In Praise of Sociology

Professor Gordon Marshall, Gordon Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415754934
• eBook ISBN: 9781134998029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this lively and entertaining book, Gordon Marshall explores ten classic studies of British society to demonstrate the valuable qualities of British sociology, and its importance for understanding contemporary society. In each case he provides a precis of the research undertaken, assuming no prior knowledge on the part of the reader, a series of points that can be made in praise or criticism of the research, and an assessment of the sociological contribution made by the researchers.

The ten studies chosen are: Goldthorpe on social mobility, Townsend on poverty, Rex and Moore on race and the inner city, the Affluent Worker project, Wallis on sectarianism, Jackson and Marsden on education and the working class, Brown and Harris on clinical depression among women, Cohen on deviance, Bott on families and social networks, and Burns and Stalker on management and new technology.

An excellent introduction for the student to the concerns and values of sociology, this book gives a powerful statement of the achievements of post-war British sociologists, and a manifesto for good sociology in the 1990s.

1
The theme

I

On the morning of 16 February 1988 the Guardian newspaper carried a full-page article on the decline of British sociology. Published under the headline ‘Who needs sociologists?’ it made grim reading over breakfast. Apparently there had been a ‘terrible eclipse’ of the discipline during the 1980s: governments and university authorities had become hostile, departments were closed, and as a result many sociologists were disheartened, anxious about their public image and uncertain as to the merits of the subject itself.

The author of the report, journalist Alan Rusbridger, expressed a measure of sympathy for his sociological interviewees. Their studies did seem to have been singled out for particularly close scrutiny by an unsympathetic government. However, Rusbridger also implies that a good deal of the criticism was justified, since (as is commonly believed) sociologists are often politically biased and methodologically inept. He underlines this conclusion by a frankly mischievous resort to stereotypes throughout the article. Thus, Rusbridger metaphorically steps back in amazement when his investigations lead him to an interview with a most exotic creature, a right-wing professor of sociology. He expresses even greater incredulity at the claim made by another professor that British sociological research is generally rather rigorous and therefore highly respected in the world at large. Surely not, replies the sceptical journalist, since sociologists have been the standard Westminster music-hall joke for so long that they are themselves now hopelessly confused about where the subject should go. He, by contrast, can offer an immediate and comprehensive diagnosis of the sociological disease. In future, sociological studies must be empirical, statistically sophisticated, policy-oriented and completely free of jargon. Less ‘political posturing’ and more ‘relevant research’ is Rusbridger’s prescription for the recovery of the patient.

As a professional sociologist, I was not unduly surprised by the tone of this article, or the unsubstantiated nature of the claims it makes about the anti-capitalist and anti-empirical bias of British sociology. The popular image of sociology in this country combines hysterical newspaper accounts of Militant infiltration in trade unions with farcical campus novels about the swinging 1960s—a sort of Red Robo meets the History Man. However, I was angered by the fact that supposedly responsible journalism continued to depict sociology as left-wing rhetoric masquerading as scholarship; the Guardian ought to know better.

In all probability nothing more would have come of my irritation had I not been scheduled that afternoon to teach a class on The Authoritarian Personality, a well-known study of prejudice in modern societies, conducted in the aftermath of the Jewish Holocaust of the Hitler years. Searching for secondary materials on this subject, I turned to John Madge’s book on The Origins of Scientific Sociology. This is based on a course of lectures given to graduate students at Brooklyn College in the late 1950s. Madge, a visitor from England, had the idea of teaching research methods by giving an historical account of the development of empirical sociology. To that end he selected twelve classic studies of American sociology (one of which was the research on authoritarianism) and devoted a separate chapter of his book to each. His choice was governed by three criteria: each text had to make a significant contribution to investigative technique, to the development of sociological ideas, and to the understanding of social problems. The dozen finalists were all highly innovative in one or all of these respects. They embraced a wide range of topics including suicide, race hatred, productivity in industry and sexual behaviour. In justifying his particular selection, Madge argues that he would have liked to include a work of British sociology as the main subject of one of his chapters, but ‘did not feel able to do so’. This is understandable enough. He was writing in the late 1950s, at a time when there were still only half a dozen or so departments of sociology in this country, all but one (at the London School of Economics) having been newly set up after the Second World War. As a modern science of society the subject was still in its infancy in Britain when Madge was selecting the studies to be included in his text. By comparison, sociology had long been established in the United States, where it was taught in most major universities. Not surprisingly, therefore, American sociology offered much more to choose from by way of technical innovation and empirically tested propositions.

Madge’s book has many virtues. It makes sociological theories relevant by showing how empirical research inspired by such ideas greatly enhances our understanding of social processes and problems. It also makes sociology accessible by discussing the various studies in more or less everyday language. His text can readily be understood by those without a professional training in the subject. In this way the non-specialist might reach an informed assessment of the merits of the sociological approach—and so go beyond the merely impressionistic accounts that appear in the media. The selected case-studies are themselves a testimony to the scholarly achievements of American sociology. Indeed, it struck me almost immediately that here was the perfect rejoinder to Rusbridger’s scepticism about the possibilities for a scientific sociology. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating then Madge’s volume offers an immensely satisfying meal. Unfortunately, of course, his recipe contained no British ingredients. But would it be possible, after three decades of empirical research by sociologists in this country, to concoct an equally appetizing dish from entirely home-grown produce?

Convinced that this question could be answered in the affirmative, I quickly set about choosing my favourite sociological studies of postwar Britain, arriving that same evening at the selection included in this book. At the request of my publisher, I have restricted the discussion to ten texts. But, like Madge himself, I could easily have included another two—or, for that matter, a further twenty. These ten will suffice to make my point. Note that the texts themselves are discussed in no particular sequence—and certainly not according to any supposed order of merit.

In compiling my list of British sociological classics I applied the same criteria as Madge himself. Candidates were required to show theoretical sophistication, methodological innovation and practical application. One additional—and rather crucial—qualification was that texts had to be readily available on my office bookshelves during that particular day. Given these requirements it is quite clear that this volume does not represent ‘the very best of’ British sociology. Strictly theoretical contributions have been excluded, as have largely descriptive ethnographies, although in both cases this means that acknowledged masterpieces must be omitted. The subject matter has been restricted to modern British society—the principal concern of most empirical researchers—which precludes several excellent studies of other societies, produced by British sociologists, but who were writing as outsiders. Historical subjects have been similarly excluded. This is perhaps the most serious omission, since many fine sociological projects have in fact examined the emergence of the modern world, and so been concerned with the societies of the nineteenth century or even earlier. Finally, of course, an indeterminate number of worthy investigations have been overlooked because of my own inadequacies. I have a broad but not exhaustive knowledge of the now extensive literature available within British sociology. Some areas—the sociology of science, for example, which looks at (among other things) the social implications of natural scientific discoveries and origins of new technologies—I simply do not feel qualified to discuss at any length.

Clearly, therefore, this book is not a comprehensive survey of the terrain covered by sociologists. There are many introductory textbooks already available which perform this particular task admirably. Nor does my selection amount to a systematic history of modern British sociology. This, too, is readily available from other sources. Furthermore, the texts I have chosen are not simply the ten most influential or widely known sociological publications, indeed several sold in rather small numbers even for academic texts. They are (with due apologies to their authors) certainly not the most accessible pieces of sociology to have appeared over the years. They are, instead, simply a small sample taken from the prodigious amount of good sociology produced in this country during the past quarter of a century or so. The final selection reflects the many idiosyncrasies of my own knowledge and preferences. The only common denominator to the studies is that they are all, unquestionably, good sociology.

II

The texts cover a broad range of topics that are of general as well as narrowly political or policy interest. John Goldthorpe’s study of Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, the first work discussed, addresses itself squarely to a subject that has often been described as ‘the great British obsession’, namely, social class. It is based on a survey of the social mobility experiences of some 10,000 adult men living in England and Wales during the early 1970s. Goldthorpe calculates the chances of men from working-class origins arriving at middle-class employment, as compared with those of men who started from middle-class backgrounds retaining these, and examines the extent to which these relative chances for upward social mobility may have altered during the twentieth century. His findings lead him to the rather controversial conclusion that significant changes in the shape of the class structure during recent years (due, for example, to the expansion of the professions and decline of manfucturing) have not actually made that structure more open. The reasonably affluent Britain of today is no more a classless or fluid society than it was during the interwar years of economic depression. All that has happened is that as the proportion of middle-class jobs in the occupational structure has grown, so middle-class parents have become proportionately more successful at securing these new positions for their own children. The liberal strategy of piecemeal egalitarian reform, via the expansion of education and welfare, has clearly failed. On the other hand, there has been a substantial shrinkage in the relative size of the manual workforce during recent years, so Goldthorpe also dismisses as no less unconvincing the Marxist scenario of radical political upheaval by a unified proletarian mass. Here, then, is a critical appraisal of the achievements of modern consensus politics—but it is patently not anti-capitalist. Nor, obviously, is it anti-empirical. The conclusions are based on extensive research employing modern and highly sophisticated techniques of quantitative analysis. Nevertheless, as I hope to show, the argument itself is relatively straightforward.

The next chapter continues with the themes of meritocracy and class by looking at the experiences of eighty-eight working-class children who were educated in Huddersfield grammar schools during the late 1940s and early 1950s. These form the basis of a study by Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden, Education and the Working Class, first published in 1962. At that time there was great public concern about the ‘wastage of talent’ and in particular the problem of early leaving among able working-class children who entered selective schools but failed to stay on until the sixth form. Jackson and Marsden offer a highly original explanation for this phenomenon, centring on the ‘culture clash’ between the mores and values of the working-class neighbourhood and those of the grammar school. From detailed and probing interviews, they tease out the often painful ways in which the sons and daughters of manual workers were required to estrange themselves from family and neighbourhood in order to be educationally successful. Many, of course, refused to pay this price for intellectual enlightenment. However, this is not really the principal theme of the Huddersfield study. Jackson and Marsden are particularly concerned with the ‘cultural costs’ of social mobility, both for the individual working-class child winning through to a middle-class life and for the moral order of the society itself. As I make clear in the text, I am frankly unconvinced by the authors’ rather romantic view of the communal and solidaristic aspects of working-class life although my own views on this subject are certainly no less controversial. Nevertheless, I know of no better sociological account of the personal costs of class mobility, and one has to turn to literature to find a more moving description of the trauma induced among working-class children by their first sustained encounter with a middle-class institution.

The third of my classic texts is Peter Townsend’s massive and controversial survey of Poverty in the United Kingdom. This is certainly the most complete account of household resources and social deprivation ever to have been produced in this country. I argue that two rather bold theses hold the many and complex arguments of the book together. The first is Townsend’s insistence that poverty should be conceptualized in relative rather than absolute terms. The notion of ‘relative deprivation’ is thus pivotal to his study. The second thesis is that poverty can nevertheless be measured objectively. This leads Townsend to arguments about a national ‘style of life’ that is customary among a majority of the population and which can be operationalized in terms of a ‘deprivation index’. Denial of access to the items in this index, through lack of individual or household resources, is in Townsend’s view the defining characteristic of poverty. According to this criterion, approximately one-quarter of all households in Britain were either in poverty or on its margins, when the survey was fielded in the late 1960s. Needless to say, this finding attracted considerable criticism—especially from those with a political axe to grind on the subject of deprivation. However, Townsend’s results have actually stood up to critical scrutiny surprisingly well, in view of their inevitably controversial nature. My own, admittedly idiosyncratic view is that they are probably more significant than is conventionally assumed in the mainstream literature on social policy. In fact, they can easily be seen as unambiguous proof of the fundamental conflict between social justice and market value in British society. The ‘essentially contested’ definition of poverty brings the universal principles of citizenship to bear on the unprincipled or free market. Successive British governments have failed to resolve the conflict between these contradictory axial principles of social order— and the continuing debate about adequate definitions of material poverty, and appropriate public policies towards it, merely underlines this fact.

Chapter 5 looks at the impact of technological and commercial change on companies involved in the electronics industry. In The Management of Innovation, Tom Burns and G.M.Stalker argue that different forms of business organization are appropriate for different economic environments, and that rapidly changing technical or market conditions require firms to adopt ‘organic’ systems of management. Some companies were quicker than others at adapting in this way to the postwar restructuring of the electronics market, and as a result became commercially more successful than their rivals. In the course of the research, Burns and Stalker also explored the ‘informal organization’ of the twenty companies involved, and this led them to conclude that the political system and status structure within each concern exerted a major influence on its economic efficiency. These findings were crucial to the development of the so-called rational systems perspective, a major advance in organization theory during the early 1960s, and one which I discuss at some length in the chapter. I also propose the perhaps rather contentious thesis that most of the insights into behaviour in organizations that are suggested in recent influential management texts were already available in Burns and Stalker’s analysis of almost thirty years ago. If this sounds like an argument for managers to read more sociology, that is precisely what is intended.

The sixth chapter describes probably the best-known piece of empirical research in British sociology, namely, the Affluent Worker Study, conducted in Luton in the mid 1960s by John Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer and Jennifer Platt. Rather ironically, since my own expertise lies in the field of social stratification broadly defined, I found this chapter particularly difficult to write. So much has already been said about the Luton project that it is extremely difficult to be original in reviewing it. Its principal claim—that there has been a convergence in the normative orientations of some sections of the working class and certain lower white-collar groups—has been subjected to almost continuous empirical investigation, more or less since it was first proposed, as indeed have the allied themes of working-class ‘privatism’ and ‘instrumental collectivism’. If readers of my own text have previously been introduced to sociology, even cursorily, then they will almost certainly already have encountered some of this literature. In the end, therefore, I opted for an unorthodox approach. Rather than rehearse familiar arguments for and against the project, I chose instead to devote at least part of my discussion to a publication which is not strictly part of the Affluent Worker research itself, but is nevertheless so obviously a development of it that one can legitimately consider it in this context. The article in question, which was written by Goldthorpe and offers a sociological explanation for the high rates of inflation in Britain during the 1970s, not only sheds light on the earlier project, but also provides a pertinent reminder of the relevance of sociological research to the formation of economic policy. The punchline here is rather obvious—economics is simply too important to be left to the economists.

I also offer a rather bad-tempered conclusion to Chapter 7. In the early 1960s John Rex and Robert Moore studied the Sparkbrook area of Birmingham as part of the Survey of Race Relations in Britain. At the heart of their research was an investigation of the multi-occupied lodging-houses in this inner-city ‘zone of transition’. They explain how, in the ‘great urban game of leapfrog’, the various ‘housing classes’ in the city come to be resident in specific territories and types of accommodation. For reasons that were not difficult to discern, coloured immigrants to Birmingham during the postwar years lacked both of the primary resources necessary for securing access to good quality housing, namely, either a substantial income or suitable length of prior residence in the locality. They were, therefore, forced into multi-occupation of large houses in the inner city. These properties were soon subject to rapid physical deterioration for reasons beyond the control of the inhabitants themselves. The problem of the ‘twilight zones’, where large, old houses, too good to be classified as slums, had become multi-occupied lodging-houses, rapidly became a ‘race problem’ about which, as the researchers found, the city had got itself into a state of near-hysteria. Rex and Moore conclude their report, which was published under the title Race, Community, and Conflict, with a series of policy recommendations designed to eliminate the discriminatory elements in the city’s housing allocation. They also warn that, if the desire of immigrants to improve their situation continues to be frustrated by racialist practices and policies, the long-term prospect must be ‘for some sort of urban riot’. Predictably enough, this warning went unheeded by those in authority. And yet, twenty years and a long series of precisely such riots later, I find myself having to defend my profession against critics and policy-makers who complain that sociological research should be ‘more relevant’ to this country’s social and economic problems; were this accusation not so tragically ill-informed, I might find it laughable.

Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics is the subject of Chapter 8. This is an investigation of subcultural deviance, especially the societal reaction to it, based on a case-study of the Mods and Rockers of the mid 1960s. Cohen advances the rather controversial thesis that, by a process of ‘labelling’ and ‘deviance amplification’, the various social control agencies attempting to undermine these subcultures actually accomplished quite the opposite. By instigating what Cohen calls a ‘moral panic’, the media, police, courts and other ‘moral entrepreneurs’ helped to create, rather than eliminate, the collective disturbances which took place at English seaside resorts between 1964 and 1966. Cohen’s compelling, convincing and often amusing account of these highly ritualized Bank Holiday gatherings shows that the majority of teenage participants were quite unlike the press stereotypes of the Mod or Rocker. Most identified with neither group and had, in fact, travelled to the seaside specifically as spectators. However, the combination of press misreports, provocation by the police and over-reaction by the courts so dramatized a number of quite unexceptional and relatively infrequent events of minor hooliganism that the crowds of youthful holiday-makers became part of a generalized vision of mass civil disobedience and profound social malaise. Rather interestingly, Cohen’s arguments could easily be extended to contemporary examples of subcultural deviance, such as football hooliganism and mugging. They therefore raise the thorny problem of the ‘policy relevance’ of sociological analyses...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The theme
• 2 Social class and social mobility
• 3 Education and culture
• 4 Poverty in an affluent society
• 5 Managing the new technology
• 6 Workers and their wages
• 7 Race and housing in the inner city
• 8 The rise and fall of the mods
• 9 Sociologists and scientologists
• 10 On the social origins of clinical depression
• 11 Families and social networks—A conclusion
• Further reading
• Index