To the astonishment of many of us who can remember the 1970s, there has recently been a "seventies revival." Some of the worst artefacts of the "decade that style forgot" are being celebrated for their kitsch splendour. But one favourite cliché of British culture in the 1970s has been conspicuously absent from the revival: the "trendy sociologist." Indeed, this is a cliché which has become an oxymoron. It is difficult for any Prospect reader under 40 to imagine the glee with which the conservative press greeted Malcolm Bradbury's satire on the relentlessly trendy sociologist Howard Kirk, in his 1975 novel The History Man. Kirk, a moustachioed womaniser with a taste for jargon and a lust for subverting "the establishment," was a monster who embodied the absurdly overblown image of sociology-the discipline had acquired a symbolic power out of all proportion to its real importance. Bradbury's demolition of his anti-hero's hypocrisies and pretensions was hailed as though he headed up an army relieving a city besieged by Marxist academics. Now, a satire on sociologists would not be worth writing.
But the paradox of the present is this: while sociology today scarcely registers with the public, sociological insight is more valuable and better grounded than ever before. In other words, we have sociology without sociologists. The discipline itself suffers from a damaging split between theory and empirical research, and from too much of the wrong kind of theory. Furthermore, there is a depleted "middle ground" of sociologist intellectuals representing the discipline in policy debates or wider public discussion. (The last sociologist to deliver the Reith lectures was AH Halsey, in 1977.) Sociological thinking remains influential, but mainly in the work of "policy entrepreneurs" operating in think-tanks or consultancies.
To consider the relative poverty of academic sociology, you only have to compare the state of the discipline in 1964 and 1997, two years in which left of centre governments returned to power after a long absence. The sociologist Martin Albrow, in a recent address to the British Association, argued that the 1960s saw a new quest by public agencies for better intelligence about the dynamics of society, factual data combined with "good theory" which can "shed light on deeper connections and possible policy directions... The social engineering of Tony Crosland had a clear vision of reform which would achieve equality of opportunity and a more just society."
It is possible to overstate the degree to which sociologists influenced policy in the 1960s, and in any case the period led to much disillusionment with sociologically informed policy-after all it gave us comprehensive schools and tower blocks. But 30 or 40 years ago there was a coherence to the discipline which is no longer there. Theory and practice were integrated in a productive way: empirical research was theoretically informed; and theorists engaged with the results of quantitative and qualitative fieldwork and data analysis. It was also possible to be an accessible sociologist, producing challenging work in terms intelligible to the lay reader.
This is not just nostalgia. The evidence is there to read in the works of Richard Titmuss, Brian Abel-Smith, Ernest Gellner and, above all, Michael Young and Peter Willmott. It is to be found in the pages of New Society, which communicated the energy and excitement of social sciences breaking new ground in theory, empirical work and policy influence. The approach lives on in the later work of Young and Willmott; of Ray Pahl and Colin Ward; in the journalism of Paul Barker; and in think-tanks and consultancies such as Demos, Comedia and the Henley Centre.
This tradition has often been caricatured in the work of radical theorists as a fact-obsessed British empiricism uninformed by ideology or self-awareness. Not so: this strain in British sociology combines lucid writing, a critical humanist ideology, a concern to map and measure social change before pronouncing on its direction, a deep interest in fieldwork and a distinctive gaze-an eye for vivid and revealing detail, indicative of larger forces at work. The latter gift-on display in Paul Barker's essays on suburbs, shopping malls, high streets and leisure centres-is what binds together the empirical work of this loose tradition with its theoretical and political dimension. Theory and policy matter, but they must be based on real experience and real talk.
The tradition has been more durable than many of the more fashionable schools of thought. It is difficult to match the empirical strength, the lucidity of prose and the integration of theory and practical insight of Young and Willmott's The Symmetrical Family, the Pahls' Divisions of Labour, Ray Pahl's After Success, or the magnificent body of work produced by the veteran anarchist Colin Ward, such as his study of new towns, New Town, Home Town. In The Symmetrical Family, for example, Young and Willmott offer a detailed, vivid and empirically ambitious study of households, work, relationships and time use in the early 1970s in the London area, which foreshadows all the "discoveries" of social trend watchers in the 1990s-the tension between family and work, the rise of women as breadwinners, the "time squeeze," and so on. Nothing as good has appeared since.
But the progressive British sociology of the 1960s and early 1970s looked insufficiently radical in theoretical and political ambition, to the "1968" generation. The influence of continental theory grew-and generated a huge amount of posturing, barely exaggerated in Bradbury's lethal portrait of his "history man." As the sociologist John Hall put it: "Modern sociology became a desert of arid concept-chopping where some sort of multiplier ruled: among various theoretical guides to social reality were ethnomethodology, structuralism, structuralist Marxism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, functionalism, exchange theory, phenomenological Marxism, linguistic analysis and network analysis. This theoretical extravagance scarcely advanced the subject, for the banal but forceful reason that sociological theories can only develop in the process of trying to explain reality."
The crumbling of the postwar progressive consensus in the 1970s and the advent of Thatcherism made the situation even worse. Empirical research with policy relevance, already anathema to the left, was now being rejected by the doctrinaire right. The criminological research carried out for the Home Office was marginalised by ministers who preferred to develop policy on the basis of personal conviction rather than sociological information. The rejection of "society" as a factor in policy formation left the social sciences in general on the margins of policy-with the exception of economics.
Indeed, a particular version of economic theory-neo-classical thinking combined with "rational choice theory" which seeks to explain human behaviour in terms of rational self-interest-became dominant at the frontier between social science and policy. Meanwhile, the response of many sociologists to their marginalisation in the 1980s was to widen still further the gap between theory and empirical research. Post-structuralism and post-modernism have produced one or two worthwhile insights, but they have largely been an intellectual dead end (as they have been in the humanities). Post-modern sociology, by and large, is conducted in a hall of mirrors on the top floor of an ivory tower with no doors or windows.
Loss of interaction between theory and empirical research has been reinforced by another legacy of the long Tory hegemony in Britain: the reform of higher education. Pressure on universities to improve productivity and "value for money" has led to the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise, through which departments are ranked and rewarded. One-presumably unintended-consequence of the system has been to overvalue the production of refereed journal articles and to depress the value, in career and departmental terms, of teaching, textbook writing and publication of non-refereed articles. The policy has rewarded Stakhanovite quota-fulfilment in the output of academic journal articles, thus helping to reinforce the isolation of many academics. For sociology, it has made a bad situation worse. As a discipline capable of speaking to a wide public, sociology has been dying a death by a thousand refereed journal articles.
The academy has had little interaction with large-scale users and developers of social theory and sociological research in think-tanks, market research organisations and consultancies-which are often far more sophisticated consumers of sociology and innovative adaptors of academic ideas than academics realise. And there is a wider loss of engagement with the polity, as noted by Geoff Mulgan, the co-founder of Demos, in the recent one-off edition of Marxism Today: "Surprisingly few intellectuals are now actively involved in society, as councillors, activists or school governors. Instead, the world is viewed at second hand, through books, or books about books... Society is viewed as if from outside, without any sense of membership or responsibility."
If this seems harsh, compare the practical legacy and continuing engagement in a huge variety of initiatives by Michael Young or Colin Ward with the feeble practical contribution of the post-modern left. Even when we look at the work of more engaged social theorists, such as Anthony Giddens in Britain and Ulrich Beck in Germany, author of the bestselling Risk Society, we can see signs of the gulf between theory and practice. As David Goldblatt notes, in his study of Social Theory and the Environment, Giddens, Beck and prestigious thinkers such as J?gen Habermas have built complex and rich theories of social change, but show remarkably little interest in how these theories might be tested to see if they are accurate pictures of contemporary reality.
Moreover, for all their lucidity, neither Giddens, nor Beck, nor (above all) Habermas are able to reach a wide audience in the way that the best popular science writers in physics, biology and cosmology can, or historians and even some economists have been able to. "Pop sociology" is alive and kicking in personal development books and journalism, but not in the prose of our best sociologists. There is no equivalent among sociologists to Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould, who have opened up difficult disciplines to a big public. Those who are attempting large-scale syntheses of sociological ideas are mainly journalists and think-tankers-such as Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard's A Class Act, Geoff Mulgan's Connexity and Nicholas Timmins's The Five Giants.
but if sociologists have a problem, sociology does not. In fact, it could be said to be entering a new golden age. How can this be the case?
First, it is easy to underestimate the pervasiveness of sociological thinking. Many sociological facts and concepts have entered the political and intellectual bloodstream. As Giddens argues in his recent volume Conversations with Anthony Giddens (Polity Press): "Most of the debates that occupy people are sociological debates now. They are about crime, cities, families, sexuality, individualism, social solidarity, the limits of industrialism, the changing nature of work. Because such topics are so widely discussed, they lose the sense of being a separate endeavour called sociology." Giddens also notes the way in which sociological ideas feed "reflexively" into everyday decisions. In thinking about our long-term futures-in relation to pensions, marriage, childcare and jobs-we are increasingly required to build personal "scenarios" drawing on whatever understanding we can glean about the social trends affecting our lives.
Second, as Martin Albrow argues, political life is now recognising the limits to economic explanations and seeking better social intelligence to underpin policy programmes. Neo-classical economic theory is under pressure, in politics and also within the social sciences, to draw on new thinking about systems and complexity (see Paul Ormerod's The Death of Economics). We are re-entering a phase in political life where policy-makers on all sides recognise the importance of "society." As Albrow remarks: "There has rarely been a more favourable opportunity for a science of society to apply appropriate theory, advise on technical solutions and engage in policy debates."
Third, alongside sociology's obscure theorising, a great deal of basic, survey-type, empirical research has been conducted over the past decade by people in sociology, social administration and social policy, departments, often in the new universities. Paradoxically, much of this research has been the consequence of Thatcherism. The reform of local government and the welfare state is creating a large demand for information about the preferences of the consumers of public services. It is sociologists with clipboards who have often provided this data. Slimming down of the research function in many Whitehall departments has also generated a new demand for social policy analysis from both university departments and think-tanks.
Fourth, there is new hope for theory. A trend which ran counter to the retreat of theorists into post-modern obscurity was the revival of historical sociology and ambitious social analysis of the evolution of nations and industrial systems. Ernest Gellner was the inspiration for sweeping, tough-minded but accessible books by, for example, John Hall and Michael Mann. WG Runciman's recent The Social Animal sets out a new evolutionary framework for understanding social change, drawing on ideas from evolutionary biology. Even the concept of the "risk society," popularised by Beck and Giddens, has attracted wide attention in public bodies and business. (See the work of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change at Lancaster University, especially their grim study of public attitudes towards quality of life and people's sense of how little they control their environments.) Moreover, as Albrow emphasises, sociological theory does have some solid results to its credit: he cites relative deprivation theory, the theory of the function of social rules and regulations, and the insight that market exchanges rest on a prior base of social exchange-relationships of trust and gifts. These can inform empirical work and policy development in useful ways.
In fact, theory and practice have been intermingling fruitfully outside the academy for some time. As Ken Worpole of Comedia has argued, the sociological imagination has been thriving in the "ideas industry." This comprises think-tanks such as Demos and the Social Market Foundation; survey research bodies such as SCPR and Mori; hybrid consultancies such as Comedia (see their work with Demos on the use and abuse of public parks), the Future Foundation, the Henley Centre and the Centre for Local Economic Strategies; charitable trusts funding social research and publishing it, such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation; advocacy bodies such as Forum for the Future; and long-established forums for research and debate such as the Industrial Society and the RSA. The spirit of British sociology of the 1960s lives on in many of these organisations, as does the union of theory, fieldwork and policy development.
Sociology is also entering a new golden age of data collection and analysis. We now have better tools than ever for analysis and data collection, with the prospect of more to come as information and communication technology continues to develop. The large surveys funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-such as the British Household Panel Study and the child development cohort studies, which have been gathering material for many years-offer a perspective on social change of great depth and with a big potential impact on policy.
Finally, there is a hunger for "pop sociology" among a wide public. Consider the impact of the Seven-Up television series on the group of people interviewed every seven years since 1964. If we are all sociologists now, as Giddens says, then we all need better access to searching sociological analysis-pub sociology is not the same as good pop sociology.
The results of the big ESRC-funded surveys, and their implications for our understanding of family life, crime and learning, deserve popularisation, but seldom get it. We cannot leave the popularisation job to the media and think-tanks alone-they are both subject to pressures of time and money which means that they are unavoidably selective. We still need real sociologists to rummage around in the unfashionable policy areas which may be providing important signals about social change.
How can we attract them? First, there is an urgent need to reform the university research assessment process. It must do more to reward teaching, textbook writing and good popularisation of key ideas and results. Second, consistently good survey work, detailed qualitative research and good dissemination cannot be done cheaply. Well-grounded policy needs well-supported research; we must not begrudge funds to the ESRC and the research arms of public bodies, especially in the absence of a large range of private foundations such as those which exist in the US. In Britain far too much of the funding load is borne by Rowntree and Nuffield. Third, the divide between theory and practice still needs more bridges. Sociological theorists need the confusing richness which comes from the world of "praxis" inhabited by think-tanks and consultancies. Similarly, survey practitioners need more contact with theory and policy. The example of Bob Holman, former professor of social administration at Bath University who has lived for years on Glasgow's Easterhouse estate as a community worker, rejecting the remoteness of academics from their objects of study, is a counsel of perfection few can follow (see his Faith in the Poor, Lion). But he points to the need for sociology to make connections in reality, not simply in theory.
Sociology is entering a golden age. All we need is for sociologists to start joining in.
