In Praise of Sociology

IN PRAISE OF SOCIOLOGY THE AUTHOR Born in Falkirk in 1952, Gordon Marshall was educated at Falkirk High School and at the Universities of Stirling and Oxford, before taking up a post as Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex. He has since lectured widely in North America, Scandinavia and East Asia, and has been a Morris Ginsberg Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Visiting Professor at the University of Uppsala. His previous publications include Presbyteries and Profits (Oxford University Press, 1980), In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism (Hutchinson, 1982), and many articles on sociological theory and social stratification. Most recently he has co-authored Social Class in Modern Britain (Hutchinson, 1988). He now lives in Wivenhoe and is presently Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex. IN PRAISE OF SOCIOLOGY Gordon Marshall London UNWIN HYMAN Boston Sydney Wellington © Gordon Marshall, 1990 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. Published by the Academic Division of Unwin Hyman Ltd 15/17 Broadwick Street, London Wl V IFP, UK Unwin Hyman Inc., 8 Winchester Place, Winchester, Mass. 01890, USA Allen & Unwin (Australia) Ltd, 8 Napier Street, North Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia Allen & Unwin (New Zealand) Ltd in association with the Port Nicholson Press Ltd, Compusales Building, 75 Ghuznee Street, Wellington 1, New Zealand First published in 1990 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Marshall, Gordon In praise of sociology. 1. Sociology I. Title 301 ISBN 0-203-16173-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-81165-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-04-445687-5 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-04-445688-3 Pbk Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data applied for For Bob and Ina Contents Acknowledgements page xiii 1 The theme 1 2 Social class and social mobility 12 3 Education and culture 35 4 Poverty in an affluent society 55 5 Managing the new technology 78 6 Workers and their wages 100 7 Race and housing in the inner city 124 8 The rise and fall of the mods 149 9 Sociologists and scientologists 176 10 On the social origins of clinical depression 205 11 Families and social networks—A conclusion 234 Further reading 249 Index 258 Tables and figures Table 2.1 Goldthorpe class categories, and distribution of respondents to Oxford Social Mobility Inquiry, 1972 page 16 Table 2.2 Intergenerational class mobility among men in England and Wales 19 Table 2.3 Relative mobility chances in terms of odds ratios, by birth cohorts 21 Table 4.1 Types of resource and main systems from which they are derived 60 Table 4.2 The Townsend deprivation index 62 Figure 4.1 Modal deprivation by logarithm of income as a percentage of supplementary benefit scale rates 63 Table 4.3 Value for previous year, in pounds, of different types of resource to average household in each quintile income group 64 Table 4.4 Selected indicators of change in social structure of the United Kingdom, 1968–76 67 Table 5.1 Characteristics of a mechanical management system 84 Table 5.2 Characteristics of an organic management system 85 Figure 7.1 The urban areas of Chicago 128 Figure 7.2 The three Sparkbrooks 134 Table 8.1 Sources of data for Folk Devils and Moral Panics 151 Table 9.1 Examples of Ron Hubbard’s ‘Definitions, Logics and Axioms’ 181 Table 9.2 Examples of Scientologists’ Reports of the Processing of Whole-Track Engrams 181 Table 9.3 Examples of Scientology ‘success stories’ 183 Table 9.4 A typology of ideological collectivities 185 Table 10.1 The categories of significant life-events 209 Table 10.2 Examples of overall severity ratings 212 Table 10.3 Percent of women developing a psychiatric disorder (i.e. onset caseness) in the year, by whether they have children at home, social class, and whether they had a provoking agent (always before any onset) 218 Figure 10.1 A causal model of clinical depression 221 xii In praise of sociology Figure 10.2 Comparison of linear probability and logit functional forms 228 Table 11.1 Relationship between conjugal segregation, type of network and occupation 239 Figure 11.1 Schematic comparison of the networks of two families 242 Acknowledgements In writing this book I have accumulated the usual debts against the goodwill of friends and colleagues. My thanks, therefore, to Joan Busfield, George Kolankiewicz, David Lee and Ken Plummer for invaluable advice on the contents of the hesitant first draft. I wrote it during the course of a busy academic year—for others as much as myself—and I appreciate the efforts that were made to find time for reading and discussing my manuscript. Gordon Smith, at Unwin Hyman, exercised his usual sound editorial judgement and made numerous worthwhile suggestions. Fortunately, he is an amicable as well as a thorough professional, so I was allowed to indulge my writer’s obstinacy and ignore a fair proportion of them. If I have exploited his tolerant nature then I hereby apologise. A particular debt is also owed to the two people to whom the book is dedicated. But for their parental encouragement I would probably still be serving drinks in a certain pub somewhere in central Scotland—and so forced to listen all day to never-ending tapes of Andy Stewart and the Tartan Lads. The thought still makes me break out in a cold sweat. Finally, for reasons that are altogether too complex to explain here, I would also like to express my gratitude to the manufacturers of the Decca Yacht Navigator IV, and the man or woman who invented the autohelm. Gordon Marshall, Yacht Alana, April 1989. 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 2 In praise of sociology 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.

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