The Appeal of British Sociology; a View from outside and Inside

Abstract

In the 60 years of the BSA’s existence many people from Eastern Europe have contributed to its achievement. I can proudly point out that my compatriots especially distinguished themselves. The list of social scientists originally from Poland who worked or are still working in the UK is relatively long; it is enough to mention here Stanislaw Andreski (1919-2007) and Zygmunt Bauman. However, while the concept of ‘diaspora’, at least to some degree, describes the fate of dislocated generations, Poles recently entering UK departments of sociology no longer fit this image. The collapse of the Berlin Wall, the EU enlargement, cheap travel, the spread of the English language all these factors have increased the crossborder dimensions of contemporary academic life. So, in a contemporary Europe without major disaster zones, under conditions of high mobility, working in an increasingly international sociological field has become easier and does not require either rejection or endorsement of any particular culture. My own journey from Poland started many years ago at a time when things were more complicated. Nevertheless, I too have come to follow the border-crossing career trajectories of sociologists. After working in Poland, the USA and Australia, in 2002 I accepted a professorship in the Department of Sociology in the University of Leicester. Knowing the history and the role of Leicester in the development of UK sociology, in particular the presence over many years of Norbert Elias, I was looking forward to this opportunity. I have been attracted by Elias’s ideas ever since his first volume of The Civilizing Process was translated into Polish in 1980 and have been exploring his perspective in my writings, for example, in my book on Informality (Misztal 2001). Moreover, I was keen to join British sociology as it, in contrast to North American sociology, exhibits a marked fusion of various approaches and it offers a possibility to develop more broad social thought. I was also attracted to British sociology because of its critical stand, interdisciplinarity, diversity, and the fact that although already well institutionally established, it was still far from the American level of closure through professionalization. The type of open-ended sociology which offers allembracing knowledge of the social word and generates exciting and productive debates appealed to me because my experience of living under the all-intrusive state in Poland and the type of training I received taught me to value sociology as an independent and synthetic field of studies.