Industry funding pulled the Frankfurt Institute toward pragmatic applied research against Adorno’s wishes.

Evidence

One of the consequences of the Mannesmann study was that the Rationalization Commission for German Industry (Rationalisierungs-Kuratorium der Deutschen Wirtschaft) provided the Institute of Social Research with finance for research assistantships in industrial sociology. It was already doing this for the Cologne Research Institute of Sociology and Administrative Studies, under the direction of René König, and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hamburg, under the direction of Helmut Schelsky. This made Adorno very uneasy. He saw the danger of becoming committed to industrial research of a kind . . . we have certain reservations about' which could lead to competition with Schelsky and König on their own level’. But in the Institute’s next prospectus, published in 1958, it was proudly statedunmistakably in Horkheimer’s wordsthat the study carried out in Mannesmann Ltd in connection with the atmosphere in the workplace, and two further research projects, on the reasons for fluctuations in the mining industry and on workers’ ideas about old age, `served the practical purposes of German industry and government administration’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2107

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the tension in chapter 70s about the Institute’s postwar funding and institutional compromises; connects to discussions of critical theory’s accommodation with capitalist institutions. — connects to: Losing financial independence forced the Frankfurt Institute to accept research contracts — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1858