Adorno coined the term ‘administrative research’ to describe client-driven media studies

Evidence

At Lazarsfeld’s suggestion, I went from room to room and spoke with colleagues, heard words like likes and dislikes study', success or failure of a program’, of which at first I could make very little. But this much I did understand: that it was concerned with the collection of data, which were supposed to benefit the planning departments in the field of the mass media, whether in industry itself or in cultural advisory boards and similar bodies. For the first time, I saw `administrative research’ before me. I don’t now recall whether Lazarsfeld coined this phrase, or I myself in my astonishment at a practically oriented kind of science, so entirely unknown to me. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 999

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the key Critical Theory distinction between ‘administrative research’ (data serving industry/clients) and critical research — fundamental vocabulary for institutional history of the Frankfurt School.
• QUESTION: First-person voice here is Adorno’s quote (from his radio essay, presumably), and authorship of ‘administrative research’ is explicitly uncertain. Worth chasing the original source.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno came to see critical reflection and team-based empirical research as practically irreconcilable — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2114; Methodological experience softened Adorno’s early hostility to American empirical techniques — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 671

Broader Connections

• Methodological experience softened Adorno’s early hostility to American empirical techniques #qualifies (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 671
• Adorno came to see critical reflection and team-based empirical research as practically irreconcilable #contradicts (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2114