Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940 The Politics of Method [Paperback]

Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940examines how, between 1940 and 1970, British society was marked by the imprint of the academic social sciences in profound ways which have an enduring legacy on how we see ourselves. It focuses on how interview methods and sample surveys eclipsed literature and the community study as a means of understanding ordinary life. The book is the first to draw extensively on archived qualitative social science data from the 1930s to the 1960s, which it uses to offer a unique, personal, and challenging account of post-war social change in Britain. It also uses this data to conduct a new kind of historical sociology of the social sciences, one that emphasises the discontinuities in knowledge forms and which stresses how disciplines and institutions competed with each other for reputation. Its emphasis on how social scientific forms of knowing eclipsed those from the arts and humanities during this period offers a radical re-thinking of the role of expertise today which will provoke social scientists, scholars in the humanities, and the general reader alike.

Introduction
1. 2005 to 1938: Lifting social groups out of the landscape.
art I: Technical Identities and Social Change
2. 1938: The British intellectual and high-brow culture
3. 1954: The challenge of technical identity
4. 1950: The resurgence of gentlemanly expertise in post-war Britain.
5. 1962: The moment of sociology
PART II: The Social Science Apparatus
6. 1956: The end of community: the quest for the English Middletown
7. 1951: The interview and the melodrama of social mobility
8. 1941: The sample survey and the modern rational nation
PART III: Technique and Expertise
9. 2009: The Politics of Method
References
Appendix: Details of Archival Sources consulted

Students of social science theory and method and the social and intellectual history of Britain lós