Abstract
Histories of sociology say little about the Polytechnics where half the sociologists in Britain worked in the late 1970s, raising questions about the relevance of institutional contexts, and what we mean by sociology’s ‘history’. In the 1960s, LSE’s department of sociology, through the London University BA/BSc Sociology External Degree, shaped the teaching and staffing of sociology in the Technical Colleges which became Polytechnics. Initially needing few resources, this facilitated the spread of sociology degrees without incorporating quantitative methods into the discipline. Younger Polytechnic sociologists, re-designing and teaching new degrees and becoming research-active, were particularly open to new ideas and non-quantitative methods, and by weight of numbers developed British sociology in new directions.
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Payne, G. (2019). ‘Poor Cousins’: The Lost History of Sociology in the Polytechnics. In: Panayotova, P. (eds) The History of Sociology in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19929-6_7
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