Abstract
This chapter provides a broad overview of the institutional and demographic development of seven social science and humanities (SSH) disciplines in the UK since the end of WWII. The first part provides a chronological sketch of key policy developments in British higher education over the last 70 or so years and their effects upon the SSH disciplines of interest. It also offers a brief account of the research funding landscape in the UK. The second part goes on to suggest certain developmental trends that have taken place across the seven disciplines under study. In particular, it stresses massification, feminization, Americanization, specialization/differentiation, and innovation through cross-fertilization.
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Notes
- 1.
The ‘canon wars’ were (and to some extent continue to be) a series of politicised disputes over which body of works are to be taken as canonical of the Western tradition, and on what basis exclusions are to be made.
- 2.
Named after the material with which many were built, in accordance with (and in distinction from) the informal naming of the so-called ‘red-brick’ civic universities built around the turn of the nineteenth century.
- 3.
- 4.
Mills et al. (2006) point out that each of the different funders of HE research in the UK, from which many of the statistics come, uses a different definition of what constitutes a discipline, making national datasets unreliable, especially for the largest and smallest of disciplines. Different time periods have been taken for different data sources, and one of the major recent sources—the Higher Education Statistic Agency—has also changed its coding of disciplines (see footnote 6). Another set of issues arises from the fact that many subjects are studied as composite degrees, and yet another from the problems of extracting the specifically social scientific elements of subjects like psychology, which increasingly overlaps with natural science. The problems of the way in which disciplines are counted is not of course merely a methodological problem of data categorisation, it is also a philosophical problem of disciplinarity itself. Issues with the HESA series that is used from 1994 onwards can be found under the various footnotes for the Student and Staff tables on the HESA website (www.hesa.ac.uk). A useful alternative method of measuring student numbers is through the University and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) acceptance data, but since UCAS was only founded in 1992, such data can only be used for relatively recent time periods.
- 5.
Thatcher’s close relationship to the UK’s first private university did not end when her time in politics concluded. After she retired, she became the Chancellor of Buckingham University for a decade, and in her honour, the institution has recently announced the establishment of the ‘Margret Thatcher Centre’ on the campus: a ‘museum and library devoted to [her] life and ideals’.
- 6.
The meteoric rise in student numbers that can be seen in Fig. 4.4 from academic year 2002–2003 is on the whole misleading and artificial. This is especially the case for psychology, even though this discipline has certainly become one of the most popular undergraduate degree programmes (Collins 2012: 23–24). The huge jump seen in the graph is largely the result of a change in the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA)’s coding of subjects from ‘HESA’ to ‘JACS’ coding. For more on this change, please see https://www.hesa.ac.uk/content/view/158/233/.
- 7.
Institutionalised British Sociology was heavily monopolised by the LSE until the end of the two World Wars, although Liverpool University, where a small social science department had been established in 1909, also played a part. Oxford and Cambridge held out a long-standing resistance to the upstart discipline, which was only introduced at Cambridge into the Economics Tripos in 1961 (and properly as a department only in the 1980s by the efforts of Anthony Giddens) and at Oxford into the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) degree only in 1962. During the 1950s a strong and steady expansion of the discipline took place, initially still predominantly at the LSE, but then at Bedford College, University of London, and in the civic ‘red-brick’ universities such as Birmingham, the University of Sheffield, and a little later, Leicester University (where the German sociologist Norbert Elias had moved in 1954). Nottingham had created a department of social administration in 1948, but sociology wasn’t taught in earnest until 1964, when it was established a sub-department.
- 8.
The significant role played by Sussex University as a training ground for anthropology graduates is a notable exception to this rule (Spencer 2000).
- 9.
The Higher Education Statistics Agency only collect staff data on the basis of ‘cost centre’ (‘an accounting practice that can be used as a proxy for academic departments’) or, since the introduction of the ‘Joint Academic Coding System’ (JACS), on the basis of the discipline of the staff member’s highest qualification. Both of these methods present potential problems. The former has the tendency to over-define categories, whereas the latter does not necessarily reflect the discipline in which the staff member is now working. Figure 4.6 has therefore used the designated Units of Assessment (UoA) for submission to the Research Excellence Framework as its categories for locating staff members. Using this data as a proxy for staff numbers operating within separate disciplines is itself not without its own problems however, many of which are listed here: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/ref2014.
- 10.
The Russell Group is an association which represents the interests of a powerful group of research-intensive universities in the UK.
- 11.
Collini (2010) offers an excellent critical overview.
- 12.
The Liberal Democrats had, during their election campaign, vowed to scrap tuition fees entirely, so their subsequent tripling under the coalition government was understood as a betrayal by many students who had offered their votes to them for precisely this reason.
- 13.
In certain STEM subjects the imbalance is quite remarkable. For instance, undergraduate Engineering students were 84% male in 2015 (Universities UK 2015).
- 14.
Mills et al. note that in the academic year 2003/4 ‘38% of new permanent appointments in economics did their highest degrees in the US’ (2006: 10).
- 15.
The report points out that ‘While the UK represents just 0.9% of global population, 3.2% of R&D expenditure, and 4.1% of researchers, it accounts for 9.5% of downloads, 11.6% of citations and 15.9% of the world’s most highly-cited articles’ (BIS 2013: 2).
- 16.
In the US, an idea originally developed by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle would similarly have a innovating effect on cultural anthropology through Clifford Geertz’s development of the notion of ‘thick description’.
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Appendix 4.1: Examination Boards Offering SSH Subjects at School-Level
Appendix 4.1: Examination Boards Offering SSH Subjects at School-Level
A-Level | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Examination board | Anthropology | Sociology | Politics | Economics | English language | English literature | Psychology | Psychology |
AQA | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
OCR |  | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |  |
Edexcel |  |  | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |  |
WJEC |  | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |  |
CCEA |  |  | ✓ |  |  | ✓ |  |  |
Scottish highers |  | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
GCSE | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â |
Examination board | Anthropology | Sociology | Politics | Economics | English | Â | Psychology | Psychology |
AQA |  | ✓ |  | ✓ (Business studies) | ✓ |  | ✓ |  |
OCR |  | ✓ |  | ✓ | ✓ |  | ✓ |  |
Edexcel |  |  |  | ✓ (Applied business) | ✓ |  | ✓ |  |
WJEC |  | ✓ |  | ✓ (Business) | ✓ |  | ✓ |  |
CCEA |  |  |  | ✓ (Business) | ✓ |  |  |  |
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Morgan, M. (2019). The Post-war Institutional Development of the SSH in the UK. In: Fleck, C., Duller, M., Karády, V. (eds) Shaping Human Science Disciplines. Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92780-0_4
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