1/2 idea No. 5: Working worlds of interwar Britain, for Japan

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

Half idea No. 5 I actually finished.

I was kindly invited to provide a paper for a workshop in Japan on the history of British science, so I decided to try out a different empirical approach to working worlds. Here’s the introduction, which explains what I did:

‘Working worlds’ was a concept that I devised and found useful in making sense of
twentieth century science.1 I have taken the opportunity of my invitation to the
‘Institutionalisation of Science and the Public Sphere in the Modern Britain’ seminar to
investigate in more detail the working worlds of British science in the first four decades
of the century. What I do in the following is, first, describe what working worlds are,
identify the five prominent working worlds of twentieth-century science, and discuss the
series of steps whereby working worlds call forth science.
Second, I summarise some research I have undertaken that aimed to identify how, and
how often, ‘problems’ were raised in the public sphere and science was suggested as a
solution, or part solution, to these problems. In this research I took the letters and
editorial pages of The Times as a central forum for the public sphere in Britain between
1900 and 1939.
Third, I review the secondary historical literature on science in Britain in the first half
of the twentieth century in order to understand who (in public, or in the public sector)
was promoting science as a solution to working world problems, the recurrent features
of public debate about science, and which sectors (public and private) were of particular
importance.

A version of the paper can be found here