Sociology and Social Research (RLE Social Theory)

Geoff Payne, Robert Dingwall, Judy Payne, Mick Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138783799
• eBook ISBN: 9781317650843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A social science which has become so remote from the society which pays for its upkeep is ultimately doomed, threatened less by repression than by intellectual contempt and financial neglect. This is the message of the authors of this book in this reassessment of the evolution and present state of British sociology.

Their investigation analyses the discipline as a social institution, whose product is inexorably shaped by the everyday circumstances of its producers; it is the concrete outcome of people's work, rather than a body of abstract ideas. Drawing upon their varied experience as teachers and researchers, they identify three major trends in contemporary sociology. First, that the discipline's rapid expansion has led to a retreat from rigorous research into Utopian and introspective theorising. Second, that the concept of sociological research is being taught in a totally false way because of this, and encourages 'research' within a wholly academic environment. Third, that the current unpopularity of sociology with academics, prospective students and politicians is no coincidence, but a reflection of the conditions under which sociology is now produced and practised.

In Sociology and Social Research the authors suggest substantial changes in sociological research, the way in which it is carried out and the conditions under which it is undertaken. Their book is a timely warning to fellow sociologists when the profession is under attack as a result of public expenditure cuts.

part one

1 The development of British sociology

There has been plenty of debate in the last decade or so – indeed, in the last century or so – as to what sociology is. Its antecedents are traced variously in accordance with particular views of its subject matter. While it has been asserted that ‘the mere existence of competing sociologies over a long period of time is no grounds for assuming that one of them is not the truest’ (Bandyopadhyay, 1971, 27), the intention here is not to debate that issue, least of all to portray the ‘one true sociology’, but to explore some of the factors which affect the activities which sociologists pursue in their differing ways and with their varying emphases and objectives.

In what ways is sociology a product of society? And how does sociology play back upon the social context in which it is generated? At a certain level, sociology in Britain can be seen as the product of the Enlightenment – an outcome of ‘the growth of social thought in the development of philosophical ideas and in the consequential pursuit of certain lines of thought, especially about religion and history’ (Mitchell, 1970, 131). On the grand scale, sociological study has its roots in notions of progress and development, Social Darwinism, and economic and technological determinism. The accumulation of knowledge and its re-definition in the light of new modes of scientific enquiry, especially in the nineteenth century, resulted in innovatory ways of perceiving the world – including the social world.

It has been proposed that the development of sociology depends upon turmoil within society and an associated mood of uncertainty among the populace. Questions about the nature of social order are, of course, more likely to occur at times of disruption or when social structures, ideas and values are undergoing rapid change. Whether one looks at the Germany of Max Weber or at contemporary ‘underdeveloped’ societies factors can be discerned which thrust sociological issues into the forefront of immediate national concerns. But this does not mean that ‘sociology’ necessarily develops as an instrument or a reflection of particular historical phases or social predicaments. Worsley has reminded us that ‘the country which has made the most spectacular and world-historic developmental breakthrough of the post war period’ – namely, People’s China, has done so without the benefit of institutionalised sociology (never mind Western sociological theory!) (Worsley, 1974, 16).

The evidence suggests that particular social climates may be conducive to the development of sociology as a discipline, may retard it or may render it irrelevant or unremarkable. At one level of explanation, the tardy development of sociology as an academic discipline in Britain – compared, say, with the USA – can be attributed to the (at least erstwhile) dominance of the ancient English universities in decisions on the direction of scholarly studies, and to their antipathy towards, or ignorance of, sociology as a field of knowledge. Yet, as Hawthorn suggests, one can explain the absence of sociology as an ‘intellectually and academically distinctive pursuit’ prior to 1939 in terms of the fact that it ‘was virtually everywhere present as part of the general liberal and liberal-socialist consciousness’. Class and status, class conflict and status difference featured in the everyday conceptions of the people and ‘the continuity of English social and political thought throughout the nineteenth century and into the first four decades of the twentieth is most simply understood by the absence of any threat of revolution from the left and of any concerted resistance from the right’ (Hawthorn, 1976).

A concern with facts

None the less, throughout the nineteenth century in England, in Europe and in America, there developed an increasingly insistent new concern with ‘facts’. This, Glazer has argued, represented the ‘origin of contemporary social science’:

it began to be felt that the collection of scattered observations from writers, combined with the casual observation of social life as one saw it in the ordinary course of one’s activities, could not possibly tell one what was true and important: it was necessary to collect all the relevant facts, to consider the grounds on which one accepted these as facts, and … to test knowledge by professionally investigating what had previously been casually observed (Glazer, 1973, 46–7).

Urban, industrial society could not do without facts, without censuses, knowledge of the economic and social condition of the people and of trends in population movements and migration. The ‘impersonality’ of cities, furthermore, was conducive to regarding men and women as objects – and therefore as susceptible to study as if they were but objects (Easthope, 1974, 10). A ‘positive science of society’ was given impetus: a ‘scientific’ study which was attractive in an age in which the pure and applied sciences were making rapid advances and meshed well with notions of ‘rational man’ derived from the idea of a social contract.

Whether one is inclined to cite the Domesday Book as an example of empiricism as an integral part of the British character or as an early indication of kingly or governmental concern to maximise income from taxes, the accumulation of statistical ‘facts’ is deeply inlaid in British social history and is associated with a particularly strong element in sociological research. Censuses have been held every ten years since 1801 (1941 excepted, and additionally in 1966). These ‘numbers pertaining to the State’ are supplemented by a number of other sources of official statistics. Rating lists, reports of the various Departments of State, Registers of Electors and so on at once provide information in their own right and may serve as a basis for sampling in particular research projects. Of course, even statistical facts are not pure and simple: it is salutary to note the subtle differences between the Statistical Society of London (later the Royal Statistical Society) which was founded in 1834 and its somewhat younger sister Society in Manchester. Glazer argues that both societies had ‘a deep belief in the saving power of the fact as against the theory’. However, the London Society was strongly influenced by academics, and its prospectus stated that it would ‘consider it to be the first and most essential rule of its conduct to exclude carefully all opinions from its transactions and publications – to confine its attention rigorously to facts – and, as far as it may be found possible, to facts which can be stated numerically and arranged in tables.’ The Manchester Society was more oriented to reform, its first Annual Report attributing the origin of the Society to ‘a strong desire felt by its projectors to assist in promoting the progress of social improvement in the manufacturing population by which they are surrounded’ (Glazer, 1973,51–2).

A concern with reform

Social reform has long been recognised as a significant strand in the story of British sociology. This intellectual ‘tradition’ includes people such as Chadwick, Booth and Rowntree and in more recent times Titmuss and his colleagues and successors. Despite some reverence paid to grand-scale theorists such as Hobhouse and Spencer, in histories of British social science there is a tendency to give more deference to the line of social surveyors, informed as they were by a social conscience and anxious that their research should pave the way for reforms. Whether it is appropriate to dismiss with Glazer theorists such as Marx and Comte for moving off into the philosophical clouds of human endeavour (Glazer refers to the ‘large general ideas, which soon began to lead a life independent of social realities’), it is important to emphasise the ‘direct involvement’ of reformers such as Beatrice Webb and Charles Booth ‘with the human beings who made up the problems’ associated with the rise of an industrial proletariat and ‘their attempt to ground any general statement about the poor and the working classes on direct acquaintance with them’ (Glazer, 1973, 59).

The stalwarts of the social reform element in the development of British sociology were not soft-headed ‘do-gooders’. The Simeys, in their biography of Booth, are at pains to point out the significance of their subject’s contribution in sheer methodological terms. The sophisticated use of survey and other methods and the careful weighing of evidence by reference to hypotheses were the hallmark of Booth’s work: ‘if Booth’s work means anything at all to the twentieth century, it is because it demonstrates that there is an inseparable relationship between fact and theory which can be established as an essential element in successful social research.’ The conclusion is that the work of Booth amounts to a ‘watershed in the history of British social policy. … a new attitude was created towards the study of the problems of contemporary society.’ Hitherto, policy had developed from belief and doctrine: ‘Booth’s work now provided the nation with a new instrument of government’ (Simey and Simey, 1960, 256).

In attempting to comprehend the different (and in some ways contradictory) definitions or styles of sociology which can be discerned in Britain now and in the past, differences in motivation (such as passion for reform or a disinterested pursuit of ‘the truth’) must be taken into account as well as the contrasting personalities and varying social backgrounds of social researchers. Matters of chance are not to be discounted however. As an example, the Simeys contend that the gulf between Booth and other social reformers on the one hand, and his contemporary Hobhouse and associated academics on the other – a gulf which served to perpetuate a separation of styles of research, in particular the blend of deduction and induction of the former compared with the essentially deductive method of the latter – was, although ‘open to speculation’, probably a consequence of the fact that ‘Hobhouse’s attention was diverted … by the sharp conflicts concerning the nature of sociological studies … which arose as soon as attempts were made to introduce them into the universities.’ It is interesting to speculate on how much more sociological effort has been prejudiced by the exigencies of organising university studies and placating contentious colleagues in the last two decades of British sociology. Yet, as the Simeys say, Hobhouse ‘shared with Comte a belief that sociology should, as it matured, render increasingly possible an expansion of the area of conscious control over the trends of human development and this was in full agreement with Booth’s view.’ The Simeys’ conclusion is that ‘had Hobhouse attempted to translate this dictum into practice he would have found himself working alongside Booth, and the subsequent history of sociology in England might have been very different.’

Sociologists – anxious for academic acceptance – are perhaps too readily concerned to trace their pedigree to grand theorists and to disown the seemingly more modest contributions of social reformers. Glazer is in no uncertainty on this issue, arguing in 1959 that

present day sociologists have more in common with the earnest men of the early nineteenth century mainly in England, who painfully built up a picture of social reality, detail by detail, than with those strongminded thinkers, disdainful of such details, who wanted to tear down worlds and build quite new ones.

A squabble over the pedigree – not to say the legitimacy – of one’s forebears may be unseemly, but the prospect of an alliance between Hobhouse and Booth is cause for reflection on the scope for mutual enhancement of sociologists of apparently very different persuasion and concern.

Industrial and urban growth, ideological change, new techniques, new concerns and new definitions – these and other factors have contributed to the state of sociology in contemporary Britain. Patterns can be shaped, but no overriding pattern will satisfy. Traditional theoretical concerns with order, change and conflict persist. Number-crunchers (the victims or protagonists of ‘quanterphrenia’)* still stand proud or dejected; whilst there is an ever-present concern to comprehend social action in terms of the ‘meaning’ for the actor – though the methodological consequences of this concern are by no means uniformly agreed. T. H. Marshall viewed sociology as being at the ‘crossroads’ in his inaugural lecture at the LSE in 1946. Which road should sociology take? Not, in Marshall’s view, the ‘way to the stars’ – ‘sociologists should not… expend all their energies climbing in search of vast generalisations, universal laws, and a total comprehension of human society as such.’ Marshall did not find an alternative route attractive either – ‘the way into the sands of whirling facts which blow into the eyes until nothing can be clearly seen or heard.’ There was, Marshall thought, a middle way

which runs over firm ground [and]… leads into a country whose features are neither Gargantuan nor Lilliputian, where sociology can choose units of study of a manageable size – not society, progress, morals, and civilization, but specific social structures in which the basic processes and functions have determined meanings (Marshall, 1963, 20).

Sixteen years later W. J. H. Sprott rejected the notion of a crossroads, carrying as it does the implication of ‘a body of men, marching together and faced with a decision as to which way to go’. For Sprott, the sociological terrain approximated more ‘the seven dials’ – he could see ‘several bodies of men converging on an open space where they spend a good deal of time abusing one another’ (Sprott, 1962). It was almost as if the sociological profession had come together at Hyde Park corner. Sprott, like Marshall before him, identified the fact gatherers (responsive to what they and administrators see as social problems). Then there are the methodmen (‘accused of letting their methods dictate the information they will obtain’). The historical sociologists are differentiated from social historians in having a general sociological problem as a base for their studies. The sociological bird watchers can themselves be spied – they, in fact, supply much of the data used in imparting the subject in the university setting. Then Sprott discerns three sorts of theorists – the middle rangers, the analytical theorists and the dynamic theorists.

This variety in scope, interest and approach is attributed by Sprott, at least in part, to the ‘odd nature of the subject-matter, its subjectiveness’: he refers to Hobhouse’s observation that ‘there are still many deep divergencies of view as to the nature and province of the inquiries which [sociologists] professedly pursue in common.’ Perhaps sociological endeavours are intrinsically and necessarily untidy; this may offend the analytical aspirations of its practitioners, but can be seen as a challenge – Westermark, as Professor of Sociology at the LSE, made the point that

anyone who takes up the study of sociology must not expect to come to an exhibition, where every article may be had ready and finished. On the contrary, he will find that he has entered a workshop, where everything is in the making – and he will have to take part in the work.

Towards a professional sociology

The springs of sociological inquiry are, clearly, many and varied. There is an interest and an intellectual excitement in understanding society, if only because, like Everest, it is there. There is a concern to change the social world and a concern to control it or at least to contain the rate and direction of change. Increasingly, too, there is an aspiration ‘simply’ to cope with it. Neustadt has indicated that ‘there are many reasons for the growing demand for sociologists in highly industrialised as well as in so-called “underdeveloped” society.’ Among them are the social needs and pressures which demand, within a smaller or wider compass, changes guided by a degree of planning. It is becoming less and less possible or desirable to rely on automatic changes pure and simple or on guidance by intuitive illuminations of so-called ‘practical common sense’. For the solution of increasingly complex social tasks, a solid basis of scientific sociological teaching and research is as necessary as a similar basis of teaching and research in economics. Hence an increasing demand for sociological skills and approaches amongst social workers, doctors, lawyers, town planners and so on. The ‘decline of the traditional trust in amateurishness’ is to be seen ‘wherever men are concerned with taking decisions over others: [in] factories, government offices, courts of law, homes, schools, hospitals and welfare agencies’ (Neustadt, 1965, 5–6). The ‘decline of the traditional trust in amateurishness’ paves the way for sociological professionalism. Mitchell has alluded, similarly, to ‘a realisation of both the possibility and the necessity of deliberately influencing social behaviour through legislation and the creation of new institutions’ (Mitchell, 1970, 130). The point was made by John Mack in 1956 that the rapidly increasing prestige and influence of the social sciences over the last decade or so was not a consequence of ‘any great theoretical advance or outstanding social invention’ – it was simply that the social sciences were becoming more necessary (Mack, 1956).

No doubt there is much in this. Yet the correspondence between the development of a discipline, its sophistication, its influence or relevance, and the ‘needs’ of society are surely matters which give rise to circumspection in the sociologist. It requires no great insight to document research which is seemingly arbitrary in direction and intent. The US Space Programme provides an example – it gave rise to considerable government support for the study of the extent to which the new technology was transferable to other sectors of technology and industry. Large programmes of research into scientific policy were funded which resulted in the redefinition of relationships between technology, technological innovation and social change. Furthermore, the direction which research takes may reflect opportunity or diplomacy rather than desirability or strategic significance. Thus it has been argued that the principal reason for the first large-scale European studies of leisure under the general direction of Dumazedier may have been the prospect of establishing contact with sociologists in Eastern Europe ‘on politically safe grounds’ (SSRC, 1967). Whether a specialist area flourishes or not may be as much or more dependent on factors associated with the particular area of study than with the value or significance of the work.

The twentieth century was three years old when Victor Branford obtained support for the foundation of the Sociological Society. Institutionally sociology got off to a slow start, but of particular importance was the inauguration of two Chairs of Sociology at the LSE, the Martin White Pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part one
• Part two
• Part three
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index