ABSTRACT
It was the Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung who popularised the phrase ‘paper tiger’ when pointing out the underlying weakness of the United States that belied its apparent strength. Such an epithet might be appropriate in describing the exponents of documents themselves, who could draw on abundant resources but failed to demonstrate their power. In this chapter we will examine the development of social research over the past century, the attempts that were made to promote the use of documents and a general decline in their use over the past half-century.
