Forgive me if I am concerned to clarify a distinction that is already
clear, but it is necessary to make a distinction between two
completely different meanings of independent-minded research here. I
am sure that the ESRC does fund independent-minded research - they
would not wish to do anything else. When they say that they do not
fund independent research, what they mean is that they do not fund
research by people without a suitable institutional affiliation: the
ESRC does not employ researchers directly, but needs to deal with an
institution that will handle the bureaucratic requirements. One could
argue that this is entirely reasonable, for the the UK situation is
that it the government chooses to channel funds into the academic
system, which it does by allocating part of those funds to the ESRC
which distributes them, mostly to Universities, in a way that is
different from the way other funds are allocated. Thought of this way,
it is not clear why the ESRC should distribute funds outside that
system.

The question of how funding does or does not influence research is an
important one, but very difficult, requiring more historical research
than has so far been done going through archives of of organisations
such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, government grant issuing
bodies, and of the recipients themselves. The answers, I presume, will
be highly dependent on the period one looks at, and may defy simple
generalizations, as is often the case with historical questions.

Roger Backhouse