In 1950, I was struggling to write something of interest about the subject of social administration for an inaugural lecture at the London School of Economics and Political Science. From a few notes I still have about that anxious summer, I can see that I did not want to claim too much for the subject. Generalists, and those who conceive their subject as having an integrative function in teaching and research, are confronted with a particular occupational hazard in attempting to give reasons for their existence. In the eyes of others, they may seem to be saying, ‘Why then, the world’s mine oyster’. This impression may also be supported at times by the tendency of social administrators to work in areas of thought and action neglected by other social scientists; they become interested in, for example, organisation, structure and development relating to the roles of family planners, town planners, architects, lawyers, nurses, doctors and other professional groups, and they start asking economic, social or administrative questions about institutions and systems which might properly be thought, on a strictly departmental view of the social sciences, to be infringing the unwritten rules of academic trespass.

Understandably then, I was cautious in 1950. For a relatively new subject, amorphous and obviously capable of territorial expansion, there were dangers of being accused of trespass in the even broader acres of sociology, economics or public administration. At the same time, there were others in the social sciences, sociologists and economists in particular, who were claiming that their subjects could, given adequate support by society, unlock the doors to rational decision-making in certain areas of social policy and resource allocation. There were, as Sprott (1962) subsequently described them, the ‘fact-gatherers’ (an industrious but rather grubby group), the ‘method-men’ (a somewhat sinister statistical brigade), the ‘sociological bird-watchers’ (with muddy boots and rural lisps) and, in the rear, a varied collection of aloof and straggling theorists.

One could be equally amusing about social administrators: the pragmatic engineers of incremental change (addicted to lonely short-distance running), the politicians in academic disguise (frequenting the murky corridors of power), the income-maintenance men (a particularly earnest lot), the illegitimate social historians, and so on.