Forging Social Scientific Elites. The Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna and its Graduates, 1965–2015

Andreas Huber, Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna

The 1950s and 1960s were a period of unabashed technocratic optimism for the social sciences. Spread primarily from the U.S., this mindset eventually reached even the peripheries of the Cold War, such as Austria. Here, the Institute for Advanced Studies (Institut für Höhere Studien, IHS) Vienna was founded in 1963 with the declared goal of bringing international (a.k.a. U.S.) standards of the social sciences to Austria, providing an impetus for the modernization of the country. Paul Lazarsfeld and Oskar Morgenstern were instrumental in its birth, as was the Ford Foundation. The institute’s main instrument was a postgraduate training program: young academics would learn, apply, and disseminate the social science knowledge acquired here at universities and other scientific institutions, but also in the central bank, in higher administration or in business. Even though the general confidence in social scientific expertise would vanish, the institute and its program persisted for five decades – and remained mostly unmodified. More than 1,000 women and men completed the two to three-year courses in sociology, political science and economics, and at times also formal sciences and business administration. They were taught by prominent academics from abroad, including 15 scholars who would later be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. IHS graduates went on to become university professors and bank directors as well as top officials and representatives of international organizations. Anecdotally, many of them have repeatedly emphasized the outstanding importance of the program. Comprehensive empirical evidence, however, has been lacking thus far. This lecture presents the preliminary results of a study of more than 1,000 scholars after their training at the IHS. Based on an online survey, oral history interviews and research in several Austrian archives, the presentation provides a comprehensive analysis of the graduates, including their socio-economic background and their career paths.

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 Presented in Session 4. Academic and Professional Career Trajectories: Meritocratic Dreams and Stratified Realities