Social Science and Social Exploration

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It has always been a major task of sociology to discover and analyse the condition of the working class. Indeed it has frequently been asserted that the origins of sociology in the nineteenth century lie precisely in the need to find ways of understanding and imposing order on a new urban industrial society stripped of its traditional bearings and attitudes. The history of British empirical sociology up to 1939 is largely a matter of surveys of urban working-class life with particular reference to the problems of poverty and unemployment. There is, however, no necessary reason why sociological texts dealing with the analysis of any social group should be concerned to offer direct evocations or experiential accounts of the everyday life or the physical environment involved. Such kinds of writing are, rather, frequently avoided on the grounds that they tend to preclude analysis, to be subjective or idiosyncratic, to fail to offer data for subsequent comparative analysis and to confuse the work of the social scientists with that of the reporter, documentarist or novelist.