Out of the blue yonder: The RAND Corporation's diversification into social welfare research, 1946-1968

This dissertation studies the RAND Corporation's diversification beyond military research into social welfare research and policy analysis during the 1950s and 1960s. The RAND Corporation was formed at the conclusion of World War II as a means by which America's finest intellectual talent could be harnessed to national security research and policy making in peacetime. Under a cloak of secrecy, the corporation hosted remarkable advances in such diverse fields as computer and software design, materials science, space systems, and, especially, in social science methodologies such as systems analysis. Yet, on 14 July 1966, RAND's board of trustees decided to terminate the corporation's exclusive military research focus and diversify into social welfare research. Moving aggressively, RAND quickly secured research funds from a wide range of public and private institutions and by 1972 its research and methods had become central to the social welfare movement. This meant that, ironically, the sophisticated methodologies developed at RAND to contemplate nuclear war became some of the nation's fundamental weapons against social injustice.;Drawing from a wide range of documentary sources, including RAND's previously inaccessible archives, this study takes up RAND's decision to diversify as a window on the complex interaction among national security and social welfare research and policy making in Cold War America. It explores the evolution of RAND's early research program, the diffusion of RAND's analytical methods to the Department of Defense and then to the federal social welfare agencies, and RAND diversification from national security research into social welfare policy analysis. The dissertation argues that nonprofit research agencies like RAND represent the most important institutional innovation in post-World War II public policy making--an innovation that both shaped the course of intellectual development and served as a conduit of expertise and methods between the U.S. defense and social welfare establishments.