The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain

645 Pages·2014·3.627 MB·English

by  John Holmwood, John Scott (eds.)

The Palgrave Handbook
of Sociology in Britain
This page intentionally left blank
The Palgrave Handbook
of Sociology in Britain
Edited by
John Holmwood
University of Nottingham, UK
John Scott
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Selection and editorial matter © John Holmwood and John Scott 2014
Individual chapters © their respective authors
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-0-230-29981-8
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written
permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in
England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies
and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom,
Europe and other countries
ISBN 978-1-349-33548-0 ISBN 978-1-137-31886-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137318862
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained
forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the
environmental regulations of the country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Palgrave handbook of sociology in Britain / edited by John Holmwood, John Scott.
pages cm
Summary: “British sociology has been central to the evolution of the field, playing a key role
in the establishment of the discipline internationally and in the professionalization of the
subject within the academy. This Handbook, drawing together leading specialists from across
the subject, provides a comprehensive history of the discipline within Britain and demonstrates
the continuing influence of British sociological thinking globally. Addressing key moments in
the development of sociology, this Handbook examines its 18th century origins in Scottish
thought, 19th century evolutionism, the impact of the end of empire in the 20th century, the
role of exiles, the rise of feminism and the implications of the most recent Government policies
toward universities. The volume examines the institutionalization of sociology through the
creation of departments, the development of research methods, the writing of textbooks and
the creation and influence of the book series, the International Library of Sociology. Further,
individual chapters discuss key topics of sociological study in Britain such as class, race and
ethnicity, religion, the sociology of the body, cultural studies, and criminology, and its relation
to other fields of research such as poverty, social work and the humanities. Challenging
received ideas about the discipline and recovering lost histories this one-stop overview is an
essential reference guide to the growth of sociology and the sociological imagination.”—
Provided by publisher.
1. Sociology—Great Britain—History. I. Holmwood, John, 1950–
HM477.G7P35 2014
301.0941—dc23
2014018687
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Notes on Contributors viii
1 Introduction 1
John Holmwood and John Scott
2 The Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Social Thought c.1725–1915 3
John Brewer
3 Poverty Studies and Social Research 30
Lucinda Platt
4 Absent or Forgotten? Recovering British Social Theory 54
John Scott
5 Evolutionism and British Sociology 71
Chris Renwick
6 Religion and British Sociology: The Power and Necessity of the
Spiritual 97
Stephen Turner
7 Sociology and Social Work: In Praise of Limestone? 123
Ian Shaw
8 The First Sociology ‘Departments’ 155
Christopher T. Husbands
9 British Sociology in the Inter-War Years 189
Baudry Rocquin
10 Building a Textbook Tradition: Sociology in Britain, 1900–68 211
John Scott
11 The International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction
and British Sociology 236
Jennifer Platt
12 Feminism in Sociology, Feminism as Sociology 260
Mary Evans
13 Exiles in British Sociology 282
Charles Turner
vi The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain
14 British Sociology in the Metropole and the Colonies, 1940s–60s 302
George Steinmetz
15 Between Science and the Humanities: Sociology as a Third Culture? 338
John Eldridge
16 The History of British Sociology from the Perspective of its
Archived Qualitative Sources: Ruminations and Reflections 359
Mike Savage
17 The Sociology of Community 374
Graham Crow
18 Sociology of Race, Racism and Ethnicity: Trends, Debates and
Research Agendas 396
John Solomos
19 Research Methodology in Sociology 413
Geoff Payne
20 The Sociological Study of Religion: Arrival, Survival, Revival 437
Grace Davie
21 Criminology, Deviance and Sociology 459
Eamonn Carrabine
22 The Sociology of Work: From Industrial Sociology to Work,
Employment and the Economy 488
Paul Edwards
23 Sociology, Cultural Studies and the Cultural Turn 510
Gregor McLennan
24 ‘Class’ in Britain 536
Wendy Bottero
25 Sociology of the Body and the Relation between Sociology and
Biology 563
Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott
26 Sociology’s Past and Futures: The Impact of External Structure,
Policy and Financing 588
John Holmwood
Index 611
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
3.1 Booth’s Poverty Map, Sheet 5, showing his classification of the
streets of London 33
3.2 The causes of primary poverty from Poverty 38
3.3 The alternating periods of poverty and plenty in the life of a
labourer from Poverty 39
Tables
10.1 British sociology texts (1900–50) 213
10.2 British sociology texts (1951–68) 213
11.1 Ups and downs of some topics in the ILSSR 248
11.2 Some US books published in Britain by ILSSR 251
11.3 Total numbers of books known to have been published in ILSSR 253
11.4 Proportion of those years’ books by authors from the main
countries represented 253
vii
Notes on Contributors
Wendy Bottero is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester.
Her research interests centre on the social reproduction of inequality with
a particular interest in how social hierarchies and inequalities are wound
through our personal ties and social connections. She has explored this from
three angles in her work: using the patterning of social ties to map hierarchies;
thinking about how social ties and interaction can help us to theorise hierarchy
and inequality; and exploring how our web of social connections affects the
visibility of inequality.
John D. Brewer is Professor of Post Conflict Studies at Queen’s University and
was formerly Sixth Century Professor of Sociology at Aberdeen University. He
is a former president of the BSA and now an honorary vice president. He has
an honorary degree from Brunel University for services to social science and is
a fellow of four learned societies and a member of the United Nations Roster of
Global Experts. He works primarily on the sociology of peace processes but also
writes extensively on the Scottish Enlightenment. His most recent book is The
Public Value of the Social Sciences (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Eamonn Carrabine is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex,
where his teaching and research interests lie in the fields of criminology,
cultural studies and sociology more generally. He has published prolifically
in leading journals including the British Journal of Criminology, the Howard
Journal of Criminal Justice, Punishment and Society, Sociological Review, Theoretical
Criminology and Crime, Media, Culture. His books include Crime in Modern Britain
(co-authored, 2002), Power, Discourse and Society: A Genealogy of the Strangeways
Prison Riot (2004) and Crime, Culture and the Media (2008), while his co-authored
textbook Criminology: A Sociological Introduction is now in its third edition. He
is currently writing a book on Crime and Social Theory, which will be published
by Palgrave Macmillan, and then plans to write a book on the Iconography of
Punishment, focusing on how punishment has been represented in the literary
and visual arts.
Graham Crow is Professor of Sociology and Methodology at the University of
Edinburgh where he is also Director of the Scottish Graduate School of Social
Science. Prior to this he worked at the University of Southampton for 30 years.
He has also been Deputy Director of the ESRC National Centre for Research
Methods since 2006. His research interests include research methods (including
viii
Notes on Contributors ix
research ethics), interdisciplinarity, comparative sociology and social theory,
and the sociology of families and communities. He is principal investigator of a
Connected Communities programme consortium investigating how change in
community relationships is imagined and how it comes about.
Grace Davie is Professor Emeritus in the Sociology of Religion at the University
of Exeter UK and a senior adviser to the Impact of Religion Research Programme
at Uppsala University. In addition to numerous chapters and articles, she is
the author of Religion in Britain since 1945 (Blackwell, 1994), Religion in Modern
Europe (Oxford University Press, 2000), Europe: the Exceptional Case (DLT, 2002)
and The Sociology of Religion (Sage, 2007/2013); she is the co-author of Religious
America, Secular Europe (Ashgate, 2008), and co-editor of Predicting Religion
(Ashgate, 2003) and Welfare and Religion in 21st Century Europe (two volumes)
(Ashgate, 2010 and 2011).
Paul Edwards is Professor of Employment Relations at Birmingham Business
School, University of Birmingham. His research interests include work
relations in small and ethnic minority businesses and employment practice
in multinational firms. His most recent book is a co-edited volume, Studying
Organizations Using Critical Realism (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is a
Fellow of the British Academy and Editor-in-Chief of Human Relations.
John Eldridge is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow.
He has written extensively in the fields of industrial sociology, sociology of
the media and sociological theory. He is a founder member of the Glasgow
University Media Group.
Mary Evans is currently Centennial Professor at the Gender Institute at the
London School of Economics. Her work has included studies of feminist theory
and aspects of literary fiction and biography. She has edited various collections
and with colleagues at the Gender Institute is an editor of the forthcoming
Handbook of Feminist Theory (Sage).
John Holmwood is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham.
He has held posts at the Universities of Tasmania, Edinburgh, Sussex and
Birmingham. His current research addresses the challenge of global social
inquiry and the role of pragmatism in the construction of public sociology.
He is a co-founder of the Campaign for the Public University and editor of A
Manifesto for the Public University (Bloomsbury, 2011) and joint managing editor
with Sue Scott of the online magazine of social research, policy analysis and
commentary, Discover Society.