"Being There": Fact-Finding and Policymaking: The Rockefeller Foundation's Division of Medical Education and the "Russian Matter," 1925-1927

The last quarter century has witnessed a rising tide of skepticism among scholars about the link between information-gathering and policymaking. Drawing on several decades of research and rethinking, students of organizational behavior concluded that organizations collect information for reasons that have more to do with organizational dynamics than with the making of choice. Students of public policy found high-stakes policy controversies deeply resistant to recourse to "the facts."

Not surprisingly, the rethinking extended to the fact-finder himself, now depicted as a cipher, seeing what he had been conditioned to see. Challenging this depiction, this article argues that being "in the field" has a powerful effect on the fact-finder. The fact-finder may have significant degrees of freedom in interpreting the mandate to collect information; the fact-finder may respond not only to the intended audience for his information but also to his informants; and, when confronted by difficulties in assessing what he finds, the fact-finder may not necessarily turn reflexively to the beliefs that he brought to the field.

This article begins with a review of the literature on information-gathering and the making of choice, paying particular attention to the assumptions (stated and unstated) about the dynamics of fact-finding in the field and the role of the fact-finder. To conceptualize and analyze the experience of "being there," the article examines at close range the fact-finding carried out in Russia between 1925 and 1927 by the Rockefeller Foundation's Division of Medical Education. The site commends itself on several grounds. From its earliest days, the Foundation trumpeted the importance of information-gathering for decision-making; for several of the Rockefeller philanthropies, the dispatch of an officer to the field to conduct a "survey of local conditions" was an indispensable requirement for gift-giving. The diplomatic "silence" between Russia and America made information-gathering in Russia politically sensitive and logistically difficult: in 1927, after nearly five-years of dithering, a Rockefeller Foundation officer finally went to Russia to find the facts. The specifics of the "Russian matter" strained both the Foundation's insistence on securing firsthand information and its vaunted commitment to taking "the facts" into account in making its determinations. Equally, the strength of the assumptions about Russia prevalent in the Foundation before the 1927 visit tested the ability of the fact-finder to "see" beyond what he had been schooled to see.

Retrieving the Fact-Finder

By the late 1950s, "classical" rational-choice theory had been modified to accommodate the limited or "bounded" nature of human rationality. ¹ Over the course of the next decade and a half, scholars who styled themselves as "heretics" within the church of rational choice challenged its "bishops" to think through the implications of limited rationality for a variety of aspects of institutional functioning, not the least of which was the search, purveying, and use of information by organizations. ²

According to "classical" rational-choice theory, organizations designed their information strategies to resolve uncertainties about future states of the world relevant to the choices with which they were grappling. An organization would therefore seek information only if the precision, relevance, and reliability of that information were compatible with the cost of acquiring it. This perspective on information generated specific expectations: relevant information would be collected and analyzed before decisions were made; available information would be scrutinized before requests were issued for more information; and only information relevant to specific decisions would be gathered.

In the mid-1970s, March and Olsen reported what seemed like anomalous findings about organizational behavior: information bearing on a decision was often collected after the decision has been taken; regardless of the information available when a decision was first considered, more was invariably requested; and available information might even be ignored...