SOCIAL SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ACTION IN AGRICULTURE.

This article discusses social science and social action in agriculture. The author was with the Bureau of Agricultural Economics when the Department of Agriculture was reorganized in October 1938. He has been with it since then. He had worked with three major agricultural action programs in the years just preceding. Therefore, he feels that his greatest contribution in this paper can be made by discussing research and action in agricultural programs. The author is of the views that many so-called scholars in sociology have not been and are not research men at all. They spend most of their time seeking authoritative documentation of their ideas instead of observing and analyzing social phenomena. Science is not built in this fashion. The science of sociology is being forwarded primarily by research men who are studying living social phenomena, such as crime, poverty, population, community organization, social institutions and agencies, and others. The author does not mean to say that study of the past is not research, nor that deduction has no place in scientific thinking.