Text of a talk given to the Michael Young Centenary Conference November 11 2015
Introduction
As this event is taking place , by no coincidence, on Remembrance Day , it might be appropriate to start with a personal reminiscence. I first met Michael Young (hereinafter referred to as MY) in 1963 when he came to Cambridge to give a talk to the Heretics Society, of which I was a member . The society was founded by Bertrand Russell when he was an undergraduate and its aim was to invite speakers who were mavericks or held views widely regarded as heretical or merely eccentric. We had someone from the Flat E arth Society , we had Colin Ward the anarchist town planner, D.W. Winnicott talking about psychoanalysis and Michael Young on Sociology. Sociology was not taught in Cambridge at that time, indeed apart from its stronghold at the London School of Economics and a few regional outposts like Liverpool and Keele , it was not taught anywhere much before the late 1960’s. It was widely regarded in higher education circles as an intellectual upstart, a cuckoo in the nest of anthropology or philosophy, politics and economics, not a proper academic discipline , and certainly not a fit subject for study by young gentlemen who were being educated to preside over the orderly decline of what was left of the British Empire and its Imperial economy. I don’t recall much of MY’s talk but I do remember being inspired by his vision of sociology as a way , not just of understanding society but of changing it for the better. Sociology for him, as it was for some of the early settlement sociologists, was about the struggle for social justice. This was news from nowhere as far as I was concerned as a first year student of anthropology struggling to decode the algebra of African kinships systems and cross cousin marriage and grasp the evolutionary foundations of human culture.
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To remember Michael Young at 100 is not as simple a task as personal reminiscence. Legacy is a complicated and tricky business, often subject to contestation and revision . In MY’s case there is the hard legacy- the institutions and organisations that he established , including the one that now bears his name. We can celebrate the many achievements of the Consumers Association, the University of the Third Age, the University of the Arts , The Open University, and the development of the whole social enterprise culture which bear the hall marks of his thinking and influence. Though, I have to say , the recent move to close down seven of the OU’s regional centres and concentrate solely on developing its on line services would have had MY turning in his grave. I suspect he would have supported its academic staff in taking strike action, on the grounds that it is the most disadvantaged students, those who need the academic scaffolding and specialised face to face support , who will suffer most.
When it comes to the soft legacy, his influence on social science, it is more difficult to arrive at a firm conclusion . In his latter years MY was very concerned to secure his posterity , and he found in his authorised biographer, Asa Briggs , if not a hagiographer, then at least a close friend who was predisposed to overlook some of the more difficult aspects of his personality and big up his intellectual credentials and achievements. In MY’s Wikipedia entry, the claim is made that ‘Family and Kinship in East London is ‘widely recognised by sociologists as being one of the most influential sociological studies of the 20th century,i nspiring British sociology to take a new path , away from social statistics and theoretical debate and towards the close observation of everyday life. In the Guardian’s tribute on the 50th Anniversary of the study in 2007, Madeleine Bunting writes about how “the voices they found described a world rich in social relationships, networks of dependence and mutual support that were central to the people’s resilience in facing the adversity of insecure and low paid employment.” She also mentions how the study was amongst the first to discover “social capital” and its role in shaping community life.
Jennifer Platt, the official historiographer of British Sociology takes a more sanguine view: The ICS tradition of research, she writes, was characterised ‘by a mixture of fairly loose sampling and interviewing, was largely descriptive , sometimes impressionistic with no formal hypothesis and included some informal observation. There is little overt use of multivariate analysis or statistic tests.The main burden of argument is carried by quotations from interviews.’
You can almost hear her academic lips curling in contempt for what she sees as the amateur tradition of do- it-yourself ethnography, whose originator was Henry Mayhew with its reliance on ‘impressionistic’ and ‘anecdotal’ evidence, i.e. on participant observation and informant narratives.
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Rethinking Family and Kinship in East London
My criticism of ‘Family and Kinship’ and the ICS approach to community studies is rather different : it is that the concept of community itself remained implicit and under theorised, and secondly that the ethnography was perfunctory and yielded a rather thin, not a thick description. I will look at each issue in turn.
The historical significance of ‘Family and Kinship’, and why it became a best seller at the time is down to two factors. Its genius loci was East London, a long established platform for state of the nation debates. And secondly its novel approach to the embourgeoisement thesis whose testing – and ultimately demolition- was a central pre-occupation of British sociology in the late 1950’s and 60’s with its fixation on the impact of social mobility and the white hot technological revolution on the working classes. The mainstream studies of Goldthorpe and Lockwood followed C Wright Mills in focussing on the emergence of the white collar and affluent worker, changes in the social division of labour and workplace culture and their effect in modernising class attitudes and values. Young and Willmott shifted sociological attention from the shop floor to the relocation of working class communities from the inner city slum neighbourhood to the suburb and even ex-urb as a result of post war reconstruction and re-housing policies . Their version of embourgeoisement concentrated on the domestication / privatisation of working class life where the focus was on the home not the workplace or the street, on values of consumption rather than production, a cultural shift which they associated with this geographical move. And of course what this shift in perspective highlighted was the pivotal role of women, in particular the mother/daughter relation. Their work was the first, though not the last, to pinpoint the shift from concentrated matri-localism to distributed but still matri-focal networks of mutual aid and social support as the main pillar of working class community life.
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Underpinning this perspective was a theoretical framework for community studies which Ronald Frankenberg spelt out in his book Communities in Britain. The book was an attempt to codify the approach of British social anthropology to community studies as developed at Manchester , under the direction of Max Gluckman ; it drew on the work of classical sociology and anthropology to construct a system of binary oppositions for characterising forms of sociality associated with the transition to modernity:
FORMS OF SOCIALITY
Status Contract (Maine)
Ascribed status achieved status (Weber/Parsons)
Community association (Tonnies)
Mechanical Organic solidarity (Durkheim)
Concentrated Distributed network (Granovetter)
This schema, familar to anyone who has taken Sociology 101, underlies much of the early work of ICS, though it is not made explicit. For Frankenberg these are ideal types of sociality which exist empirically in a variety of weak and strong combinations and have definite spatial correlations. The transition to a modern capitalist society was for him a case of uneven and combined development of these forms, full of tension and contradiction, reversals and displacements . ICS in contrast saw it as a simple transition, a one way ticket to ride from Bethnal Green to Greenleigh, emphasising the losses rather than the gains in the move, and en route, painting a perhaps too rosy picture of family life in Bethnal Green , and underwriting the popular stereotype of suburbia as an arid social desert: Greenleigh as a poor relation to Levittown and the American suburban dream.
Whatever view you take, the fact is that it is not the case that MY and Co were a bunch of a-theoretical empiricists , only that they were more interested in trying to figure out what was happening on the ground than scoring theoretical points. It is interesting in this regard to consult MY’s own library, which is still in place at 18 Victoria Park square where it is gathering dust and represents the material, if not the symbolic aspect of his intellectual legacy. Like all libraries it is the way books are classified and grouped together, what authors are put where and next to whom, and who is left out that gives us a clue as to the mental map of the collector, his or her enthusiasms and blind spots and how a field of intellectual endeavour is constructed. So we find a lot of anthropology, from Margaret Mead to Levi-Straus ,from Ruth Benedict to Jack Goody, but nothing on contemporary popular or youth culture , apart from Richard Neville’s Play Power whose lurid psychedelic cover sticks out amidst the serried ranks of sober hard back tomes like the proverbial sugar plum. MY never got youth culture, even though East London was such a germinator of them . As we would expect urbanism, housing and town planning are well represented but there is no section on community studies as such. It is interesting that there is no place for social theory , but T.H. Marshall, Talcott Parsons, Ernest Gellner, John Madge and Jack Douglas find themselves awkwardly rubbing shoulders with Bendix and Lipsett’s 1966 door stopper on Class, status and power, in a section devoted to social stratification.
A second weakness of ‘ family and kinship’, perhaps less obvious in the follow up study of Dagenham , was more methodological. The relations between workplace, street neighbourhood and domestic life tend t o be treated as separate self enclosed worlds, the workplace as largely the province of men , the street corner as the province of male youth and their territorial allegiances and rivalries and the great indoors as where women and girls rule OK . The Symmetrical Family does indeed document and argue for the reconfiguration of these positions, for working class men to become more involved in housework and child rearing and women in the labour market, but it does not fully grasp the fact that these worlds are anyway structurally inter- linked even as they generate split perceptions and social/cognitive closures.
We discovered this in our fieldwork on the Isle of Dogs in the late 1980’s .The social geography of the Island was based on a pervasive distinction between an aristocracy of dock labour ( waterman and stevedores) who had regular well paid jobs and the ordinary dockers , who even once dock work was decasualised, did not. This workplace distinction was also a spatial /residential one, these occupational groups lived in different parts of the island, they went to different churches , different pubs and clubs and marrying out –ie. getting it together with someone from the other side of the island , was definitely frowned upon. Social endogamy ruled OK and the local youth culture added its own territorial markers to the social divide. There were ethnic and religious connotations too and in a way that often conflated moral and economic status : respectable /rough: skilled/unskilled :: protestant: catholic :: English: Irish . This social geography did not disappear with the closure of the docks, and only shifted when the advent of large numbers of Bangladeshi and Vietnamese Chinese families into the area united all sections of the long established white working class : they closed ranks in defence of a ‘sons and daughters’ housing policy that gave them privileged access to housing stock which they regarded as theirs by right. All this is politically contextualised very well in Geoff Dench and Kate Gavron’s book on the New East End, but my point is that you cannot understand what is happening in a working class neighbourhood, its internal principles of stratification its divisions of gender and generation, unless you grasp its intimate relation with the labourhood, even if it is not immediately and tangibly present. For example you cannot understand the trajectory of the Becontree estate in Dagenham unless you understand what is happening down the road at Ford’s Dagenham, not to say Ford’s operations world wide.
My own work in community studies has been about trying to show how the labourhood relation is present and transmitted in the codes of apprenticeship and inheritance which operate in the interior of family culture, shaping its narrative grammars, its dispositions of mental and manual skill, its paradigms of the life course, its prospects on the world. These codes are not confined to families or to workplaces , they operate across a range of sites from playgrounds to streets, from peer groups to formal organisations like tenants associations, wherever communities of practice get established and social and cultural capital is mobilised around the staking of claims over local amenity and resource;. It is by tracking the modes of transmission and transformation of these codes, as they come into negotiation and sometimes open conflict with the dominant codes of vocation and career ,that we can trace the hidden injuries of class, the symbolic violence that has been done to working class cultures and communities in the long and uneven transition from industrial to post industrial capitalism .
For example to grasp the full implications of the current crisis of working class masculinity and its current disembedding from the culture of manual labourism , we have understand growing up working class as an apprenticeship to an inheritance tied to specifically embodied and hence gendered prides of place and skill. Even and especially where occupational succession was weak , male patrimonies were entailed in the learning of all kinds of physical dexterities associated with inherited characteristics. You had coal in your blood, your uncle’s strong hands. your fathers knack with machines. This natural symbolism had a its material underpinning in forms of boy labour and the youth wage. Boy labour traditionally was proto-domestic labour, it involved fetching and carrying and skivvying jobs that put the young apprentice in a quasi- feminine position of subordination in being mated to the old hand from whom he learnt the tricks of his manual trade. The counter-assertion of a hard core laddish form of masculinity, from which all traces of the feminine has been erased, is primary enacted in the street and through forms of territoriality which stake exclusionary claims of place identity and belonging ( we rule round here) as well as creating little niches in the urban fabric free from adult surveillance and control , where is it safe to have adventures. In this context it is worth noting that working class boys’ sexual apprenticeships traditionally mirrored the occupational form , and included being initiated by an older woman, the mastery of sexual skills practiced on often younger girls and the apprenticeship of courtship to marriage.
The shift from a manufacturing to a services economy set in motion two decisive transformations in the habitus of the labourhood: the replacement of traditional forms of formal and informal apprenticeship with training regimes based on transferable skill sets abstracted from the concrete labour process ; and secondly the requirement for working class boys to master ‘feminine’ techniques of impression management and ways of selling their body images and ‘personality’ as avatars of labour power : the Post Fordist just- in -time production of the self . It was a pincer movement which destabilised this whole system of formation, albeit unevenly, across all the sites of its operation. Apprenticeship pulled apart from inheritance and opened up a space for new kinds of identity work often linked to youth cultures. To trace the multiple pathways of this de- and re-linking of life stories, life styles and livelihoods, we need a form of research that is as subtle and multilayered as the processes it is seeking to describe and analyse.
This brings me to my second point about the role of ethnography in the work of ICS. MY and Peter Wilmott were not trained as social scientists but they wanted their work to be recognised by a profession dominated at that time by quantitative methodologies, and they wanted it taken seriously by politicians and policy makers for whom tables of statistics seems to be the only guarantee of objectivity putting findings beyond ideological challenge. So they went through the motions of conventional sociology, using questionnaire survey methods with relatively large samples supplemented by non participant observation and some in depth interviews with a much smaller number of key informants. It was a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods which did not really do justice to the heuristic potential of either. In particular they turned their back on the methodological innovations that were occurring within ethnography ,as part of its that would have enriched their research story and liberated it from the constraints of a positivist scientific paradigm to which they did not in any case really subscribe.
To give you an idea of what is at stake here , here is list of research methods I have used with colleagues in studies in ex-docklands area of London and in and around Stratford over the past 30 years. They have allowed us to produce a close grained reading of the images, texts and other material produced by our informants in an effort to document and analyse the impact of demographic and economic change on their lives and life stories :
- Narrative Interviews
- Longitudinal site observations
- Cognitive and memory mapping
- Photo-story telling
- Photo-portraiture
- Guided Phantasy exercises
- Video walk abouts
- Art work constructions
- Peer to peer discussions
- Digital diaries and information capture
At the time some of these methods were regarded as a bit experimental but today they are standard items in the ethnographers toolkit. Of course some of the research technologies were not available to MY & Co, but many of them were and they chose to ignore them because they remained committed to a social survey approach. Yet these new methods,it seems to me , open up a much richer , more textured, account of how urban socio-economic change is actually being lived , in all its singularity and diversity , an account with real biographical depth as well as sociological breadth.
These are some of the research themes opened up and explored by this methodology :
- Fictive kinship and the family romance
- Youth cultures as social imaginaries of class and gender
- Civic and ethnic nationalisms of the neighbourhood and their imagined communities
- Map/territory relations, globalisation and the Cockney diaspora
- Changing patterns of social im/mobility and their relation to ontological precarity
- The psycho-geography of race, place, identity and belonging
- Patterns of local stakeholding in relation to the 2012 Olympic games
Finally in terms of policy , and as an integral part of the research we tested and evaluated the following practical interventions:
- An alternative to moral, symbolic and docrintaire forms of anti-racist education with working class children and young people based on community art practice
- The development of an ethno-cartographic approach to participatory community asset mapping
- An alternative to social and life skills in vocational training based on informal learning and peer to peer pedagogies
- A challenge to policing and urban control strategies directed at young people in marginalised communities .
The outputs of this work have taken the form of exhibitions, films, audio trails, pamphlets and learning resources, primarily directed at the kinds of groups with which we have been working and as well as the usual academic publications.
As an example of this approach we recently carried out a multidimensional project in East Village, called Speaking Out of Place , designed to capture a historical moment of transition in the Post Olympic Legacy in east London , through the stories, photographs, videos and maps produced by incoming residents and young people. By documenting these patterns of inhabitation our aim is not just to evaluate a policy experiment in multi-tenured housing, but to locate what we have called an estate of exception within its ‘other scene’ , within the special narrative framework created by the Olympic Dream machine and its aspirational culture : higher,faster,stronger urban regeneration.[/expand]
Public Sociology, critical ethnography and the moral economy of knowledge
This kind of work could be considered an experiment in public sociology, that is a sociology concerned to reconnect public matters to private concerns in C Wright Mills’ classic formulation and in particular , to treat the sociological knowledge as a public good , accessible to a wide and not just a specialist academic audience. Typically this may involve attempts to widen the interpretative community to include as many informants as possible , so that the research agenda , methods and even the analysis become part of a continuing dialogue . Informants are not used as grist to the researcher’s mill , as pegs to hang ideas on , but themselves take control of the means of observation and representation. It can also be about encouraging various publics to exercise their sociological imagination through pedagogic interventions. In both cases , the aim is to and redistribute intellectual capital in and through a mode of knowledge co-production grounded in participatory research methodology.
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There are many ways of challenging existing knowledge /power structures and just as many approaches to doing public sociology. In some cases the sociologist functions as a public intellectual and/or acts of a political advocate of the communities she works with. So the sociological study of social inequality becomes an evidence platform for campaigns for social justice, and/or sponsors the creation of new institutions designed to embody these principles. However the public sociologist has to be authorised by the informant community to act on their behalf. Otherwise there is a risk that she simply substitutes her voice for theirs.
There is also what has been called muck raking sociology, the aim being to disclose information about the hidden concentrations and operations of wealth and power in society, to dish the dirt through some process of documentation. Whether this can actually be considered ‘sociology’ is a moot point , since the answer to the research question is known in advance – it is always and already capitalism or patriarchy or racism what dunnit. Investigative journalism meets the soapbox.
A more fruitful approach is to seek to validate the situated knowledge of marginalised communities, on the grounds that their very marginality, their lack of implication in power, gives them privileged access or insight into its workings. So we seen the emergence of public sociologies based on standpoint epistemologies linked to identity politics of gender, race and class, and aiming to provide these groups with a space of representation in which they can gain confidence and trust in their own ability to articulate their viewpoint without needing intermediaries. Yet if only the wearer knows where and how the shoe pinches, the actual pain of ‘feeling the pinch’ and the struggle for day to day survival can inhibit the capacity to gain the critical knowledge required to know why the shoe is made that way and what alternatives to ‘one size fits all ‘ policies might be possible. The well springs of the sociological imagination are not automatically nurtured by conditions of poverty and oppression. Political education, not propaganda for a particular cause , but shifting the grounds of common sense so that an accessible space for democratic politics and debate opens up, is a vital aspect of public sociology. More conventionally, the sociologist functions as a public educator, even a latter day civilising missionary, using research findings as a platform to spread a more enlightened public understanding on issues such as the causes of wealth and poverty, the impact of immigration, and the unequal distribution of power.
Running like a red thread through all these approaches is a concern with establishing a moral economy of knowledge, undermining its hierarchisation and fragmentation in the academic division of labour. This can take the form of developing a strategic inter-disciplinarity. Not just an intellectual mash up but the collaborative production of concepts and methods which accomplish a paradigm shift in the way a problem is addressed , both as a research topic and as focus of political intervention. In practice that means assembling a team of consultants around the project and running charettes in which ethnographic and other primary research material is subject to multiple interpretations and internal debate.
Alongside this there is a trend to create some kind of intellectual commons by building a more inclusive community of research practice and skilling informants so that they become more or less fully fledged members of it. These are almost always ethnographic projects because critical ethnographers have been at the forefront of attempts to create more participatory modes of research. The moral economy of knowledge certainly has implications for how ethnographic material is presented to various publics. The voices of informants have to be presented live , whether in audio or video, so that the full texture of their statements is made available for discussion. All too often ethnographers report using indirect speech to convey the gist of informant’s stories , merging or submerging their own interpretations in the flow whilst also substituting their voice for the informants. And then they talk about this kind of research as empowerment! The research stories we tell about the stories we collect, the interpretative meta-narrative we weave around the ethnographic data to give it a wider contextual meaning ( for example in relation to a particular theory in the human sciences ) has to be clearly distinguished from the primary source material. The best way to do this is to create parallel texts, so that a dialogue between the informants interpretation of their world , and the ethnographer’s becomes possible.
Finally an ethnographic approach to public sociology is about grounded theory making. It is not about trying to fit the material you collect into some pre-existing theoretical schema, but allowing it to permeate your thinking about the issues in ways which unsettle pre-conceived notions, and hopefully enables you to make new , often counter-intuitive connections. The equipment the ethnographer brings to this task is not just about professional field work training. It requires the ethnographer, to steep herself in literature and the arts, as well as a broad range of human sciences, and, ideally to live a full life outside the Academy, moving through a wide range of social mileux, from the corridors of power to the wilder side of town. The ethnographic imagination may be stimulated by reading a novel or a poem as much as by research monograph ; the act of observant listening and embodied looking in the primary encounter with an object, informant, or environment . but it does not thrive in the library or the museum.
It would be wrong to think , however, that critical ethnography is the sole platform for public sociology. There are approaches which use more conventional sociological methods and are more oriented to civic or market economies of worth, defining their value either in terms of norms of public accountability and improving the efficiency, transparency or justice of governance, or in terms of the collaborative capacity for innovation in the global market place of ideas. Doing public sociology may thus be another strategy for shoring up or extending State intervention in the economy ; equally , it may serve as a vehicle for disseminating the enterprise culture in civil society .
Mass Observation, that pioneering experiment in public sociology, moved in the course of its history from being a national network of correspondents committed to sharing information and insight to an arm of government documenting civilian morale during the war, to a market research organisation in the post war consumer boom. Thinks tanks are equally diverse. They may be strategies for weaponising evidence to blow holes in opponents arguments and win the battle for hearts and minds. Or they may be environments specially designed to provide living space for exotic or rare ideas that would otherwise be fish out of water. So where does ICS fit in this scheme?
My sense of it is that the Institute of Community Studies begins and perhaps ultimately belongs within the tradition of settlement sociology, grounded in attempts by reformers of various persuasions, to investigate the social conditions of the poor so as to provide evidence for policies and practices designed to ameliorate them , whether at work, home, or leisure. Of course it is easy to poke fun at some of these early missionaries, like the toffs slumming it at the Eton Manor club in East London attempting to instil the public school spirit in the local rough trade through a strict regime of rational recreation. But many of the early settlement workers were socialists as well as Christians, and some like Beatrice Webb at Toynbee Hall were engaged in pioneering forms of participant observation within a framework of sociological enquiry. The reforms in work and housing conditions they campaigned for were often espoused by the labour movement and the Left: they were about social justice not moral reclamation. MY had close connections with Toynbee Hall and the first premises of ICS were in the Oxford House Settlement . ICS never had the close relationship to its neighbourhood that John Barron Mays developed at the Liverpool Settlement and which informed his own work on juvenile delinquency or Howard Parker’s View from the Boys . Contrast with Willmott’s Adolescent Boys of East London. But neither did ICS go in for the kind of extractive hit and run research which came to characterise much University based sociology from the 1970’s onwards.
If the strong point of settlement sociology was its locally grounded theorisations of class and community , today its moral impulse finds expression within a globalised knowledge economy in the form of the Citizen Social Science . This can typically involve the use of GIS and other digital information technologies to crowd source and validate locally situated knowledge, and/or create platforms for participatory community mapping using a variety of creative media . The aim is both to generate situated accounts, whether from big or small data sets , to investigate for example of the local effects of environmental pollution or gentrification and , secondly, in and through the research process, to facilitate and empower communities of resistance to these effects. One thing CSS does is to blur the distinction between amateur and professional social scientist, the real challenge being not how to train up amateurs so they think and behave more like professionals , but how to get professional social scientists to recognise that they are first and foremost amateurs of the social , fascinated by its relays between things not themselves social . Whether CSS is genuinely redistributive of intellectual capital, or just a more subtle and democratic way of extracting information without paying for it remains to be seen. One thing is certain if MY was alive today he would be at the forefront of exploring these new possibilities and pushing them as far as he could in the direction of social justice.
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Further Reading and References:
Jennifer Platt Realities of Social research: an empirical study of british Sociologists Chatto and Windus 1976
Raymond Kent A History of British Empirical Sociology Gower 1981
John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood The Affluent Worker CUP 1965
Asa Briggs Michael Young :social entrepreneur Palgrave 2001
Michael Young and Peter Willmott Family and Kinship in east London Routledge 1957
Michael Young and Peter Willmott Family and Class in a London Suburb New English Library 1971
Michael Young and Peter Willmott The Symmetrical Family Routledge 1973
Peter Willmott The Evolutvion of a community :Dagenham 40 years on Routledge
Peter Willmott Adolescent Boys in East London Routledge 1966
Howard Parker View from the Boys Heinemann 1976
Geoff Dench and Kate Gavron The New East End: kinship,race and conflict Profile 2006
Ronald Frankenberg Communities in Britain Palgrave 1976
Nora Rathzel and Phil Cohen Finding the Way Home : race,identity and belonging amongst young people in London and Hamburg V&R Publishing 2008
Dave Robins and Phil Cohen Knuckle sandwich :growing up in the working class city Penguin Books 1978
Phil Cohen and Mike Rustin London’s Turning : the making of Thames Gateway Ashgate 2007
Phil Cohen On the Wrong Side of the Track? East London and the Post Olympics Lawrence and Wishart 2013
Richard Sennett and Jonathon Cobb The Hidden Injuries of Class Knopf 1972
Richard Sennett The Culture of the New capitalism Yale 2006
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello The New Spirit of Capitalism Verso 2005
Philip Nyden et al Public Sociology :research,action,change SAGE 2011
Joyce E Williams et al Settlement Sociology in the Progressive Years Brill 2015
Bruno Latour Re-assembling the Social Oxford University Press 2005
C Wright Mills The Sociological Imagination Methuen 1967