Approaches to Sociology (RLE Social Theory)

An Introduction to Major Trends in British Sociology

John Rex

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317652526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

These essays, commissioned by John Rex, reflect the state of sociology in Britain today. Leading representatives of the diverse 'schools' provide lucid accounts of their own particular approaches to this complex discipline and in doing so demonstrate the techniques described. Topics covered include the empirical study of stratification, social evolution, survey techniques, mathematical sociology, systems theory, phenomenological approaches, Weberian sociology, structuralism, contemporary Marxism, and the development of theory after Talcott Parsons.

1 Some aspects of the study of modern British society*

John Westergaard

I

The range of sociology is daunting. It spans, in principle, all manner of societies. Its claim to separate identity from other social sciences rests not on any convenient demarcation of subject matter, but on the opposite: an ambition to explore connections among all the elements of society—economic, political and so on—which are otherwise the subjects of special disciplines. Its empirical material has to come largely from observation of ‘natural’, historical uniformities and variations of social structure, institutions and processes: there is little scope for direct experimentation. All this is familiar. So is the corollary that these features of sociology enhance temptations to use evidence selectively and for illustration rather than systematically; to blur the distinctions between fact, assumption and speculation; to adopt a style of theory that emphasises conceptual elaboration at the expense of empirical application; conversely, to burrow diligently into trivia; to take refuge in vocabulary which may be almost as bewildering to colleagues as to outsiders. Of course these temptations, or some of them, may be lessened by the specialisation of sociology into sociologies of this, that and the other; and by the practical fact that most sociologists concentrate their individual research on a limited range of societies—often only one, with perhaps an occasional sabbatical excursion to another. Yet they have to try to keep sight of more than that. The boundaries of subject specialisms are fuzzy—indeed need to be, or sociology would abdicate its claim to distinctiveness. And those boundaries dissolve altogether when it comes to some of the major issues—issues that concern the general character, trends and prospects of ‘society at large’ or (more manageably but only somewhat more so) of particular forms of society.

These large issues cut across territorial frontiers as well as subject boundaries. The questions which they pose spring in part from comparisons among societies, and in turn ultimately require such comparisons for their answers. But they also demand case studies of individual societies: comparison from one society to another plainly depends on a good knowledge of each. This applies almost—perhaps fully—as much to comparisons limited to particular aspects of social structure as to those in terms of overall social structure. For one needs a fair idea of the contexts in which particular features are embedded before it makes sense to abstract them for comparison. Societal case studies—the exploration of this and of that society ‘in the round’ and in depth, in an attempt to pull together the diverse strands that make up its social structure and condition its future—are not antithetical to the comparative ambitions of sociology, but a prerequisite.

The point seems obvious. The only reason for making it is that it is sometimes denied. One may hear it argued, for example, that to include in the curriculum of a sociology degree a separate course on the structure of one particular society (modern Britain, say, to take the subject of this essay) is sociological nonsense, because it is inconsistent with the essentially comparative concerns of the discipline. The style of this argument may incline the wary to take a pinch of salt to it. Attempts to rule out this or that ostensibly relevant field of study by an assertion that, however worthy, ‘it’s not sociology’ are two a penny among sociologists. The popularity of this ploy of sociological one-upmanship seems, paradoxically, in direct proportion to the fluidity of the subject’s boundaries. Caution on that score apart, the argument might have some substance if there were already available one or more reasonably coherent versions of a framework for comparison, say, of industrial societies or of capitalist industrial societies with one another in terms of their social structure; and if the major examples of the species were sufficiently and consistently enough mapped for them to be placed within that framework. Of course there are sketches of this kind around; but little more than that. There is not much in the way of systematic typology to take one beyond the distinction between capitalist (alternatively, ‘post capitalist’, ‘pluralist’ and so on) and non-capitalist (socialist, ‘monolithic’) industrial societies—a distinction whose significance, if not existence, has in turn been queried by ‘convergence’ hypotheses of both right and left wing genesis. Variations of social structure within the capitalist category receive some recognition—with reference, for example, to the extent of state-provided welfare and of public involvement in economic enterprise; or in terms which imply residual survival of ‘pre-industrial’ features of social organisation to different degrees; or with respect to such particular aspects as, say, the character of educational institutions and their role in social mobility. But this is as yet all still pretty fragmentary, selective and often impressionistic. To take it further must require, among other things, more consistent attempts to pull together the strands of social structure within individual societies.

Meanwhile the study of a particular society in some detail—not, of course, ‘in isolation’, or in a theoretical vacuum—can serve also a distinct pedagogical purpose: to provide some relatively firm empirical discipline in a subject only too rich in temptations that pull the other way. This is one very solid reason why it makes sense to include a course on the structure of a specific society in the curriculum of a sociology degree. Modern Britain has the advantage, for this purpose, of a fairly extensive degree of empirical documentation—far from complete, of course, but sufficient to allow insistence that speculation must be kept consistent with a reasonably well-established and cumulative body of essential fact. There is, in the end, only one way of demonstrating the point: to follow the precept that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I can only offer a nibble at the pudding here; and that is what I shall try to do—to sketch what seem to me to be some of the central issues in the study of contemporary British social structure. The sketch will, of course, be a personal statement. It is not intended as a prescription, or as an attempt at a digest of courses on the subject.

II

The key to an exploration of British society is its class structure. This proposition in no way leans for support on the common assertion that the British (or the English?) are peculiarly obsessed with ‘class’. For one thing it is difficult to know whether the assertion is true in any of the senses usually intended. Sensitivity to symbols of social rank is not peculiar to the British. (If the niceties of accent, U and non-U manners were developed to a fine art in this country, so—to take just one example—was elaborate use of occupational titles in Scandinavia and Germany. These particular forms of symbolism have probably been losing ground, but hardly so the general concern with socio-economic position either here or there.) Recognition of social origin, and attitudes of deference to superiors, may be more widespread in Britain; ranking by achievement, and aspirations for individual success, by comparison stressed more singlemindedly in the United States. But if so these are differences in the character, not the magnitude, of status consciousness; and the contrast is across the Atlantic rather than across the Channel. Class consciousness, in the sense of collectively expressed awareness of interests arising from economic position, certainly plays a larger overt part in British than in American politics and industry. But in this respect, especially, it is America which is the odd man out among capitalist societies, while differences between Britain and the rest are complex and cannot be summed up in simple terms of more or less.

For another thing, and more importantly, the postulate of British obsession with ‘class’ usually refers only to quite limited features of class structure; to aspects of that dimension of stratification which sociologists call ‘status’. The focus of the postulate is on invidious distinctions of social prestige; on the symbols and the variations of lifestyle by which such distinctions are recognised; on the rituals and etiquette of inter-personal relationships within and across dividing lines of prestige. All this has its own fascination, and a significance beyond its impact on everyday life. But it tells us little by itself about the central and logically prior features of class structure: about the economic organisation of society and inequalities of condition and power, whether coincident or not with divisions of status.

It is from those features that analysis of the society must start. The justification for that has in fact nothing to do with any peculiarities of the British, real or imagined. It applies equally to any other complex society, and, in a more particular formulation, to other countries of advanced industrial capitalism. There are two points to it. The first is quite simply that class has ramifications which are generally more widespread and intricate than those of any other set of features of the social structure. Conditions of life and styles of culture alike are tied to the economic organisation of the society, limited by its divisions, intermeshed with the patterns of response to those divisions. To say this does not imply dogmatic commitment to a simple, one-directional mode of explanation. But it does involve rejection of that confession of intellectual bankruptcy which sociological texts often sanctify as the respectable alternative to vulgar ‘economic determinism’—the here-we-go-round-the-mulberry-bush doctrine of indiscriminate multi-causality, according to which nothing is more important than anything else. It involves recognition of the tight limits which economy and class set to permutations of social structure and culture. Though tight, however, those limits are not fixed, nor can they be known merely from introspection. The extent to which, for example, divisions of colour, region or religion may cut across divisions of class rather than be contained within them—and if so, in what ways and with what repercussions—is an empirical question which cannot be resolved by a priori postulate. Again, there can be changes in the features of society with widely ramified consequences—including consequences for the nature of stratification—which are not amenable to explanation by tidy formulae couched in terms of class structure alone. Take, to illustrate the latter point, the outstanding case of shifts in the demographic parameters of society.

III

Effects of the adoption of the small family pattern, common to all industrial societies so far and visible in Britain from about the 1870s, have been far-reaching. The consequent slowing off of population growth of course altered the trend in the ratio of fixed resources to people with implications, certain and speculative, which cannot be pursued here. The weight of the age structure shifted upwards: fewer children and young people, more middle-aged and old. Contrary to common belief, the relative size of the dependent age groups did not increase. But though outweighed by the decline in the child population ratio, the growth in proportionate numbers of old people has brought into sharp relief one of many tensions in the allocation of resources. Public provision for wage-earners in old age has been singled out for categorisation as a special ‘burden’ on the economy. Education of the young, by contrast, for all the constraints and the inequalities of distribution which affect it, can assert a claim on expenditure as investment in the future; while those who retire from working lives in business and the professions have been able to use their command of both public and private resources to avoid having the tag of ‘burden’ attached to their demands in old age. Among other consequences of the upward shift in age structure—which affected the composition of the labour force as well as the population at large—must have been some depression of career promotion prospects while the shift was still in process, except in so far as this was countered by the creation of new jobs at middle and senior levels and by earlier retirement. Both indeed occurred, and may conceivably in part have been responses to the pressures on promotion opportunities. The process of fertility restriction was associated with a whole series of changes in family patterns, many of them now obvious and familiar, but no less important for that, some with wide-reaching repercussions on the larger structure of society. Since the process was voluntary it presupposed some, as well as promoted further, changes in the character of marital relationships. It involved a parallel increase in intensity of contact between parents and children—one consequence of which may have been to sharpen a tension between dependence and independence in adolescence, and perhaps therefore also to sow some of the seeds of what is today rather misleadingly described as a ‘revolt of the young’. Be that as it may, the adoption of birth control allowed—indeed was almost certainly intended to allow—a concentration of parental resources, emotional, cultural and especially material, on the smaller number of children. This concentration of resources was complementary to the growing importance of formal education as an institutionalised machinery for occupational placement and social selection in the larger society. Far from wasting away, as often postulated, the ‘role of the family’ in education acquired enhanced significance; the family’s central place in the transmission of inequality from one generation to the next was underlined in new colours. Manual working-class couples continued to have more children than non-manual couples, with no signs of closure of the relative size of the gap until the middle of this century. But the steady absolute fall in working-class family size significantly changed the nature of the economic life-cycle characteristic of the manual sections of the population. The risk of poverty in childhood and in the child-rearing period of adult life was reduced: the incidence of poverty and nearpoverty shifted more towards the tail end of life. One result—oddly neglected in the fashionable discussion of family and kinship—must have been to reduce the sheer financial strains which in the past no doubt contributed a good deal to ‘role segregation’ between husband and wife in working-class marriages and to a concomitant ‘traditional’ reliance by wives on their extended kin for support in everyday life. As the universal tactic adopted in birth control was to curtail the effective child-bearing period, not to spread out fewer births at much longer intervals, the direct effects on the life-cycles of married women and on their capacity to take paid employment were broadly similar in all classes. The response was quite long delayed. No overall increase in paid work among wives occurred till the Second World War; and census data in the 1960s still showed some one in every two married women at the most ‘active’ stages of life (in their late thirties, forties and early fifties) without jobs outside their homes. The further implications of wives’ employment have differed between classes. It ran counter, in the middle and upper classes, to a notion of ‘marriage as a career’ inherited from the nineteenth century and by no means yet extinct. That clash, and the contrast especially in the case of educationally well-qualified wives between their own and their husbands’ opportunities in professional and executive work, are presumably among the main stimulants of the new pressures for ‘women’s liberation’. Force of circumstance, by contrast, had inhibited practical adoption of the notion of ‘marriage as a career’ on the part of working-class wives. Rates of employment among them—whether on a regular or especially on a casual and intermittent basis—probably fell during the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century. But it is doubtful whether in their case work outside the home was ever so exceptional as to become the subject of a ‘right’ to be asserted and reasserted against an entrenched ideology of domesticity (involving a very restricted definition even of women’s domestic roles) in the same way as for middle-class wives. Manual work in any case provides jobs, not careers; it is a source of cash with relatively few intrinsic satisfactions. There is little contrast in that respect between working-class men and their wives, some of whom indeed have routine-grade clerical jobs that may offer at least some appearance of advantages unfamiliar in manual work. There is plenty of contrast, on the other hand, in respect of effective rates of pay and access to work classed as skilled, between men and women in manual work. The fact that working-class wives have been able to take up jobs on a far more regular basis than ever before has, of course, contributed substantially to the greater ‘affluence’ of their families. It has also, for them as for middle-class wives, thrown into sharper relief the patterns of sex discrimination arising from ‘women’s two roles’. But the critical features of this are likely in their case to be those that relate to sheer earning power, wages and conditions at work, rather than barriers to promotion associated with a conflict between marriage and employment as rival ‘careers’.

The list could be elaborated. But enough has been said to show that the shift in fertility has had wide-ranging social consequences; that these have included significant effects on patterns of stratification; and that their impact in turn has varied between classes: the form and character of the consequences were moulded by class structure. Economic forces and class structure were clearly central also in the web of causes that led to adoption of the small family pattern. The fact that all industrial societies so far have experienced a similar shift in fertility suggests the role of economic change as a common precondition, though variations between countries in the chronology and detail of the processes involved do not lend themselves to any one simple explanatory formula. In the case of Britain it was plainly no accident that the bourgeoisie reduced the size of their families, with progressively greater effect, from the 1870s onwards: during a downward turn of the long-term economic cycle; at a time when Britain’s earlier overwhelming economic dominance as the pioneer of industrial capitalism was on the point of being effectively challenged; when cumulative changes in technology and in the scale, concentration and rationalised organisation of private and public enterprise were creating new demands and new uncertainties; when the quiescence and complacency of mid-Victorian affluence were giving way to a phase of mounting industrial and political restiveness; in short, at a critical stage in the formation of modern British social structure. The most convincing and ingeniously supported attempt to explain the bourgeoisie’s adoption of increasingly stringent family limitation looks precisely to a clash between the economic uncertainties associated with a number of these changes and a concomitant, continuing cost inflation of the standards of living considered appropriate. It seems possible that restriction of family size by the aristocracy already, from early in the nineteenth century, may have been a response to analogous dilemmas in their situation associated with the growing industrialisation of capitalism at that time. The spread of effective birth control among manual workers from the late years of the Victorian era—little explained and often by implication ascribed merely to ‘emulation’—may have been encouraged, not only by increased costs of child-rearing as the years of dependency lengthened, but by improvements in working-class circumstances and collective organisation which are likely both to have stimulated rising demands on life and to have helped to make some degree of personal control over life chances seem a feasible proposition in ways difficult to conceive earlier. To take another leap forward in time, attempts to account for the mid-twentieth century levelling up of marital fertility to rates somewhat above replacement level may look, for a few clues, to recent changes in class fertility differentials. There are signs that a set of abstract norms of ‘ideal’ family size—quite often up to three or four children, with temporal fluctuations—may now be fairly widespread, with few differences between the classes. Practical, especially material, considerations, on the other hand, keep actual family sizes below the abstract ideal to varying degrees—furthest below it in the case of routine white-collar workers, least far below it in the case of couples with the security of professional careers, whose fertility in recent marriage cohorts exceeds that of skilled and semi-skilled manual workers. Now, as earlier, economic circumstances seem to play a crucial part in the determination of fertility; and central to any explanations must no doubt be the relationship between individual demands on life for parents themselves and their children, on the one hand, and perceived opportunities on the other, a relationship the pattern of which varies according to class position. Yet none of this is sufficient to rule out any influence from factors that cannot be subsumed under the rubric of economy and class. And in none of it are there more than some key elements for a framework of explanation. Explanation itself is still elusive—fairly firm at some points, but speculative and uncertain for the rest.

IV

Its pervasive ramifications apart, class must be at the core of an analysis of British society also for another reason—because it raises in an acute form a paradox of societal existence: the stubborn continuities of social structure despite deep internal divisions. There is no need, against once dominant ‘functionalist’ schools of thought, to labour the point that complex societies are not harmonious, blandly consensual, perpetually in equilibrium or en route to equilibrium; that they are more aptly described as perennially on the verge of instability, even collapse, their internal divisions and contradictions the triggers of actual or potential social change. Yet what is remarkable is how rarely they are taken right over the verge: their resistance, as well as their exposure, to pressures for wide-ranging structural change.

The paradox is especially striking in the case of contemporary capitalist industrial societies. For capitalism carried with it a series of sweeping social promises: a promise of material wealth, control over the conditions of human existence and a release of mankind from the constraints of want; a promise of innovation and of a rational critique of the order in being, on the premiss that no institutions were sacrosanct merely because they existed; the promises implied by a creed of opportunity. It was just those promises which, in the nineteenth century and before, provoked the fears of the established ruling strata in opposition to capitalism; and which led Marx and Engels to write a suitably qualified hymn of praise for capitalism into the Communist Manifesto. Of course there were fundamental restrictions built into those promises. The receptivity of capitalism to change did not, and could not, extend to a critique of the institutions of private property; and once society had been recast in a capitalist mould the impulse of capitalist ideology was towards technological innovation in isolation from major socio-structural change. The freedom which British and Western capitalism exalted was a freedom to be exercised in competition, with full success only for a few and supposedly guaranteed to none in advance. Competition, moreover, proved inherently impermanent because it required perpetual insecurity. Even, and in some respects especially, those who achieved success and power through competition thereby acquired an interest in its curtailment. The conception of equality with which capitalism was linked was one of equality of opportunity that had substantive inequality as its logical c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Some aspects of the study of modern British society
• 2 Evolutionary and developmental sociology
• 3 Current approaches to empirical research: some central ideas
• 4 Mathematical sociology and sociological theory
• 5 Towards the identification of the major axes of sociological analysis
• 6 Phenomenological perspectives in sociology
• 7 Sociology and the sociology of education: a brief account
• 8 New directions in sub-cultural theory
• 9 Social structure and humanistic sociology: the legacy of the classical European tradition
• 10 The Frankfurt school: critical theory and positivism
• 11 The structuralism of Lévi-Strauss and Althusser
• 12 Time and theory in sociology
• Index