ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to answer the question: "How many people in Britain are engaged in learning about the social sciences and the implications of what they are learning?" It seeks to give some indication of the scale of the workforce which is engaged in the social sciences in some way. The most easily defined group is that of academic staff and researchers in the social sciences. There are two different sources of evidence in this regard — the Higher Education Statistics Agency statistics on university staffing and the numbers of staff notified to the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. Capital funding is more difficult to ascertain and allocate, not least because some infrastructures are shared between social sciences and other parts of universities. Teaching funds are part of the national teaching allocation and — other than where national policy changes rapidly — changes system-wide are unlikely to be more than 1% per annum.
