Preface to the first publicly available edition of the Manual of Elite Target Analysis.
In 1953-4, Alfred de Grazia, who was then Executive Officer of the Committee for Research
in Social Science and Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford
University, submitted a proposal to the Department of State to write a manual
that would help train federal employees assigned to culturally diverse countries
around the world. It was a period of great and expanding scope of U.S.
operations abroad.
Upon its acceptance, he invited
two colleagues from the fields of sociology and communication studies to
collaborate. By the year 2000, both colleagues, distinguished leaders in their
fields, were long deceased; yet the manual of Elite Target Analysis had not been
published, beyond the copies used internally by government officials. There was
never any secrecy about the activity or the manual. And it is hardly superseded
in theory and practice, although it was prepared in the age of the hand-punched
card or machine-sorted Hollarith card, and it was a generation preceding the
sophisticated generally available computer network. Despite the new technology
that would be applied, strictly comparable pragmatic works seem not yet to be
available.
