Applied social knowledge and social planning: Tracing legitimation 2

摘要: Throughout the 20 th century knowledges of various types have played a key role in the legitimation of social planning. For a considerable portion of this time the belief that knowledge developed within the social sciences could be applied to deal effectively with social issues was widely accepted, and the idea of social planning based on the supposedly hard dispassionate facts provided by a rigorous social science analysis gained in authority. Such ascendancy was drastically curtailed in the later decades of the 20 th century, to be replaced, in part, by the emergence of the authority of knowledge derived from empirical research, in particular empirical data derived from participative engagement.