Abstract
Mike Savage notes in his Preface that the book changed considerably during the course of its writing from what he had originally intended and envisaged it would be. Having foreseen something that would be a relatively descriptive account of changing social identities based on secondary analyses of data collected in classic studies, he moved towards a more analytical account of the complex and changing relationship between social science and the social world. Initially seeing his task as an uncovering of the lost history of sociological method, he came to see the more complex relationships between sociology and its social context, and he explores this reciprocal relationship through the ways in which sociological methods have entered into public consciousness and practice to produce a cultural orientation that has had critical consequences for the social sciences themselves.
This reorientation in the book’s concerns has resulted in a rather unconventional text with a multi-layered exploration that reflects the complex shift in Savage’s outlook. This makes it a rather difficult book to read and to summarize. The reader (or, at least, this particular reader) has to adopt an unconventional reading strategy in order to get the most out of the book. Having begun with the Preface, Introduction, and Chapter 1, I failed to grasp the central thesis. However, starting again at Chapter 2 and continuing to Chapter 8 gives a far better understanding of the argument and allows the full significance of Chapter 1 and Chapter 9 (on social identities) to be appreciated at the end of the main reading. The Introduction and Conclusion can then be usefully read as a summation of the various claims made.
Savage looks at the emergence in the post-war period of the 20th century of a new battery of scientific interview and survey methods that were deployed to uncover and illuminate ordinary, everyday lives. As a cultural practice, these began to displace the literary and artistic approaches of the humanities and their ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘highbrow’ orientation to an elite culture. Savage finds the origins of the new approach in such movements as Mass-Observation, whose observers saw themselves as technical, social-scientific observers of the world. This was carried forward after the Second World War in the social researches of the Institute of Community Studies and had its literary reflection in the novels and plays of the ‘angry young men’. However, this was not reflected in the contents of the British Journal of Sociology and the activities of the British Sociological Association until after 1962. This was the period that Savage refers to as ‘The Moment of Sociology’ – the time when the pages of New Society provided a venue for the publication of the sociological work of John Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Chris Harris, Peter Willmott, and others who were committed to ‘rational, neutral, and objective’ social investigation. The political orientation of Mass-Observation was abandoned in favour of scientific neutrality and the aspiration to appeal to government and civil service policy makers and administrators. At the heart of this development in social research was a new trend of ethnographic community studies that developed in a series of investigations from rural communities to Stacey’s classic investigation of Banbury.
At the heart of Savage’s concern are the attempts made in these studies to explore changing conceptions of English national identity and its links to the landscape and to spatial and regional patterns of north/south, England/Wales differences. He stresses the investigation of geographical and social mobility apparent in such studies as that of Jackson and Marsden and the contemporary novels of Waterhouse, Amis, and others. Alongside the Banbury study he highlights those of Featherstone (Norman Dennis, Ferdinand Henriques, and Cliff Slaughter), Bethnal Green (Michael Young and Peter Willmott), and the de facto community study of Luton and its affluent workers undertaken by Goldthorpe and his colleagues. These provide the framework from which a large range of local studies are considered in the book.
It is these considerations that led Savage to draw out views on social class identities and to relate these to his own analyses of that topic. ‘Traditional’ class identities based on the manual/non-manual divide and a cultural divide between lowbrow and highbrow gave way to new class identities rooted in differences of technical skill and education. This had crucial consequences for middle-class identities and established a framework of discourse around achievement, expertise, and planning in which a middle-class position was seen as resulting from a meritocratic structure of mobility.
Savage shows that interviews and surveys had become the means through which popular voices could be represented in academic discourse. At the same time, respondents had learned from this academic discourse and were able to talk about their own lives in the language of sociology. These techniques, however, are now being superseded by advanced computer techniques and the possibility of analysing large-scale available data sets. As a result, a particular kind of window on society and social change is being closed. Savage holds that we cannot carry on interviewing and sampling people as if 50 years of sociological research had changed nothing. That is, of course, true but this does not mean that interviewing and sampling have to be abandoned. I don’t think this is Savage’s view, but it does seem to be implied by the way in which he presents his argument.
There is much in this book with which to disagree, not least in his image of the history of sociology. Savage is, for example, dismissive of Hobhouse on the basis of a lack of the close reading that he accords to others. Paradoxically, however, he ends up by advocating Hobhouse’s strategy of generalizing and synthesizing. Similarly he rejects the local surveys of Branford and Geddes, neglecting the fact that they had a critical influence on the very community studies that he values, most notably on the work of Bill Williams, its influence at Aberystwyth, and at the new university of Keele. These are, however, minor concerns. Savage has provided an important and compelling interpretation of class identities and social change and provides a model for the use of secondary analysis and interpretation to explore changing gender and ethnic identities, and wider dimensions of social change.