Jennifer Platt

John D. Brewer

English

Research Papers in Economics

Editorial Introduction: John d Brewer and Jennifer Platt
by John D. Brewer and Jennifer Platt
University of Aberdeen; University of Sussex
Sociological Research Online, 16 (3) 25
<http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/25.html> 
10.5153/sro.2448
Received: 14 Jul 2011     Accepted: 18 Aug 2011    Published: 31 Aug 2011
1.1 This special section forms part of the series of events in 2011 to mark the 60th anniversary of the
British Sociological Association (BSA). It is not about the history of the BSA, although there are some
items that add new material on this topic, even less a historical overview of the development of sociology
in Britain, though there are pieces here which contribute signiﬁcantly to that. As guest editors we have had
the privilege of serving the BSA as the current President (Brewer) and a former President (Platt). Both of
us have an interest in the history of the discipline, but we have avoided pursuing our personal interests.
There was a general call for contributions and the conventional review process was rigorously applied
except to short solicited autobiographical contributions. Nonetheless, the anniversary theme perforce
imposes a stamp on its contents and our positions and background gave us the ambition to provide
something different but with longer-term historical signiﬁcance.
1.2 Going under the title of '60 Years of Impact: Reﬂecting on 60 years of British Sociology', as editors we
want ﬁrst to address the word 'impact', for we do not want to leave this implicit, as if the relevance of
British sociology emerges naturally from any account of its growth and development. Contemporary
interest in 'impact' in Britain arises from two concerns, its use in the Research Excellence Framework as a
way of showing the utility of research outcomes, and its incorporation in the evaluation of grant
applications to Research Councils as a way of highlighting engagement with the 'users' and 'beneﬁciaries'
of funded research. It has a narrow and technical meaning in these usages. If we take impact to mean
more broadly the public value and relevance of research, it has been a feature of British sociology since its
inception, whether its origins are thought to rest in Scottish Enlightenment engagement with the effects of
proto-industrialisation in eighteenth-century Scotland, late Victorian interest in distributive injustice or early
twentieth-century political arithmetic, but this was never conceived as impact. Diverse ranges of people
came to sociology in large part for its commitment to social improvement and human betterment, but the
'relevance' of the discipline was taken for granted and rarely articulated in terms that would be recognisable
in today's governmental concern with 'impact'. Even the leading ﬁgures of British sociology in the 60 years
covered by this special section let their research ﬁndings speak for themselves, as they pursued
interesting sociological questions regardless of government higher education policy. Yet as we shall see in
most of the contributions here, whether in the work of speciﬁc individuals like Ray Pahl, the effect of
particular books like Rex and Moore's Race, Community and Conﬂict, or the overview of ﬁelds such as
economic sociology, gender or the sociology of food, sociologists were doing high impact research whether
or not they intended it or knew it. What differs with modern generations of sociologists is merely our explicit
attention to impact today.
1.3 In this sense, history itself has impact by illustrating the social beneﬁts of sociology in the past and
thus the essential continuity of the idea of impact. The controversy today is about the attempt in
government higher education policy to impose a particular form of impact, rather than the suggestion that
sociology is incapable of generating socially relevant and beneﬁcial research. Impact has been part of the
growth and development of British sociology even further back than the sixty years covered by this special
issue. If impact as an idea illustrates the continuity of sociological practices, this suggests that the
discipline itself shows the same tendency toward continuity and change. This is another recurring theme
that ties our contributions together, and it is useful to review the contents of this special section in the light
of that.
1.4 There are two backward glances to old documents of great historical interest, both as contributions to
the history of the BSA and sociology in Britain more generally, and as illustrations of the personal and
professional standpoints of the people involved at the time. The ﬁrst is Asher Tropp's summary of the state
of British sociology, contained in the very ﬁrst edition of the BSA Bulletin in October 1956, which we might
consider as the forerunner to the BSA's Network. Tropp was its ﬁrst editor and noted that the intention was
to publish the Bulletin, then merely a typescript copy, three times a year. The review of the 'present state
and development of professional sociology' reported on the Association's conference of the same title, held
at the LSE in January 1956. The second document is Richard Brown's previously unpublished interview
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/25.html 1 31/08/2011with Anne Dix in 1992 on her retirement from the BSA as its Executive Ofﬁcer. The interview is signiﬁcant
for the personal perspective it provides on the professionalisation of the BSA.
1.5 No backward glance is ever entirely just about the past however, and both documents may well leave
readers with a sense of d￩j￠ vu. The timelessness of some of the bureaucratic concerns of the BSA as a
professional association are matched by some enduring problems in the discipline in Britain faced by its
growth and popularity, the balance between intellectual interests and vocationalism, anxieties over the
employment of sociology graduates and difﬁculties in managing the tension between teaching and
research, amongst others. This sense that while things change, they remain very much the same, that in
the midst of change there is also continuity, is captured well by the personal reﬂections of John Eldridge on
the state of sociology in an era of cuts, then and now. As a former President of the Association, Eldridge is
able to speak knowledgeably as an insider to some enduring and recurring issues in the politics of
sociological research and the effects of public expenditure cuts.
1.6 We were eager to complement these historical documents with new ones generated especially for the
occasion. An innovation appropriate for our theme is a focus on the diasporic experience of sociologists
migrating into and out of British sociology, in which they reﬂect on both their personal trajectories and that
of the discipline generally across national boundaries. We deliberately commissioned testimonies from a
number of different sorts of sociologists with quite varied experiences, in order to capture wider historical
trends in sociology as they were experienced in personal, autobiographical journeys. There is a sense in
which the institutional development of sociology in Britain occurred through the life and activities of the key
individuals who comprised it, and wider structural events had their consequences through the individual
careers of major sociologists. This intellectual diaspora contributed to the later emergence of sociology as
a global discipline. But the personal trajectories contained within the migrations offer a blend of the macro
and micro events behind such globalization, as well as displaying the particular intellectual spaces offered
by sociology in Britain. Movements into (Misztal, Morawska), out of (Hall), and back into (Crouch,
Saunders) British sociology, enable authors to comment on features in the discipline in Britain that were
attractions and disincentives. These accounts cover Australia, North America, and Western and Eastern
Europe and thus leave ignored some other signiﬁcant migrations to Britain, from South Africans in
particular. It is inevitable that these accounts are of the experiences of senior sociologists, but as
counterbalance we include the autobiographical journey of a new entrant into the discipline (Bates) as she
encounters what C. Wright Mills would call the promise of the sociological imagination.
1.7 This emphasis on careers in sociology and sociology as a career is reinforced by Crow and Takeda's
article on one speciﬁc sociologist, the late Ray Pahl. It is in part a measure of the institutional
development of sociology in Britain that it was able to sustain signiﬁcant careers for its major practitioners,
but the article on Pahl also reﬂects the way in which the discipline has been professionalized through the
contributions of signiﬁcant sociologists. Today we call this 'impact' – and so difﬁcult is it to distance the
discipline from the impact agenda that our title nods towards it – but major sociologists like Pahl were
pursuing interesting lines of research oblivious to its institutional ramiﬁcations for the growth of sociology
as a discipline in Britain and without consideration of its impact. Yet, as Crow and Takeda acknowledge,
people like Pahl are role models for today's generation of sociologists in both the range of their sociological
thinking and their concern to pursue socially beneﬁcial research. Pahl is, of course, in a way representative
of his whole generation. (The trajectories of some members of his cohort are valuably documented and
celebrated in the Qualidata 'Pioneers of Qualitative Research' series, which in addition to Pahl includes
Colin Bell, Peter Townsend, Janet Finch, Paul Thompson and Denis Marsden, among others. For this
pioneering generation there is, regrettably, no equivalent general source for predominantly quantitative
workers, but Crow and Takeda cite a number of valuable biographical and autobiographical sources on
other authors.)
1.8 To look at the development of sociology as a discipline through the careers of key sociologists as they
made the discipline their vocation is one interesting angle of approach; another is to do so through speciﬁc
instances of major research programmes or key books. There are numbers of works which could be used
in this way. The one offered here, which we can take as emblematic of a larger group, is Race, Community
and Conﬂict by John Rex and Robert Moore. Robert Moore's analysis of its reception here shows how the
parts of the work which received most attention were not always those of most interest to the authors, but
depended on the historical context, and focuses attention on the ways in which British sociology was
affected by the remarkable social changes occurring in Britain at the time, which saw not only the
emergence of a sociology of race relations but also signiﬁcant contributions in the study of poverty, family
relations, gender, class and mobility, education, and work and employment. (It also marks the signiﬁcant
contribution of Rex as one of those made by South African exiles in British sociology.)
1.9 Trends in two of these sub-ﬁelds are reviewed in greater depth by contemporary specialists who give
what are personal overviews in that, while they reﬂect the expertise of the authors, they carry also some of
their particular emphases and interests. They are not designed to be fully comprehensive within the space
provided, but no assessment of sociology in Britain over the last sixty years could be considered complete
without some commentary on economic sociology, provided here by Duncan Gallie, or on gender and
feminism, by Sylvia Walby.
1.10 While sociology was in part shaped by its analyses of social change in modern Britain, sociology
itself was subject to the inﬂuence of social change. Charles Crothers reﬂects on some of these changes in
his analysis of the content of the major British sociology journals. The expansion in the notion of the
'social', which has accompanied the fragmentation of the discipline away from its original central concerns
with power, class and inequality, witnessed the emergence of new areas for the display of the sociological
imagination, including gender but more recently ﬁelds like emotions, consumption, tourism, human rights,
peace processes and food.
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/25.html 2 31/08/20111.11 The last is covered in depth here by Anne Murcott's analysis of the emergence of food as a
sociological topic, and the role played in that by the BSA's Food Study Group. This paper is important not
only for its attention to new intellectual developments but also for highlighting that the BSA itself is part of
the context in which individual sociologists work and develop careers; and not just in the case of the
Women's Caucus in the 1970s, which was so powerful in reshaping the whole sociological agenda, and not
just around gender. Through Study Groups like that on food, the BSA provides intellectual spaces for
people to pursue shared interests, as well as some ﬁnancial assistance. Study groups in the areas of
medical sociology and the sociology of religion are very large, with academic conferences and events of
their own which attract large numbers. The newest study group, on the sociology of climate change,
established in 2010, has potential to play a very signiﬁcant role in analysing one of the most critical
problems affecting the future of humankind, showing the relevance of sociology to public issues. The
importance of study groups, and the whole infrastructure to intellectual debate fostered by the BSA as an
organisation, is demonstrated in the proposal to establish a study group on the history of sociology, which,
if it comes to fruition, will appropriately begin its operation in this 60th anniversary year.
1.12 This neatly brings us full circle. Sociology is as much its past as its future, containing within it path-
breaking work on topical issues like climate change as well as fascinating historical enquiries into its own
history. It is methodologically plural as well as substantively diverse. Some of this plurality and diversity is
represented in this section. More could have been said on these issues and some areas are untouched,
not through design but simply because nothing was submitted on them; we are aware that there are gaps in
the picture it paints of British sociology. We hope, however, that it may encourage further work of similar
kinds to help ﬁll the gaps. This volume is therefore merely part of the ongoing account of the history of
British sociology, speaking as much to its future as its past.
1.13 But we would like to end with an assessment of our own. It is difﬁcult to identify national traditions in
sociology because of the global nature of the discipline and the world-wide circulation and dissemination of
ideas. But cultural spaces do affect both the production of ideas and their reception, giving us what David
Livingstone (2003) calls the 'geography of ideas'. There are features of British sociology that stand out
strongly, which, if not constituting a national tradition, at least give it some shape and identity. British
sociology always was, and remains, associated with the sociological analysis of social problems, not
atheoretical but concerned with developing theories of the middle range rather than the grand historical
narrative, methodologically pluralist but with an emphasis on mixed methods, although weaker on
quantitative skills while renowned for qualitative methods, substantively open and ﬂexible, with a wide
range of topics to which the sociological imagination is applied. The papers presented here are emblematic
of these qualities and represent in microcosm what is distinctive about sociology in Britain.
References
LIVINGSTONE, David N. (2003) Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientiﬁc Knowledge,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/25.html 3 31/08/2011

Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientiﬁc Knowledge,

Editorial Introduction: John d Brewer and Jennifer Platt

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Editorial Introduction: John d Brewer and Jennifer Platt

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Research Papers in Economics