Abstract
It has always been a major task of sociology to discover and analyse the condition of the working class. Indeed it has frequently been asserted that the origins of sociology in the nineteenth century lie precisely in the need to find ways of understanding and imposing order on a new urban industrial society stripped of its traditional bearings and attitudes. The history of British empirical sociology up to 1939 is largely a matter of surveys of urban working-class life with particular reference to the problems of poverty and unemployment. There is, however, no necessary reason why sociological texts dealing with the analysis of any social group should be concerned to offer direct evocations or experiential accounts of the everyday life or the physical environment involved. Such kinds of writing are, rather, frequently avoided on the grounds that they tend to preclude analysis, to be subjective or idiosyncratic, to fail to offer data for subsequent comparative analysis and to confuse the work of the social scientists with that of the reporter, documentarist or novelist.
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Notes and References
D. V. Glass (ed.), Social Mobility in Britain (London: Routledge, 1954)
J. Floud, A. H. Halsey and F. M. Martin, Social Class and Educational Opportuniy (London: Heinemann, 1957).
R. A. Kent, A History of British Empirical Sociology (Aldershot: Gower, 1981) p. 37.
R. Frankenberg, Communities in Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) p. 9.
N. Dennis, F. Henriques and C. Slaughter, Coal is Our Life (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1956).
Coal is Our Life (second edn, London: Tavistock, 1969) p. 7. (Subsequent page references are to this edition.)
J. Klein, Samples from English Cultures (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).
M. Stacey, Tradition and Change: A Study of Banbury (London: Oxford University Press, 1960).
Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter. Coal is Our Life (second edn) p. 168.
C. Critcher, ‘Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class’, in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds), Working Class Culture (London: Hutchinson, 1979) p. 17.
M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957) pp. xvff.
J. Platt, Social Research in Bethnal Green (London: Macmillan, 1971) p. 138.
Ibid., p. 1. This is part of a policy statement of the Institute printed on the dust jackets of their books.
M. Young and P. Willmott, Review of Social Research in Bethnal Green, New Society, 28 October 1971, p. 841.
R. Titmuss, Foreword to Young and Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, p. xi.
Ibid., p. 22.
Ibid., p. 30.
Young and Willmott, Review of Social Research in Bethnal Green, p. 841.
Young and Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, p. 47. (Subsequent page references are to this title.)
P. Willmott, The Evolution of a Communiy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963) p. 111.
M. Young and P. Willmott, ‘Research Report No. 3: Institute of Community Studies, Bethnal Green’, Sociological Review, IX (July 1961).
Critcher, ‘Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class’, p. 15.
B. Jackson and D. Marsden, Education and the Working Class (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962; revised edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), revised edn, p. 18.
R. Glass, ‘Conflict in Cities’, in A. de Reuck and J. Knight (eds), Conflict in Society (London: Churchill, 1966) p. 148.
R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957) p. 11.
Ibid., pp. 17, 19.
This is discussed further in Chapter 7.
C. Sigal, Weekend in Dinlock (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). (Subsequent page references are to the Penguin edition.)
‘Weekend in Dinlock: A discussion’, New Left Review, May–June 1960, p. 42.
Sigal, Weekend in Dinlock, p. 81.
‘Weekend in Dinlock: A discussion’, pp. 42, 43.
D. Lessing, In Pursuit of the English (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1960) p. 95. (Subsequent page references are to this title.)
M. Lassell, Wellington Road (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) Prefatory Note. (Subsequent references are to the Penguin edition.)
C. Curran, ‘The new estate in Great Britain’, Spectator, 20 January 1956, p. 74.
Lassell, Wellington Road, p. 73. (Subsequent page references are to this title.)
New Statesman, 16 February 1962, p. 234.
Times Literary Supplement, 17 August 1962, p. 627.
New Statesman, 4 June 1960, p. 832.
The Listener, 28 January 1960, p. 185; Times Literary Supplement, 22 January 1960, p. 45. The television ‘fictionalised documentary’ form is discussed in Chapter 6.
A. Wilson, ‘Rescuing the workers’, Spectator, 29 January 1960, p. 140.
The Listener, 15 March 1962, p. 482.
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© 1986 Stuart Laing
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Laing, S. (1986). Social Science and Social Exploration. In: Representations of Working-Class Life 1957–1964. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18459-0_3
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