Workers and their wages

Abstract

I write this final chapter almost exactly one year to the day since Alan Rusbridger’s ‘Who needs sociologists?’ ruined my breakfast and so annoyed me that I was prompted to write this book by way of a reply. On the face of it, of course, the scale of my response is out of all proportion to the original offence. A brief, superficially researched and hastily written article located on page 21 of a newspaper with a relatively small circulation scarcely merits a 100,000 word volume in reply. At a more profound level, however, Rusbridger’s perfunctory piece epitomizes the sustained barrage of criticism to which I and my colleagues have been subjected during the past decade. Sociology has acted as a magnet to every current of anti-intellectualism within the British Establishment. In that respect, at least, Rusbridger’s assessment was entirely accurate: the subject has been singled out for peculiarly harsh treatment by unsympathetic governments and an uncomprehending media. Some sociology departments have been closed, while those that remain have experienced serious job losses; research funding has been harder to come by, and more often tied specifically to projects devised by others, at the behest either of the government or Civil Service; accusations of incompetence, irrelevance, left-wing and anti-capitalist bias have been rife. Too many friends and colleagues have been forced to retreat to the more liberal climates of North America and Australasia. Others have lost heart and withdrawn with their pensions into early retirement, leaving younger colleagues to fend off the bailiffs. And still the innuendo persists. Last night, for example, I watched a popular television advertisement in which a distraught adolescent telephoned his grandmother to report that he had ‘failed all his exams’—or, more accurately, failed all except pottery and sociology, but then they hardly counted. That, in a nutshell, is what I am objecting to: the popular perception that, in the Britain of the 1980s, sociology simply does not count.

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