Introduction

Abstract

This book emerged from the annual British Sociological Association Conference 2007, one of the most highly attended ever held in the United Kingdom, with no less than thirty five streams.¹ It took three days and a large area of the University of East London’s campus to get through them, yet we say a potentially unpromising beginning for a book because one of the first things which publishers, and indeed a few of the attendees, said to us when we proposed a book to come out of it, was ‘Oh no! Not a conference volume! Think how disparate (and dispiriting?) the papers will be! Think how incoherent such a book would be! Who would read such a book? Who would contribute to such a book? What would such a book show other than a discipline in flux?’ Yet the idea lingered. With the passage of time the initial desire to trap the excitement of a real, live conference, the birth of which you have personally and painfully endured as the organising committee wore off, to be replaced with a more serious project at the heart of which lie real questions. Sociological questions which have, at best, uneasy answers grew between the paving slabs of the university precinct and blossomed in the urban air of the dockside campus.