The Frankfurt School’s French unemployment study collapsed for want of trained interviewers.

Evidence

While Lazarsfeld was attempting, at the Princeton Radio Research Project, to reconcile Adorno’s ideas, as a European, to the kind of American empirical researchcontract researchthat Lazarsfeld himself represented at its best, empirical research had entirely ceased at the International Institute of Social Research itself. The various projects on the family, authority and unemployment, which had been drafted as continuations of Studies on Authority and the Family, had slowly ground to a halt. The collection and analysis of empirical materials on as large a scale as possible, which Horkheimer had announced in 1935 in the foreword to Studies on Authority and the Family, had failed to take place. There is no evidence to show that there was even any development of the plan, announced by Horkheimer in the foreword, for a continuation of collective research work. The fusion of constructive and empirical methods' seemed in practice to have been abandoned completely. Continuous collaboration between various specialists’ had been left to improvisation, and had consequently been reduced to a matter of connecting various topics and points of view through frequent personal contacts and informal editorial meetings. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1025 (#expands, via linked claim)

Considerations such as these never extended beyond the hypothetical stage. Further work on the labour project later on consisted only of the Institute’s directors commissioning Lazarsfeld to produce a publishable version of the report, while Adorno tried to round the undertaking off with a series of detailed memoranda. Adorno, Marcuse and others at the Institute agreed, however, that the version produced under Lazarsfeld’s supervision did not meet the Institute’s standards, because it emphasized the quantitative sections while neglecting the qualitative ones, and because of its inadequate integration of quantitative and qualitative analysis. As in the case of the study of the working class in Weimar Germany, therefore, the research was not published. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1563 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Frankfurt School’s promised empirical program quietly collapsed by the late 1930s — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1025; The Frankfurt Institute suppressed its labor study over methodological disagreements with Lazarsfeld — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1563; Institute research projects on family and unemployment quietly collapsed unfinished

Broader Connections

• The Frankfurt School’s promised empirical program quietly collapsed by the late 1930s #expands (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1025
• Institute research projects on family and unemployment quietly collapsed unfinished #expands (0.95)
• The Frankfurt Institute suppressed its labor study over methodological disagreements with Lazarsfeld #complicates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1563