Sociology

This paper considers the relevance of data from a recent survey to the thesis that the welfare state is currently running the risk of a crisis of political legitimacy. Two traditions in the discussion of legitimation issues are outlined, focusing respectively on the role of ideology and of the maximization of individual values in the production of dissenting opinions about state policy. The analysis of survey data indicates that there is no evidence for the view that attitudes to welfare provision add up to a consistent disaffection with policy. Perceptions of self-interest emerge as the best predictors of preferences, and these appear closely related to location in a typical family life-style.

There is increasing interest in the concepts through which lay people identify states of health - in their cultural origins and in their connection with preventive or remedial behaviour. A study of the concepts used by elderly Aberdonians is reported, exploiting two data sources: an intensive study of two social networks, and a random sample survey.

Concepts of health as the relative absence of disease are distinguished from health as a dimension of strength, weakness and exhaustion, and from health as functional fitness. In this Scottish material, functional fitness is dependent on freedom from disabling disease and not on strength, but strength is an important concept logically distinct from both disease and functional fitness. The `strength' dimension is poorly represented in scientific research on health indicators; but on the other hand lay concepts tend not to acknowledge pain as a dimension in itself.

A comparison with a similar French study suggests that while these three lay dimensions of health are present in both cultures, in France functional fitness is dependent on strength as well as on freedom from disabling disease, and this difference seems to be related to the practice of medical consultation.

The substantive focus is upon the relation between Rockefeller philanthropy and the development of the social sciences during the period, 1910 to 1940. Two major propositions are examined. First, that philanthropic foundations attempt to maintain the social order rather than alter it. Specifically, that during the period under study philanthropic foundations were key institutions in both the reproduction and production of cultural hegemony. Second, that a “critical-conflict” perspective has most value when one is attempting to understand the nature and sources of change in the systematic production of both knowledge and intellectuals. Attention is focussed upon the process by which Rockefeller policy for the social sciences emerged. The policy is described and analysed. The ideological viewpoint of Rockefeller philanthropy as identified in the policy-making process is located in the wider political economy. Confirmation is provided for the two propositions. Hegemony, ideology and social class are essential concepts when one is attempting to understand and explain the role of philanthropy in capitalist societies.

This paper traces the contours of current, practical explanatory problems in stratification theory showing the similarity of issues in apparently diverse approaches, both Marxist and non-Marxist. There are two related purposes. The first is to show the specific nature of the current crisis, locating particular explanatory failures. The second is to illustrate the more general issue of the way in which the central epistemology of self-conscious social science derives from and describes failures in social scientific practice. This is well illustrated in the response to current problems.

Both purposes are served by laying bare the procedures by which attempts are made to convert the contradictions inherent in explanatory failures into contradictory features of social experience which could be explained by consistent theories. Contradiction is thus, apparently, removed from its role in specifying the need for theoretical development, to encapsulating the processes by which current social arrangements are reproduced. However, we show that despite initial plausibility such attempts merely displace explanatory contradictions rather than solve them. The attempts are justified by an explicit or implicit action frame of reference which, though it is central to abstract discussions of the nature of social science, is invoked in practical social science only in circumstances of explanatory failure in an unproductive attempt to insulate the theories from the consequences of their failure. Productive social science is the resolution of contradictions in the transformation of theoretical objects and relationships.

In contrast to the importance placed on secondary analysis by researchers in other disciplines, British sociologists have long neglected the rich data available from large scale government surveys, perhaps because of technical obstacles. This report describes work to make the General Household Survey (GHS) data more easily accessible for sociological analysis, summarizes the contents and structure of the GHS and reviews the arrangements which have been made to allow researchers access to it.