and it's predecessors, spanning WWII to the present. The book quite openly concedes that these organisations were/are underachieving afterthoughts of Australian academic life, and due to the lack of significant activities by the orgs, MacIntyre is at times reduced to writing about what small sums of money were spent on, who attended the annual meetings and how many academics let their memberships lapse that year. The book says just a tiny bit about trends in the subject matter of Australian social science research over the years. I had expected it to focus on this. Perversely, this book is best as a history of government policies towards the tertiary education sector and to staffing, student and research funding levels in the various fields over time.