The Department of Social Relations for Interdisciplinary Social Science Studies, more commonly known as the "Department of Social Relations", was an interdisciplinary collaboration among three of the social science departments at Harvard University beginning in 1946. Originally, the program was headquartered in Emerson Hall at Harvard before moving to William James Hall in 1965. While the name "Social Relations" is often associated with the program's long-time chair and guiding spirit, sociologist Talcott Parsons, many major figures of mid-20th-century social science also numbered among the program's faculty, including psychologists Gordon Allport, Jerome Bruner, Roger Brown, and Henry Murray ; anthropologists Clyde and Florence Kluckhohn, John and Beatrice Whiting, Evon Z. Vogt ; and sociologist Alex Inkeles. Many of its graduate students also went on to be major figures in US social sciences during the latter part of the twentieth century; their work tends towards strong interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches. Allport and Boring discussed the origins of the department's name in the April 1946 issue of the American Psychologist: Social Relations sponsored or collaborated in a number of research studies characterized by explicit cross-cultural comparisons and multidisciplinary approaches to problems of policy or social theory. Major projects included the Six Cultures Study ; a multidisciplinary analysis of Soviet culture and society, published in part as How the Soviet System Works; and the Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures during the 1950s, which examined five very different communities living in the same region of Texas: Zuni, Navajo, Mormon, Spanish-American, and Texas Homesteaders. The curriculum of the Harvard Social Relations had four inter-related components:
The program disaggregated into its component departments around 1972, though a certain interdisciplinarity remained throughout the 1970s. A similar program at Yale, the Institute for Human Relations, also now disbanded, developed the , a cross-cultural database for comparative research, administered by Carol and Melvin Ember.
Jean Lipman-Blumen, sociologist and leadership scholar
Jean Mandler, cognitive psychologist
, social and personality psychologist
Stanley Milgram, social psychologist
Richard Price
Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, feminist theorist and psychological anthropologist
Renato Rosaldo, cultural anthropologist
Barbara Rogoff, developmental and cultural psychologist
Richard A. Shweder, psychological anthropologist and cultural psychologist
Neil Smelser, sociologist
Fred L. Strodtbeck, social psychologist
Abby Stewart, personality and feminist psychologist
Marc J. Swartz, cultural anthropologist
Charles Tilly,, sociologist, historian, political scientist
Michael Wallach, social psychologist
Barry Wellman,, sociologist
Interlocutors
, psychologist
, cultural anthropologist
Edward Shils, sociologist
Selected publications
Bauer, Raymond A., Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhohn. 1956. How the Soviet System Works: cultural, psychological, and social themes. New York: Vintage.
Homans, George Caspar. 1984. Coming to My Senses: The Autobiography of a Sociologist. Medford, MA: Routledge.
Inkeles, Alex; with D.J. Levinson; Helen Beier; Eugenia Hanfman; Larry Diamond. 1997. National Character: a psycho-social perspective. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Kluckhohn, Florence Rockwood and Fred L. Strodtbeck. 1961. Variations in value orientations. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.
Munroe, Ruth H., Robert L. Munroe, Beatrice B. Whiting, eds. 1981. Handbook of cross-cultural human development. New York: Garland.
Parsons, Talcott. 1949. The Structure of Social Action. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Vogt, Evon Zartman and Ethel M. Albert Vogt. 1966. People of Rimrock; a study of values in five cultures. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Whiting, Beatrice and John Whiting. 1975. Children of Six Cultures: a psychocultural analysis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
