About and Beyond the `Underclass': Some Notes on Influences of Social Climate on British Sociology Today

Abstract

The concern of this article is with the influence of fashion and social climate on social speculation. The `underclass' notion is a nice example of fashion. Its various versions are influential less because they fit facts than because they are tuned well with tempers of the times. It seems then a sign of sound sense that, while sociologists have taken the notion on board for assessment, most have not gone overboard with it. This point prompts some wider reflections about the interplay between social science and the societal climate within which it exists. The balance between alertness to new agendas and purblind pursuit of them is a fine one. If sociology can now strike that balance tolerably well, it is in part a result of renewed disciplinary coherence: not least because theoretical and empirical analysis now mesh more closely than they once did. British sociology's general resilience to the pressures of the 1980s also reflects extended cross-disciplinary connections. Some of those pressures were unfriendly to academic free-thinking, but charges of ideological subversion or practical futility were never aimed solely at sociology. They seem anyway more muted, now that we and many partner-disciplines offer practical utility as prime targets for new growth in higher education. Welcome as this is, it sets challenges for the 1990s onward that may prove tougher than any pressures for intellectual conformity.