Abstract
This article applies Norbert Elias’s ‘processual-relational approach’ to an empirical case: the influential Leicester Department of Sociology between 1954 and 1982. Based on 42 qualitative interviews and extensive archival materials, we identify two phases: the early phase of cohesion is characterised by a strong sense of purpose and a growing influence on British sociology. The second phase is characterised by social and intellectual fragmentation. In explaining this reversal, we argue that a critical juncture of youth rebellion around 1968 provided the portents of an anti-authoritarian civilisational trend, which increasingly put strains on the established power nexus: the autocratic leadership model embodied by the department’s inspirational leader, Ilya Neustadt.
Keywords
Just over three decades ago, TH Marshall (1982) noted that a ‘remarkably high proportion’ of teachers of sociology in British universities began their careers in the Leicester Department of Sociology. Since Marshall’s acknowledgement, a growing list of authors have added new pieces to the puzzle of how and why this particular department became, within less than two decades of its creation, a flagship of British sociology (see Banks, 1989; Brown, 1987; Goodwin and O’Connor, 2006; Rojek, 2004).
Goodwin and Hughes (2011) have highlighted one particular feature which contributed to the swift expansion of Leicester Sociology from the late 1950s onwards: the close working relationship, based on emotional co-support, between two extraordinary individuals, the Odessa-born Ilya Neustadt (1915–1993) as the organisational leader, and the Breslau-born Norbert Elias (1897–1990) as a preeminent intellectual source of inspiration. Goodwin and Hughes (2011: 677) use early 1960s personal correspondence between the two men as an empirical resource to document the development of this relationship of interdependence over time, outlining what they refer to as a ‘figurational analysis of epistolary forms’. Their contribution constitutes an innovative attempt to assess the importance of the Leicester department in post-war British sociology through theoretical categories developed by Elias himself. However, by confining their analytical emphasis to one particular dyadic personal relationship, they miss the full potential of adopting a figurational approach to the history of the Leicester Department of Sociology.
The purpose of this article is to expand the scope of the figurational model by shifting the focus of analysis: the personal relationship between Neustadt and Elias is treated as one of many key aspects, as we trace, over time, the development of the Leicester Department of Sociology conceived of as a figuration of interdependent individuals (cf. Elias, 1978: 123). Our objective is to provide a more comprehensive Elias-inspired analysis of the development of (academic) institutions. This allows us to achieve two aims: first, we can respond to Jennifer Platt’s (2005: 23) justified call for histories of British sociology to focus less on the life stories of pre-eminent individuals (‘barons’) and more on the routine practices of the ‘social groups and institutions to which sociologists have belonged’ (Platt, 2005: 29). Second, our figurational framework yields new insights in relation to the question of how and why the Leicester department gradually lost its momentum or ‘pole position’ (after LSE) in British sociology in the years following the phase of rapid expansion in the 1960s.
In this article, we treat the Leicester Department of Sociology as a figuration, which consists of an ever-shifting group of human individuals. Conceptualising it as such must not overlook the fact that this figuration is also embedded in the larger figuration constituted by all UK sociology departments.
We then explore the second aspect: a relational-figurational perspective involves an emphasis on processes – not states. Social life is conceived as a constant flux of processes, which continuously constitute social entities. The study of processes turns sociology into a historical sociology since processes are always a product of particular historical circumstances and previous processes. To comprehend current processes, we need to trace their genesis in order to understand how current groups have at the same time been shaped by previous processes, and how they are always embedded in an interdependent chain of other groups in a figuration.
Principles of Processual-Relational Method
Over the last decades, a number of scholars have contributed in various ways to the common task of defining a figurational methodology for sociological analysis (see for example Baur and Ernst, 2011; Goudsblom, 1996; Kilminster, 1998; Van Stolk, 1987; Wouters, 2007). We propose that, at least for the task of a historical-institutional analysis of singular figurations of a limited size, such as the Leicester Department of Sociology, a small set of methodological prescriptions derived directly from the works of Norbert Elias can provide a suitable point of departure.
To achieve this aim, it is highly useful to organise one’s empirical material to facilitate comparisons between different phases in the development of the figuration. As Goudsblom (1996: 21–24) has pointed out, the practice of distinguishing and comparing phases is a useful centrepiece of the figurational method, as long as one remembers that the point of such comparisons is not to identify the static, unchanging, key characteristics of each phase. On the contrary, ‘phase models’ should be devised precisely as a tool for obtaining a better grasp of the processual character of social life. Only by means of comparisons of phases do the long-term trends of development become visible, and only by identifying such trends does it become possible to grasp the overarching direction of social processes over longer periods of time. The key principle in distinguishing between phases is that of identifying ‘turning points’, which can be defined as the particular historical moments when distinctive, new phenomena begin to directly alter the social flows of the figuration, or when a reversal of the overall trend of existing processes occurs. In relation to characterising the direction of social processes, Elias (2009: 5) highlights the usefulness of pairs of antithetical concepts such as integration/disintegration and civilisation/decivilisation, or simply rise/fall: Pairs of antithetical concepts which are used to define the direction of social processes have more than [one] function. They may be used to define structural antitheses and tensions within a process-movement at any given time. They are indispensable in determining phases or stages of a social process.
The purpose of analysis, then, is to construct a historical sociological account which, by identifying a set of consecutive phases of development, captures the key trends, countertrends and turning points in the development of the figuration in a suitable manner. 1
Our analysis is based on the existing literature on Leicester Sociology, combined with two original empirical data sources: first, we have collected an array of archived documents detailing administrative practices, relevant statistical information and personal communication within the Sociology Department. 2 Second, we have interviewed 42 individuals with expert knowledge on, or personal experience from, the department. Of these, 34 were either students, members of faculty, or both, at the Department of Sociology for at least one year within the 1954–1982 epoch (see Table 1). 3
List of interviewees by date.
Phase 1: From Periphery to Epicentre (1954–1968)
In 1954, a new Department of Sociology was established in what was then the University College of Leicester. For the first three years, the figuration consisted of only two individuals: Ilya Neustadt, who had been employed as a lecturer at the Department of Economics since 1949 as head of department, and Norbert Elias, whom Neustadt brought in as a lecturer. In 1957, the Faculty of Social Science welcomed the first cohort of students to a new BA degree. 4 This degree consisted of a common first year introduction to five different disciplines – politics, economics, sociology, economic history and geography. Thereafter the students specialised in one discipline. To meet with the growing demand for sociology teaching, a history graduate from the University of London – John Goldthorpe – was hired as assistant lecturer. Thus, Goldthorpe was the first of some 50 individuals to join the figuration in permanent staff positions within the next 20 years.
The number of sociology graduates from the Leicester BA Social Science programme surged from 13 to 59 in just six years between 1960 and 1966. Figure 1 shows the number of faculty members tripling from seven in 1960–61 to 21 in 1966–67, before reaching a stable state of between 24 and 28 permanent members of staff in the entire period from 1969 to 1982. 5 The popularity of sociology among students was on an upwards trend until the early 1970s (despite significant yearly fluctuations), with the total number of sociology graduates peaking at 90 in 1972.
Numbers of staff and students, Leicester Sociology (1954–1982).
This pattern, which reveals rapid expansion of sociology as a discipline in the 1960s, followed by a slowdown of growth in the 1970s, follows the general trend in British sociology – and higher education more generally. 6 Indeed, the broader societal conjuncture of the 1960s provided a ‘window of opportunity’ for sociological visionaries, in that developments in the larger figuration in which Leicester University was embedded (the UK higher education sector as a whole) were conducive to the expansion of ‘first-mover’ sociology departments. 7
In an epoch in which the prospects for sociology were this bright, it is no mystery that the figuration established by Neustadt and Elias would – on the basis of its temporal advantage as one of the first of a host of new sociology departments – be successful both in attracting talented students and in producing an impressive list of would-be scholars. Yet this exogenous factor of a conducive climate for expansion must be supplied with an understanding of the internal dynamics of the emerging Leicester figuration – to bring about a fuller understanding of how this particular department in a modestly sized Midlands university managed within a few years to establish itself as a powerhouse of British sociology. We now examine these dynamics by analysing how the power ratios and habitus 8 of the figuration developed over time.
Ratios of Power: The Rise and Fall of the Elias-Neustadt Alliance
How and why did the power ratios of the social hierarchy within the figuration change over time? This aspect of Leicester Sociology’s history from 1954 to 1968 is the story of a two-man leadership (Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias as equal partners) being gradually replaced by a one-man leadership (Ilya Neustadt as the preeminent figure). Our interview data indicates that this alliance had already formed as early as 1956. An early connoisseur of Norbert Elias’s works recalls from the Third Congress of the International Sociological Association, held in Amsterdam in 1956, that the two men formed a symbiotic unit, capable of making an impression on the outside world: ‘At that conference, in my recollection, they were always together. Like twins. And they were a very talkative couple. Always ready for talks and conversation … [T]hey seemed to agree on everything’ (Interview #28).
Thus the constitutive power ratio of the department in the early years was that of Neustadt and Elias, effectively acting as a unit, on the dominant side of a set of unequal power ratios with individual staff members. However, this leadership model based on an equal partnership (and academic division of labour) did not last long into the 1960s. Gradually, Neustadt’s position as an absolute figure of authority became consolidated, whilst Norbert Elias became more marginal as new members of staff increasingly set their mark on the culture of the department. On the one hand, Neustadt increased his organisational influence in the department. On the other, Elias became less of a towering figure in terms of outlining the department’s intellectual agenda: the growing number of academically ambitious new staff members meant that his views of sociology would no longer go uncontested. His privileged position within the figuration slowly began to shift in 1960, when Percy Cohen was brought in as a lecturer. Cohen, who eventually left for the LSE in 1965, is remembered by several interviewees as a flamboyant, extremely eloquent, and intellectually self-assured figure. He was clear in distinguishing his approach to modern social theory from the historical-comparative approach favoured by Elias. Furthermore, in 1961, Anthony Giddens joined the department and gradually developed his own intellectual position, which also did not always converge with the views expressed by Elias. 9 In 1962, Elias took up an offer to become Professor of Sociology in Ghana. When he left the figuration, Neustadt became the paramount leader of the department. Elias returned to Leicester in 1964, but it is clear from our data that the partnership between the two never recovered after his return. Although he played a role in the department for at least another decade, none of our interviewees remember him as occupying nearly as central a position as Neustadt. Indeed, some recall him as a relatively marginal figure, with limited contact with students. In contrast, Neustadt very much became a figure of authority. From the mid-1960s onwards, ‘Leicester Sociology’ increasingly became synonymous with its undisputed leader.
How did Neustadt consolidate his position? Our data indicates that he was adept at cultivating strong personal ties with his staff, as well as with those students, almost exclusively males, he found to be intellectually gifted. His status as an unmarried man allowed him to expend an extraordinary share of his social and cognitive resources on cultivating deep emotional bonds with his employees and selected students.
In figurational terms, Neustadt’s successful efforts of patronage galvanised his position in a very unequal power ratio: he was dependent on his group of protégés taken as a whole – or indeed, on the aggregated academic attainment of the department he managed. Yet, because of his position as the department’s leader and only professor, he had it in his power virtually to decide the academic future of any of his individual protégés. 10
‘But what is your SOCIOLOGICAL problem?’: Shaping the Figurational Habitus
Even if Elias became more marginal as the 1960s progressed, he still had, as a co-founder of the department, a longer-lasting influence on the particular way in which sociological knowledge was pursued at Leicester. Our data indicates that the institutional set-up of the department – which was shaped collaboratively by Elias and Neustadt – significantly shaped the patterns of sociological behaviour, defined as the specific set of predominant intellectual adherences and social codes, which became institutionalised during the 1960s. First, in terms of recruitment of teachers, Neustadt and Elias made a point of creating an academic melting pot of people representing many educational backgrounds in disciplines such as history and social psychology. In terms of the kind of sociology taught, Leicester pioneered thorough exegesis of the great classical European sociologists. Some interviewees recall that the teaching of theory was taken more seriously than that of research methods. The acquisition of theoretical skills was enforced by a structure of weekly seminars where two or three students would meet with their tutor – a task shared by all members of staff – to go over assignments and discuss texts. If this set-up had an impact on generations of students, it influenced the younger members of staff even more, as they would have to keep ahead of students, and were often asked by Neustadt to teach in fields they had not worked with before. As for the social aspects, daily lunchtime conversations about sociological issues (see Dunning in Rojek, 2004), as well as frequent parties for which Neustadt would personally cook dinner, are remembered by some former staff members as very important in the Leicester environment in the 1960s. However, according to our data one institutional mechanism contributed more than anything else to maintaining a particular dominant standard of intellectual behaviour in the figuration: the mandatory Friday afternoon staff seminar.
The weekly staff seminar served as the key ‘intellectual interaction ritual’ (Collins, 2002) for the figuration, in the double sense of shoring up social cohesion around a collective professional endeavour imbued with a specific intellectual vision, and of confirming power balances within the department.
Applying this understanding to the weekly staff seminars, we can see how ‘Leicester Sociology’ was in practice reproduced as a cohesive figuration. As one long-term employee recalls: It was almost like an unwritten contract of employment that you attend the staff seminar on a Friday. And that in a sense was the core of the place, I thought … The seminar became an affirmation of Leicester sociology. (Interview #6)
This sums up the central qualities of the staff seminar as an institution as remembered by several interviewees: while it was an interaction ritual designed for regenerating deep emotional commitment to sociology, it was also an arena for consolidating solidarity amongst insiders, those fortunate enough to represent ‘Leicester Sociology’, to the detriment of those outsiders who were often invited in to give papers.
Neustadt had carved out a clearly defined role for himself in staff seminars: several interviewees recall his catchphrase question, which he would invariably, in his distinctive Eastern European accent, ask speakers, whether visiting or members of staff: ‘But what is your sociological problem?’
With this remark, Neustadt would ensure that the collective attention remained focused on contemplating the particularity of sociological knowledge as a distinct intellectual endeavour.
Mapping the Figuration: Neustadt’s ‘Empire’ at its Peak
To illustrate how the figuration of Leicester Sociology looked after a decade of growth, Figure 2 provides a heuristic attempt to visualise the constitutive power ratios of the figuration at this particular stage of its development – the beginning of the academic year 1967–1968. The full analytical relevance of this synchronic representation emerges only through a diachronic comparison with ‘snapshots’ from other points in time, by which it becomes possible to highlight changes to the figuration over time (see Figure 3). 11
Leicester Sociology as Figuration (1967).
Leicester Sociology as Figuration (1976).
Neustadt’s advantageous, or indeed hegemonic, position in terms of power ratios with his members of staff (large circle) is symbolised by the downward-pointing arrow. According to many interviewees, the social cohesion among staff members was at this point still effective, with collegial relations by and large friendly and close with no academic cliques having yet developed. Figure 2 also indicates Elias’ special position as being relatively marginal to the figuration, yet retaining strong personal bonds with Neustadt, Eric Dunning, and some of the sociology students.
The ‘Hirst Group’ of sociology students (small circle) is included in Figure 2 to indicate that new social trends, which were ultimately to prove disruptive to the established order of the figuration, were beginning to impinge upon it from the outside from the mid-1960s onwards. Indeed, as we will demonstrate below, a group of radicalised students including Paul Hirst played a key role in bringing about a turning point in the development of the department briefly after the 1967 ‘snapshot’ of the figuration proposed by Figure 2. 12
The Impact of Anti-Authoritarian Youth Movements: The Late 1960s as Turning Point
Towards the end of the 1960s, Leicester was becoming a victim of its own success in terms of recruitment, as sociological job openings everywhere prompted talented graduates to leave rather than stay in the department (Goodwin and Hughes, 2011). However, this was not the only critical juncture that the Leicester figuration faced. More generally, as western society entered into a phase of accelerated socio-cultural change, so did Leicester Sociology. A new, rebellious youth generation entered the university in the mid-to-late 1960s.
To understand the changing dynamics of the Leicester Sociology figuration, it is not sufficient to look at endogenous processes of flux occurring within the figuration (conflicts and shifts in ratios of power between individual members). We also need to consider the exogenous factor of the larger societal context of the figuration, including the structural changes of society (Elias, 2009: 24). No figuration exists in isolation from other figurations. Hence, the political-economic and cultural conjuncture of society at large is interdependent with the internal struggles over the power and habitus of the figuration. The question, then, is: What was the character of the main trends of structural change in adjacent larger figurations (e.g. the UK educational system, and university sector) of the 1960s?
The 1960s seemed to synchronise political and cultural dissatisfaction around the globe (Müller, 2011: 172). The key agent of this upheaval was the generation born around 1945. In many countries this was almost 50 per cent larger than, for example, the 1980 generation. In the western world at least, this generation grew up with a booming economy, an expanding welfare state and consensus politics (Müller, 2011). The number of students exploded because of an increasing demand for highly educated people in a more complex and differentiated society. An increasing anti-authoritarianism developed and became a driving force in politics, in family issues, in teacher-student relationships and in the relationship between manager and worker.
As evidenced in a substantial literature (see e.g. Ali and Watkins, 1998; Fraser, 1988; Gilcher-Holtey, 1998, Harman, 1988), the 1960s saw a number of political and cultural processes and trends colliding, from which a strong political and social force materialised. In this conjuncture, a host of more or less formalised social movements boomed, based on wide support from the youth, including the anti-war movement, new civil rights movements, feminist and gay movements and the student movement in the US, France, Germany, and elsewhere which demanded representation, participation and more critical research.
The Eliasian scholar Cas Wouters (2007, 2011) has theorised the social development of the 1960s in terms of an informalisation trend in the larger civilising process. Combining these two sets of insights, we suggest that the critical juncture of the late 1960s represents the emergence of a simultaneous informalisation and democratisation trend in western societies. The core of this transnational swing of sentiments can perhaps be most succinctly described as an anti-authoritarian trend, defined as the popularisation of the notion that people ought to be allowed the freedom to decide their own lives (including manners of behaviour), by means of emancipation from subjugation to any authority. This trend swept universities everywhere, and thus also had to make an impact on the habitus of the Leicester department, given that Leicester Sociology was a separate figuration with a unique historical trajectory.
How did this political upheaval and what Stuart Hall has called ‘cultural rebellion’ (cf. Müller, 2011: 200) come to influence the power ratios and habitus of the Leicester figuration? In Leicester, as in so many other universities in the UK and worldwide, groups of students and other young people swiftly gained political and intellectual self-confidence, leading to an explosion of social movements which broadly identified with a ‘new left’ anti-authoritarian political platform. One group of individuals were simultaneously key figures in the Leicester student movement, and in the 1965–1968 cohort of BA graduates of sociology (see Figure 2). This group of aspiring sociologists produced a challenge to the status quo at the Department of Sociology through its combined intellectual and political activism. Intellectually, the student activists began to challenge the monopoly of their teachers (and thus ultimately Neustadt who assigned his young staff specific teaching duties) to determine what was to be considered the relevant subject matter for sociology students. As Paul Hirst recalled some years later (author’s notes from private conversation), he and his peers developed a ‘double reading strategy’ through which the exegesis of the works of the great sociological masters (Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Comte), then part of Leicester’s standard sociology curriculum, was supplemented with self-organised studies of a great variety of ‘critical’ literature. The student magazine Sublation, which ran seven issues between 1966 and 1968, is evidence of this process of independent ‘double-schooling’. 13
The 1968 Student Occupation: A Challenge to Neustadt’s Authority
One event in particular heralded the advent of anti-authoritarian socio-political sentiments on the margins of the Leicester Sociology figuration. For four days, from 26–29 February 1968, students demanding representation in university decision-making processes occupied the main administration building of Leicester University (Noble, 1968: 8–9). One participant in the occupation (Interview #17) remembers discussions as ‘hegemonised by sociologists’, with Paul Hirst playing a leading role. It was not university politics narrowly conceived, but rather the wide-ranging social and political ambition of emancipation that had stayed with him as the most important: ‘For me it was a whole experience of challenging the authority relations of the university. Forming new kinds of lateral relationship. And having free-floating, challenging intellectual debates that weren’t limited by a curriculum.’
The occupation did not aim directly at Neustadt, yet given the considerable involvement of sociology students, it did affect him personally. One of the sociology student activists remembers: I don’t know what happened between Neustadt and the Vice-Chancellor or others within the university senate, whether he got the blame and was told that ‘these are your boys leading this, what are you going to do about it?’ But – in my perception, I may be wrong – he lost his nerve. I remember seeing him make a rare incursion into student space; a bar somewhere with a large scotch, at the height of all this, looking extremely perturbed and upset, and essentially he was there to try and argue us out of it. To argue his boys out of the leadership, if you like, of the occupation. (Interview #27)
Building on interview and archival data, we conclude that the 1968 occupation constitutes a key symbolic ‘turning point’, which marks more precisely than any other single event the reversal of a key social process (cf. Goudsblom, 1996: 22–23) in the development of the Leicester Sociology figuration – namely the process of monopolisation of power by Ilya Neustadt. The occupation was not in itself a main cause of changing dynamics in the department. Yet it marks the beginning of a new era in which Neustadt’s paternalistic authority would increasingly come under pressure. Indeed, it epitomises a new societal demand for emancipation from paternal authority which would come to mark the struggle for power within the department in the following decade. In terms of the dialectic between the endogenous dynamics of the Leicester department and its external conditions of existence, we might conceive of the processual shift brought about by the 1968 critical juncture as expressive of a larger-scale societal trend: due to continuously improving standards of living, members of the younger generation born in the 1940s collectively raised their expectations of life compared with earlier generations. This trend ‘spills over’ into the internal development of Leicester Sociology, through changing patterns of behaviour among students and younger staff (who become less inclined to accept relations of authority unquestioningly), thus changing the power balances between members of staff and students as well as between senior and junior members of staff.
Phase 2: From Cohesion to Fragmentation (1968–1982)
Here we chronicle the trend of social fragmentation of the figuration in the second phase of its development from 1968 onwards, beginning with the increasingly strained relationship between the two founder members. According to Elias (cf. Van Stolk and Van Voss, 1994: 62), the period between 1970 and 1975 constituted for him ‘a very gradual, sliding disengagement’ with life in England, and with the Leicester Department of Sociology. After 1975, he gradually spent more of his time at European universities (Amsterdam, Bielefeld, and Konstanz). A personal falling-out with Ilya Neustadt appears to have been an additional source of motivation – alongside growing recognition in Europe – for Elias to move on. By the early 1970s, the emotional energies of two strong characters had begun to contribute to divisions rather than social cohesion in the figuration.
The feud between Elias and Neustadt undermined the self-image of a department, strongly united against the outside world, with a mission to spread a particular vision of sociology. By the early 1970s, the close emotional bond and intellectual division of labour between the two men no longer existed.
How important was this split for the overall developmental trend of the department? Goodwin and Hughes (2011: 692, our emphasis) somewhat cautiously note that ‘the breakdown in their relationship … coincided with the end of a period of rapid expansion of sociology at Leicester’. In our view, this assertion is too weak. Our empirical data indicates that the breakdown of the socially stabilising and emotionally energising Neustadt-Elias axis was in fact one (among several) causes of the Leicester department’s fragmentation in the 1970s. Of course, other social processes had an impact on the dynamics of the figuration too. First, as money for recruitment became more tight in the 1970s and people could not easily find jobs elsewhere, the average age of staff members increased. As they grew older and had children, they were less inclined or able to socialise as much in the department as earlier. In consequence, the social cohesion and vibrancy characteristic of the 1960s decreased, and the formation of cliques became harder to avoid. Second, Neustadt, who had not managed to bring in a designated successor, developed Parkinson’s disease, which led his working capacity to deteriorate. This is highly relevant to the cohesion of the figuration where the power nexus was built on the charisma and ubiquity of one man. However, one cannot understand the slow demise of Neustadt’s empire without also analysing how his patrimonialism was challenged by a group of sociologists bent on liberating themselves from what they considered the unjustified authority of a father figure.
Ratios of Power: Increasing Pressure on Neustadt’s Autocratic Leadership
To understand how the anti-authoritarian impulse, the first expression of which was the University of Leicester 1968’s Student Occupation, influenced the Leicester Sociology figuration in the longer term, it is useful to draw on our interviewees’ accounts of the department at different stages of its development.
One 1960s BA graduate remembers the department as structured around the charismatic, but also despotic, leadership of one man: Ilya Neustadt: People always talked about him, the department was synonymous with Neustadt … He created an energising culture, free of rules and regulations and procedures, but nevertheless highly dependent on his own discretionary behaviour. If you have a vision and a view which you want to impose and implement, driven by your notion of sociology, and how it should develop, then of course you patronise or exercise patronage on certain individuals who are going to help you realise that vision. But you are going to have no interest for others who don’t share that vision, or [whom] you fall out with. So yes, he was autocratic and despotic, but for what he regarded as the ideal vision of developing the department. (Interview #25)
All interviewees shared the view that Neustadt was indeed the undisputed departmental leader, although not all agreed on whether there were positive sides to his absolute authority.
By the 1970s his leadership model had become an increasingly contentious issue, due to the conspicuous lack of formal influence granted to members of staff. If Neustadt’s autocratically based ‘empire-building’ had seemed dynamic and future-oriented in the early 1960s, by the 1970s some members of staff began to view the department as being run in a charming, yet essentially antiquated way – as an organisational relic of a past epoch. Their assessment illustrates how the figuration began to lose its dynamism because its autocratic power structure – and the paternalistic underpinnings of the dominant pattern of conduct – was increasingly perceived by at least some of its members as anachronistic in a modern university.
The memories of one student who later became a member of staff are informative in terms of understanding how Neustadt’s reign came under increasing pressure: Autocratic people say ‘autocracy is great and very efficient’. The trouble is, when the system goes wrong it is very difficult to correct strategy. There was this horrible culture of centralisation and control and court favours and I think only with Terry [Johnson] and John [Scott] did Leicester begin finally to grow up.
14
A lot of Freudian traumas in that department; Neustadt is running your life, so you love him but you hate him, it was all that stuff. … It was a very adolescent, stunted kind of place. It wasn’t a democracy or proper collegial body at all. (Interview #23)
The above quote lucidly exemplifies how, in the 1970s, emotional and political aspects of a work environment hang together very closely. The interviewee leaps from emotional ambivalence (a Freudian father figure) to political stuntedness (no proper collegial democracy) in two sentences. What the members of staff had by the 1970s grown to expect in their working-place was emancipation, both social and political.
What happened to the power balances of the department in the 1970s can be likened neither to a coup d’état nor to a revolution, however. After all, Neustadt did remain head of department until his retirement in 1981. Yet, the figurational equilibrium of a one-man leadership, non-democratic departmental structure was to an increasing degree disturbed by the changing collective expectations, or professional habitus, of staff members. The leadership model described by staff members sympathetic to Neustadt as one centred around a benevolent despot, and by others alienated by him as a veritable ‘fiefdom’ (Interview #39) did not collapse entirely, but it did become gradually destabilised as democratising reforms took place. The process of democratisation happened mainly through a new institutional practice which proliferated in the late 1970s. Neustadt had to give into pressure and increasingly agreed to set up ad-hoc committees of staff members for dealing with upcoming academic and organisational tasks.
Shifting Patterns of Behaviour: Breakthrough of a Research-Oriented Habitus
Our final concern is how changes in departmental power ratios – the gradual dismantling of Neustadt’s hegemony – were interrelated with changes in the habitus of the figuration. Based on interview data, we find that what happened during the 1970s can best be summarised as a gradual process of dissolution of the then dominant view in the department of what sociology was, and how a proper sociologist ought to behave: as Neustadt lost his status as political sovereign, patterns of academic behaviour which at an earlier stage had been subdued came to be more accepted. One example is particularly illustrative of the process by which the behavioural constraints of the Leicester figuration’s habitus loosened. It concerns the increasing acceptance of a research-oriented mindset among staff. In the 1970s, Leicester Sociology ceased to be primarily a teaching-focused institution. Up until this point it had been a significant trait of Leicester Sociology that publications coming out of the department were few and far between, because Neustadt – either directly or unintentionally – would prevent (some of) his young staff from publishing. As several interviewees note, it was clear that his priority was the teaching of sociology and that this priority therefore pervaded the ethos of the department. By the mid-1970s, however, some members of staff began to push for increasing independence to pursue research tasks. A long-term staff member (Interview #6) remembers it as a symbolic turning point when he and a colleague finally managed to publish a research-based book without the support of Neustadt. By having deliberately stayed away from the ritual Friday seminars to finish the book, the pair had brought the status quo of power balances to a crucial test, effectively proving that there would from then on be more ways to be a successful Leicester sociologist than those defined by Neustadt. With the emancipation from his paternalist requirement that his staff prioritise undergraduate teaching over independent empirical research, the road was opened for different groups of younger staff to realise their ambitions along different intellectual lines.
Mapping the Figuration, Part II: Towards Social and Intellectual Fragmentation
The process of habitus change in the 1970s was not a clear-cut paradigm shift, as one coherent set of dominant new norms and practices supplanted an earlier set. Rather, a wider array of patterns of behaviour became accepted as Neustadt’s sovereign central authority was gradually replaced by more decentralised, internally competing groupings. As one illustration of these processes of compartmentalisation and fragmentation, Figure 3 provides a heuristic image of socio-intellectual affinities in the department, circa 1976. This sociogram is not an attempted ‘objective’ mapping, but instead provides the subjective and retrospective perception of one key person in the history of the department, John Scott. 15
The group of individuals included in Figure 3 went virtually unchanged for several years. After John Scott and Dominic Strinati joined as lecturers in 1976, no new staff members were recruited to the department for almost 10 years. Neustadt is still centrally positioned at this stage, but his rule has come under increasing contestation. At this point, the relationship between Neustadt and Elias has broken down (as suggested by the dashed line). Meanwhile, as Scott’s diagram also suggests, a closely-knit group of staff members (Hurd, Waddington, Dunning, Murphy) intellectually close to Norbert Elias, but also loyal to Neustadt’s leadership, had emerged. Moreover, a set of somewhat looser groupings based on professional and/or personal affiliation were beginning to emerge. 16 According to our interview data, the intellectual split between the Dunning group of ‘Eliasians’ and the rest of the department remained crucial well into the 1980s after Neustadt’s retirement.
Conclusion
We have argued that a processual-relational approach can identify how ratios of power, as well as dominant patterns of social and intellectual behaviour, have fluctuated over time in an interplay between endogenous factors (the changing attributes of individuals who make up the figuration) and exogenous factors (shifting cultural, intellectual, political and economic factors influencing the Leicester figuration from ‘the outside’). This framework has allowed us to contribute new insights to the understanding of the development of Leicester Sociology. This intricate mix of exogenous and endogenous factors produced a trajectory of rapid expansion and strong social cohesion until the late 1960s, followed by a trend towards stagnation and socio-intellectual fragmentation from the 1970s onwards. Table 2 shows the main trends of development in two distinguishable phases in the history of Leicester Sociology 1968–1982.
Key trends in the development of the ‘Leicester Sociology’ figuration.
The increasing prosperity of British society, and expansion of sociology, in the late 1950s and 1960s and the subsequent 1970s crisis of the economy and the social sciences constituted the ‘exogenous’ societal context of Leicester Sociology. We have argued that it is impossible to understand the process of internal fragmentation which occurred in the 1970s unless one takes into account how the ‘expressive revolution’ of the late 1960s (Wouters, 2011) in youth culture produced a longer-term change in the social, emotional, intellectual and political expectations of staff members. Both the constitutive interpersonal power ratios and the dominant intellectual points of reference in the department underwent major shifts, as a dominant centripetal trend of development gave way to a centrifugal trend from the late 1960s onwards. This happened mainly due to the increasing demands of staff for departmental democratisation and emotional emancipation from paternalist ties of dependence; the break-up of the personal-professional alliance between the two founders of the department, Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias; and the erosion of the sense of intellectual and social community among staff members. As a consequence of these processes, neither the institutional priority of teaching over research, nor the scientific vision of ‘developmental’ sociology in the style of the modern continental masters (Comte, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) survived as trademarks of the Leicester department after Neustadt retired in 1981. Only a few months after his retirement in 1981, the common BA degree in ‘Social Sciences’, for which he crafted the sociology module course structure in collaboration with Norbert Elias, was dismantled at faculty level as a relic of the past.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.