twenty-nine - Sociology: involvement and detachment

Summary

Why did I study sociology? Reconstructing motives after decades is always risky, but I am sure that one thing that drew me to sociology as a teenager was its novelty. Its absence from the school curriculum gave the discipline a certain cachet – it smacked of the ‘underground’ and all that was challenging about social movements in the 1960s. In the sixth form of a boy’s grammar school in 1968, we were enthralled by events in Paris and elsewhere, and excited by the prospect of widespread radical change outside the conventional leftist mould. These radical social movements appeared to offer the prospect of a world turned on its head and sociology seemed bound up with this. At school a geography master persuaded a few of us to subscribe to New Society. It seems astonishing now that a social science magazine had a weekly readership of 60,000. Its popularity in the 1960s was evidence of, ‘the crystallization of a distinctive interest in gleaning knowledge of social life and social relationships in areas that had hitherto been ignored,’ (Savage, 2010, 113). New Society showed that the ‘everyday’ could be a legitimate subject of interest and the institutions that I imagined I was rebelling against – family, school, work – could be objects of systematic study. My curiosity was cemented when I read the Jackson and Marsden classic, Education and the working class (1965). Here was a study that echoed my experiences and a discipline that helped to explain life as a working-class grammar school boy and the complex interactions between home, school, parental values and intergenerational mobility. I went to Leicester University to study sociology with no idea that it housed a cosmopolitan department with so many eminent academics. Only later did I learn how influential the Leicester department was in the development of British sociology (Goodwin and Hughes, 2011). I expected sociology to be ‘relevant’, and involved in contemporary issues, but I was largely disappointed. Instead, the Leicester syllabus included Evans-Pritchard, Malinowski, Bloch, Witfogel, Barrington Moore and, of course, Norbert Elias’ work on the sociogenesis of courtly behaviour in Europe in the middle ages.