Barbara Misztal

English

Research Papers in Economics

The Appeal of British Sociology; a View from Outside and Inside
by Barbara Misztal
University of Leicester
Sociological Research Online, 16 (3) 15
<http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/15.html> 
10.5153/sro.2346
Received: 8 Apr 2011     Accepted: 20 Jul 2011    Published: 31 Aug 2011
In the 60 years of the BSA’s existence many people from Eastern Europe have contributed to its
achievement. I can proudly point out that my compatriots especially distinguished themselves. The list of
social scientists originally from Poland who worked or are still working in the UK is relatively long; it is
enough to mention here Stanislaw Andreski (1919-2007) and Zygmunt Bauman. However, while the
concept of ‘diaspora’, at least to some degree, describes the fate of dislocated generations, Poles recently
entering UK departments of sociology no longer ﬁt this image. The collapse of the Berlin Wall, the EU
enlargement, cheap travel, the spread of the English language - all these factors have increased the cross-
border dimensions of contemporary academic life. So, in a contemporary Europe without major disaster
zones, under conditions of high mobility, working in an increasingly international sociological ﬁeld has
become easier and does not require either rejection or endorsement of any particular culture. My own
journey from Poland started many years ago at a time when things were more complicated. Nevertheless, I
too have come to follow the border-crossing career trajectories of sociologists. After working in Poland, the
USA and Australia, in 2002 I accepted a professorship in the Department of Sociology in the University of
Leicester. Knowing the history and the role of Leicester in the development of UK sociology, in particular
the presence over many years of Norbert Elias, I was looking forward to this opportunity. I have been
attracted by Elias’s ideas ever since his ﬁrst volume of The Civilizing Process was translated into Polish in
1980 and have been exploring his perspective in my writings, for example, in my book on Informality
(Misztal 2001). Moreover, I was keen to join British sociology as it, in contrast to North American
sociology, exhibits a marked fusion of various approaches and it offers a possibility to develop more broad
social thought. I was also attracted to British sociology because of its critical stand, interdisciplinarity,
diversity, and the fact that although already well institutionally established, it was still far from the
American level of closure through professionalization. The type of open-ended sociology which offers all-
embracing knowledge of the social word and generates exciting and productive debates appealed to me
because my experience of living under the all-intrusive state in Poland and the type of training I received
taught me to value sociology as an independent and synthetic ﬁeld of studies.
In my student years at the Institute of Sociology in the University of Warsaw, we were lucky to be exposed
to broad, rather eclectic, interdisciplinary teaching which grappled with large comparative themes. Yet, even
though cultural and political freedom was greater in Poland than in other countries of the ‘socialist camp’,
not many Western books and ideas were easy accessible. Thus, the majority of people studying sociology
in Warsaw in the 1970s were not very knowledgeable about British sociology; we knew more about British
social anthropology, especially about the contribution of our compatriot, Bronislaw Malinowski.
Nonetheless, despite limited access, we were impressed by many distinctive characteristics of British
sociology and came to believe that there was such a thing as the British tradition that consisted of
community studies, citizenship and conﬂict. We admired Marshall’s notion of citizenship, John Goldthorpe
et al.’s (1969) The Afﬂuent Worker, Michael Mann (1973) Consciousness and Action in the Western
Working Class, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class(1963) and John Rex and Robert
Moore (1967) Race, Community and Conﬂict. Although the geopolitical, cultural and economic background
of social sciences in Poland was totally different to that of the UK, the British working class studies
provided the framework for my PhD. My subsequent research was a result of my interest in how things
work in a different, not undemocratic, political environment. Thus, my ﬁrst two books published in the UK,
Trust in Modern Society (1996) and Informality (2001), are comparative studies of habits of life in
democratic and in undemocratic environment. They were still reﬂections of somebody, who, to use the title
of Said’s (1999) autobiography, felt herself to be ‘out of place’ and cannot stop wondering about the
different nature of normality and relationships in the new context. Writing Theories of Social Remembering
(2003), I placed myself within the humanistic tradition of sociology which I learned from British historical
sociologists. Following Bauman’s conviction (2003) that one of the main tasks for contemporary sociology
is to inform people about the social forces that threaten to diminish freedom and political democracy, I
devoted my Intellectuals and the Public Good (2007) to explore the ways in which the civil courage and
creativity of public intellectuals served to expand the democratic imagination and civic sensitivity of both
citizens and their leaders. My analysis was built around the identiﬁcation of courageous conduct by public
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/15.html 1 31/08/2011intellectuals who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. With China’s imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo, the
2010 Nobel Peace laureate, and Beijing’s boycott of the Nobel Peace ceremony, the relevance of my
examination of the difference civil courage makes to the functioning of institutions and to the scope and
quality of civil society becomes even more obvious. Recently, in the context of the shrinking of the welfare
state, the growing feeling of insecurity, the fears connected with the decline of social protection and
security, I have developed further my interest in democracy’s ability to serve people. Arguing in my
forthcoming book The Challenges of Vulnerability that the issue of vulnerability has acquired a Zeitgeist-
like status, I assign to sociology the role of communicating the social character of human suffering and
thus aim to contribute to debates about how to reduce the experiences of vulnerability. Arguing that the
social sciences have a very important role to play in developing a comprehensive understanding and
awareness of vulnerability, I suggest that the essential purpose of all ‘humane sociology’ (Gouldner 1975)
is to evaluate the conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others.
Such a goal, given that the current conditions of knowledge production in British universities and
competing deﬁnitions of academic excellence, which both neither help to overcome the processes of
fragmentation of sociology nor necessary help the abilities of sociologists to act as public intellectuals,
presents us with a very difﬁcult challenge. It requires above all, as the BSA righty argues, the creation of a
social space in which scientiﬁc debate and critical thinking can be deployed relatively sheltered from the
inﬂuence of the political and economic powers. Although the quality of British sociology’s journals,
publishers, departments, plus the comparative advantage it has enjoyed from the global role of the English
language, places it at the international forefront of the discipline today, it could have produced more
comparative works and thoughtful critical sociological responses to the present-day situation. It could also
provide us with the evidence and tools to create a successful society by expanding our comprehension of
changing relationships between society and market, between society and the state and between global civil
society and the international structures. In a context characterised by the declining number of research
active sociology departments, demands to generate more resources through winning grants and to devote
more time to administration and bureaucratic compliance, the task of enhancing sociology’s public
standing by reinforcing its visibility and authority outside academia is rather difﬁcult. Nonetheless, the
effort to achieve a higher status and greater esteem for sociology is worth making not only on behalf of the
discipline but also to diffuse a sense of the social importance of our research and knowledge among
decision-makers and the wider public.
References
BAUMAN, Z. (2003) Conversation with Z. Bauman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
ELIAS, N. (1978) The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, Oxford: Blackwell.
GOLDTHORPE, J.H. et al. (1969) The Afﬂuent Worker in the Class Structure, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
GOULDNER, A. W. (1975) For Sociology and Critique in Sociology Today. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.
MANN, M. (1973) Consciousness and Action in the Western Working Class, London: Macmillan.
MISZTAL, B. A. The Challenges of Vulnerability: In search of strategies for a less vulnerable social life,
Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming)
MISZTAL, B. A. (2007) Intellectuals and the Public Good: Creativity and Courage. Cambridge University
Press. [doi:://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511488825]
MISZTAL, B. A (2003) Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead: Open University.
MISZTAL, B. A. (2001) Informality: Social Theory and Contemporary Practice. London: Routledge.
MISZTAL, B. A. (1996) Trust in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press.
REX, J. and Moore, R. (1967) Race, Community and Conﬂict, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
THOMPSON, E. P, (1963) The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollnacz.
SAID, E.W. (1999) Out of Place, London: Granta Books.
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/15.html 2 31/08/2011

Consciousness and Action in the Western Working Class,

Conversation with

For Sociology and Critique in Sociology Today. Harmondsworth:

Informality: Social Theory and Contemporary Practice.

Out of Place, London: Granta Books.

Race, Community and Conﬂict,

The Afﬂuent Worker in the Class Structure, Cambridge:

The Challenges of Vulnerability: In search of strategies for a less vulnerable social life, Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming)

The Making of the English Working Class.

Trust in Modern Societies.

The Appeal of British Sociology; a View from Outside and Inside

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The Appeal of British Sociology; a View from Outside and Inside

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