The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain This page intentionally left blank The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain Edited by John Holmwood University of Nottingham, UK John Scott University of Copenhagen, Denmark Selection and editorial matter © John Holmwood and John Scott 2014 Individual chapters © their respective authors Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-0-230-29981-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-33548-0 ISBN 978-1-137-31886-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137318862 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Palgrave handbook of sociology in Britain / edited by John Holmwood, John Scott. pages cm Summary: “British sociology has been central to the evolution of the field, playing a key role in the establishment of the discipline internationally and in the professionalization of the subject within the academy. This Handbook, drawing together leading specialists from across the subject, provides a comprehensive history of the discipline within Britain and demonstrates the continuing influence of British sociological thinking globally. Addressing key moments in the development of sociology, this Handbook examines its 18th century origins in Scottish thought, 19th century evolutionism, the impact of the end of empire in the 20th century, the role of exiles, the rise of feminism and the implications of the most recent Government policies toward universities. The volume examines the institutionalization of sociology through the creation of departments, the development of research methods, the writing of textbooks and the creation and influence of the book series, the International Library of Sociology. Further, individual chapters discuss key topics of sociological study in Britain such as class, race and ethnicity, religion, the sociology of the body, cultural studies, and criminology, and its relation to other fields of research such as poverty, social work and the humanities. Challenging received ideas about the discipline and recovering lost histories this one-stop overview is an essential reference guide to the growth of sociology and the sociological imagination.”— Provided by publisher. 1. Sociology—Great Britain—History. I. Holmwood, John, 1950– HM477.G7P35 2014 301.0941—dc23 2014018687 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 Contents List of Figures and Tables vii Notes on Contributors viii 1 Introduction 1 John Holmwood and John Scott 2 The Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Social Thought c.1725–1915 3 John Brewer 3 Poverty Studies and Social Research 30 Lucinda Platt 4 Absent or Forgotten? Recovering British Social Theory 54 John Scott 5 Evolutionism and British Sociology 71 Chris Renwick 6 Religion and British Sociology: The Power and Necessity of the Spiritual 97 Stephen Turner 7 Sociology and Social Work: In Praise of Limestone? 123 Ian Shaw 8 The First Sociology ‘Departments’ 155 Christopher T. Husbands 9 British Sociology in the Inter-War Years 189 Baudry Rocquin 10 Building a Textbook Tradition: Sociology in Britain, 1900–68 211 John Scott 11 The International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction and British Sociology 236 Jennifer Platt 12 Feminism in Sociology, Feminism as Sociology 260 Mary Evans 13 Exiles in British Sociology 282 Charles Turner vi The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain 14 British Sociology in the Metropole and the Colonies, 1940s–60s 302 George Steinmetz 15 Between Science and the Humanities: Sociology as a Third Culture? 338 John Eldridge 16 The History of British Sociology from the Perspective of its Archived Qualitative Sources: Ruminations and Reflections 359 Mike Savage 17 The Sociology of Community 374 Graham Crow 18 Sociology of Race, Racism and Ethnicity: Trends, Debates and Research Agendas 396 John Solomos 19 Research Methodology in Sociology 413 Geoff Payne 20 The Sociological Study of Religion: Arrival, Survival, Revival 437 Grace Davie 21 Criminology, Deviance and Sociology 459 Eamonn Carrabine 22 The Sociology of Work: From Industrial Sociology to Work, Employment and the Economy 488 Paul Edwards 23 Sociology, Cultural Studies and the Cultural Turn 510 Gregor McLennan 24 ‘Class’ in Britain 536 Wendy Bottero 25 Sociology of the Body and the Relation between Sociology and Biology 563 Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott 26 Sociology’s Past and Futures: The Impact of External Structure, Policy and Financing 588 John Holmwood Index 611 List of Figures and Tables Figures 3.1 Booth’s Poverty Map, Sheet 5, showing his classification of the streets of London 33 3.2 The causes of primary poverty from Poverty 38 3.3 The alternating periods of poverty and plenty in the life of a labourer from Poverty 39 Tables 10.1 British sociology texts (1900–50) 213 10.2 British sociology texts (1951–68) 213 11.1 Ups and downs of some topics in the ILSSR 248 11.2 Some US books published in Britain by ILSSR 251 11.3 Total numbers of books known to have been published in ILSSR 253 11.4 Proportion of those years’ books by authors from the main countries represented 253 vii Notes on Contributors Wendy Bottero is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. Her research interests centre on the social reproduction of inequality with a particular interest in how social hierarchies and inequalities are wound through our personal ties and social connections. She has explored this from three angles in her work: using the patterning of social ties to map hierarchies; thinking about how social ties and interaction can help us to theorise hierarchy and inequality; and exploring how our web of social connections affects the visibility of inequality. John D. Brewer is Professor of Post Conflict Studies at Queen’s University and was formerly Sixth Century Professor of Sociology at Aberdeen University. He is a former president of the BSA and now an honorary vice president. He has an honorary degree from Brunel University for services to social science and is a fellow of four learned societies and a member of the United Nations Roster of Global Experts. He works primarily on the sociology of peace processes but also writes extensively on the Scottish Enlightenment. His most recent book is The Public Value of the Social Sciences (Bloomsbury, 2013). Eamonn Carrabine is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, where his teaching and research interests lie in the fields of criminology, cultural studies and sociology more generally. He has published prolifically in leading journals including the British Journal of Criminology, the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, Punishment and Society, Sociological Review, Theoretical Criminology and Crime, Media, Culture. His books include Crime in Modern Britain (co-authored, 2002), Power, Discourse and Society: A Genealogy of the Strangeways Prison Riot (2004) and Crime, Culture and the Media (2008), while his co-authored textbook Criminology: A Sociological Introduction is now in its third edition. He is currently writing a book on Crime and Social Theory, which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan, and then plans to write a book on the Iconography of Punishment, focusing on how punishment has been represented in the literary and visual arts. Graham Crow is Professor of Sociology and Methodology at the University of Edinburgh where he is also Director of the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science. Prior to this he worked at the University of Southampton for 30 years. He has also been Deputy Director of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods since 2006. His research interests include research methods (including viii Notes on Contributors ix research ethics), interdisciplinarity, comparative sociology and social theory, and the sociology of families and communities. He is principal investigator of a Connected Communities programme consortium investigating how change in community relationships is imagined and how it comes about. Grace Davie is Professor Emeritus in the Sociology of Religion at the University of Exeter UK and a senior adviser to the Impact of Religion Research Programme at Uppsala University. In addition to numerous chapters and articles, she is the author of Religion in Britain since 1945 (Blackwell, 1994), Religion in Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2000), Europe: the Exceptional Case (DLT, 2002) and The Sociology of Religion (Sage, 2007/2013); she is the co-author of Religious America, Secular Europe (Ashgate, 2008), and co-editor of Predicting Religion (Ashgate, 2003) and Welfare and Religion in 21st Century Europe (two volumes) (Ashgate, 2010 and 2011). Paul Edwards is Professor of Employment Relations at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. His research interests include work relations in small and ethnic minority businesses and employment practice in multinational firms. His most recent book is a co-edited volume, Studying Organizations Using Critical Realism (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and Editor-in-Chief of Human Relations. John Eldridge is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He has written extensively in the fields of industrial sociology, sociology of the media and sociological theory. He is a founder member of the Glasgow University Media Group. Mary Evans is currently Centennial Professor at the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics. Her work has included studies of feminist theory and aspects of literary fiction and biography. She has edited various collections and with colleagues at the Gender Institute is an editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Feminist Theory (Sage). John Holmwood is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham. He has held posts at the Universities of Tasmania, Edinburgh, Sussex and Birmingham. His current research addresses the challenge of global social inquiry and the role of pragmatism in the construction of public sociology. He is a co-founder of the Campaign for the Public University and editor of A Manifesto for the Public University (Bloomsbury, 2011) and joint managing editor with Sue Scott of the online magazine of social research, policy analysis and commentary, Discover Society.