British Social Scientists Research Articles

The Family Life of Peter and Ruth Townsend: Social Science and Methods in 1950s and Early 1960s Britain.

Peter Townsend (1928-2009) was one of the most important British social scientists of the twentieth century, best known for pioneering and innovative research on poverty, as well as his political campaigning, most notably for the Child Poverty Action Group. This article returns to Townsend's influential work on ageing, for which he first became widely known, during the 1950s and early 1960s. It does so to recover the ways in which his research, first in Bethnal Green at the Institute of Community Studies (ICS), and then at the London School of Economics, as well as the professional and political networks he built during this period, were rooted in and shaped by his home life in Hampstead. As will be shown, the most important figure in the interconnecting spheres of Townsend's career was his wife, Ruth (1927-2011), who not only was central to the construction of a way of life in which the boundaries between research, the domestic sphere, and politics were often so blurred as to be non-existent, but also made significant and underappreciated contributions to her husband's research.

Adolescence versus Politics: Metaphors in Late Colonial Uganda

In late colonial Uganda, British social scientists, development experts, religious leaders, and administrators used the metaphor of adolescence to explain political unrest. If Uganda could be seen as an adolescent, upheaval in the model colony was a sign of successful growth, not a rejection of British administration or global ideas of development and progress. Using the metaphor of adolescence, experts emphasized the period’s turmoil as signs of biosocial, adolescent maturation, rather than symptoms of political competition, clashing class interests, or ethnic patriotisms. Through this powerful metaphor, British observers rejected any politics based in different values, interests, or goals.

"Worse than Being Married": The Exodus of British Doctors from the National Health Service to Canada, c. 1955-75

Despite a sizeable literature on the evolution of health insurance in Britain and Canada, there is virtually no research on the transnational migration of physicians between these countries in the immediate postwar period. This article hopes to address this neglected subject. Three inter-related topics will be examined. First, the paper will summarize the debate over physician emigration from the National Health Service (NHS) in postwar Britain. It will demonstrate how British social scientists and politicians began to come to grips with a major demographic exodus of British-trained doctors in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Second, it will analyze the changing health human resource situation in 1960s Canada, which focused, for practical and cultural reasons, on General Medical Council of Britain licensed practitioners. Third, through oral interviews of British-trained physicians who settled in Canada during the 1960s, it will examine the professional and personal reasons why physicians left Britain for Canada. It reveals that, among a myriad of personal issues that motivated a physician to leave the NHS, the inflexibility and hierarchical nature of British medicine loomed very large. The paper will conclude by reflecting on the contemporary significance of this fascinating historical phenomenon.

American institutionalism and its British connections

This paper examines the connections between American institutionalists and a number of ‘non-Marshallian’ British economists and social scientists, several of whom were associated with the Fabian Society or the London School of Economics or both. Specifically, the links between institutionalists such as Walton Hamilton and Wesley Mitchell and British social scientists such as John A. Hobson, Henry Clay, R.A. Tawney, William Beveridge and Graham Wallas. It is argued that these connections were related to common views on the importance of institutions, compatible methodological views, common interest in questions of social value, shared policy concerns (particularly unemployment and the coal industry), shared interests in the development of new institutions for education and research in economics and shared connections with the funding activities of the Rockefeller Foundation. These connections were much more extensive than has usually been realized. Some reasons for this British group not to form into a movement similar to American institutionalism are explored.

Revising the Revisionists: Veblen and His Interpreters Revisited

British sociologist and long-time Veblen scholar Stephen Edgell has written the first book-length study of Veblen by a Britisher since John Hobson's Veblen (1936).l Edgell, professor of sociology at the University of Salford, which is located in the Manchester conurbation, has also pub lished a number of empirical studies on the sociology of work, class, family and politics. But Veblen in Perspective, His Life and Thought is his attempt to come to grips not only with Veblen's life and work but, just as importantly, with existing scholarship on Veblen. Veblen does not receive the attention he deserves from American or British sociologists, particularly the latter; so Edgell's book is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature on the founder of institutional economics. How does Edgell's work on Veblen relate to that of other British schol ars? Clearly, it is more original than that of Hobson, whose Veblen was mostly a descriptive/narrative performance of modest interpretive value. However, in recent years at least five other British social scientists have made con tributions to Veblen scholarship. Two of them, sociologist Colin Campbell and marketing specialist Roger Mason, who is Edgell's colleague at Salford, have worked primarily on Veblen's ideas about consumption; thus the scope of their analysis is too narrow to permit broad-gauged comparison with Edgell. A third, political scientist, Jules Townshend, is Edgell's occasional coauthor, but the main thrust of his scholarship is Marxist not Veblenian. This leaves ?migr? Scotsman Malcolm Rutherford and Englishman Geoff Hodgson, both economists. It is hoped that Rutherford and Hodgson will eventually publish monographs with Veblen as their main focus; such ef forts would indeed be welcomed. It is evident that British scholarship on

The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States

Foreword Michael J. Lacey Part I. Knowledge and Government: 1. Social investigation, social knowledge, and the state: an introduction Michael J. Lacey and Mary O. Furner 2. The science of the legislator: the Enlightenment heritage Donald Winch Part II. Empiricism and the New Liberalism: 3. Experts, investigators, and the state in 1860: British social scientists through American eyes Lawrence Goldman 4. The world of the bureaus: government and the positivist project in the late nineteenth century Michael J. Lacey 5. The republican tradition and the new liberalism: social investigation, state building, and social learning in the gilded age Mary O. Furner 6. The state and social investigation in Britain, 1880-1914 Roger Davidson Part III. Pluralism, Skepticism, and the Modern State: 7. Think tanks, antistatism, and democracy: the nonpartisan ideal and policy research in the United States, 1913-1987 Donald T. Critchlow 8. Social investigation and political learning in the financing of World War I W. Elliot Brownlee 9. The state and social investigation in Britain between the world wars Barry Supple 10. War mobilization, institutional learning, and state building in the United States, 1917-1941 Robert D. Cuff Index.

‘Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em’: Backlash and the gender politics of the underclass debate

This article is concerned with an aspect of the ‘underclass debate’ which has, thus far, been largely neglected by British social scientists—its gender politics. It examines the discourse that links lone mothers, juvenile crime, and the fiscal crisis of the Welfare State, tracing the development of the discourse, in its various forms, through 1993. The article argues that a high degree of consensus developed, uniting politicians and commentators in hostility to never married mothers. It is suggested that this discourse can be understood as part of a wider backlash against feminism, and that it locks into the restructuring of the Welfare State.

Public Participation and Nuclear Power Politics

The social sciences, like all the sciences, cannot be neutral or stand apart One recent, rather unexpected, problem for Western democracies has been the rapid growth of social movements opposed to civilian nuclear power programmes and installations. Governments have commissioned and paid social scientist to advise on optimal ways of preventing the anti-nuclear opposition from delaying or halting the implementation of nuclear power programmes. In international terms Britain came late to the nuclear power debate, which remains muted and under-developed. So it is not surprising that British social scientists have only recently become involved as policy advisors on nuclear power. It is worthwhile looking a t the experience o f West Germany, where the nuclear power issue was politicized much earlier, to see how this policy advisor role can develop. After this I return t o Britain and examine in detail proposals for 'improving' public participation on nuclear issues put forward by Pearce, Edwards and Beuret (1979) in their recent book Decision Making f o r Energy Futures.

A passage to limbo?

A major problem in the social sciences is the question of when to move beyond the analysis of particular data towards the construction of conceptual models and the enunciation of general theories. It is arguably a fault of British social scientists (other than those who have a complete framework provided by Marx) to go on and on piling up data which is capable of quantification (such as election studies) but not to move very far towards conceptualising the broader questions. It is perhaps a fault of their American counterparts that they are too eager to come up with general deductions and general theories on insufficient evidence. The model builder really must be careful to ensure that the model is applicable to, say, 60 percent of the evidence before treating it as anything but a provisional hypothesis. Far too often, one has an uneasy suspicion that the trendy modelmaker has envolved the model first and then looked around for the evidence. There is a need for more intermediate studies based upon a comparative analysis of a number of situations. Such comparative studies can indicate trends which may lead to a general theory; although the theory may need substantial modification as further comparative studies come forward.

Land reform and the Portuguese revolution∗

In spite of the fact that the Portuguese Land Reform has been a radical and far‐reaching one, it has received very little attention from British social scientists. This review article looks at three books published in Portugal since April 1974 which are essential reading for anyone interested in this subject. In understanding the development of the Land Reform and the Revolution as a whole it is important to recognise the different types of regional agrarian structure which exist in Portugal. This review pays particular attention to those parts of the three books which deal with these regional questions. The cleavage between those areas in which rural wage‐labourers predominate and those in which peasant farmers are in the majority goes a long way towards explaining both the advances and the defeats of the Portuguese Revolution.