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In 1921, controversy broke out at the board of directors of the International Labor Organization over the office’s competence in conducting enquiries. The dispute brought proponents of a systematic study of the causes of economic and social ills and their remedies up against proponents of a mere centralized collection of member states’ documents. The issue centered on a vast statistical enquiry entitled Enquiry on Production, which was led from 1920 to 1924 by Edgar Milhaud, a professor of political economy who had been recruited by Albert Thomas. The author’s methodology—which received scant approval from employers’ representatives, who underlined the enquiry’s unscientific approach and lack of objectivity—conveyed a positivist view of social sciences that attached a great importance to Durkheimian analysis of social phenomena. The criticisms of this enquiry suggest that the actors involved constantly went back and forth between scientific arguments and ideological views, and between liberal orthodoxy and socialism. Considered by its opponents as too socialist, too focused on economics, or not sufficiently scientific, the Enquiry on Production was almost buried, and it was the last enquiry of its kind. This analysis shows that scholarly activities, traditionally studied through so-called “scientific management” or “technical expertise,” can also be formulated by pointing out their relative autonomy. This allows the concrete forms of coproduction of knowledge by administrators who were both scholars and bureaucrats to be highlighted.