Cold War social science methods carried ethnocentric assumptions while claiming neutrality

Evidence

Modernization theorists didn’t speculate about contemporary societies based on classical texts: they conducted empirical research and gathered data, which was evaluated using quantitative data analysis techniques. These methods were not neutral and value-free but rather imbued with ethnocentric assumptions. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 249

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Rana’s and Aziz’s arguments about how knowledge-production serves imperial policy; ties to the vault’s Islamophobia cluster which treats Orientalist epistemology as policy infrastructure. — connects to: Foundations and state built area studies to serve Cold War empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 240; Social-science methods smuggled Orientalist racism past academic scrutiny — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 261; Cold War-era editors framed emerging markets through liberal Western lenses — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 167
• QUESTION: Which specific quantitative techniques in modernization research carried which specific ethnocentric assumptions? Would be worth pinning down an example for a citable claim.

Broader Connections

• Social-science methods smuggled Orientalist racism past academic scrutiny #corroborates (0.95) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 261