Anthony King the Sociology of Sociology

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The Sociology of Sociology Anthony King Philosophy of the Social Sciences 2007; 37; 501 DOI: 10.1177/0048393107307665 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pos.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/37/4/501

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Review Essays

The Sociology of Sociology Anthony King Exeter University

Philosophy of the Social Sciences Volume 37 Number 4 December 2007 501-524 © 2007 Sage Publications 10.1177/0048393107307665 http://pos.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

In this recent history of British sociology, Andrew Halsey suggests an intriguing connection between political economic régimes in the twentieth century and the development of sociology as an academic discipline, dividing British sociology into four periods, 1900-1950, 1950-1967, 1968-1975, and 1975-2000. In this way, by connecting disciplinary developments with contemporaneous régimes of economic regulation, Halsey begins to outline a sociology of sociology. However, although much of Halsey’s book is informative, especially his description of the period from 1950-1967 when he personally entered the discipline, Halsey ultimately fails to develop his sociology of the discipline sufficiently, especially after 1967. Although it does not claim to be comprehensive, this essay attempts to develop Halsey’s sociology of the discipline. Keywords: British sociology; social theory; twentieth century

Halsey, A. (2004). A History of Sociology in Britain: Science, Literature and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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s part of his recent book on the history of British sociology, Andrew Halsey asked British sociology professors to identify individuals who had been particularly decisive in the development of the discipline. One response stood out sufficiently for Halsey to record it in full: “I would not pick out any specific figure. I think that sociology has been developed by the sociological community, generally impeded by the fetishism of great men” (Halsey 2004, 49). The humorless reply exemplifies the sanctimony which, as Andrew Abbott has noted (2005), often characterizes professional sociology. However, the reply also illustrates the central purpose of Halsey’s book. Halsey calls his book A History of Sociology in Britain but, in fact, it is a sociology of British sociology. Halsey aims to identify the institutional and social context in which professional sociology has been conducted in this country since Leonard Hobhouse took the first chair of sociology at the Received 13 September 2006 Author’s Note: I am extremely grateful to Ian Jarvie for his useful comments on this article and to Marta Trzebiatowska for reading an early draft. 501 Downloaded from http://pos.sagepub.com by on February 5, 2010

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London School of Economics in 1909. Halsey analyzes the “sociological community” which has allowed certain prominent individuals to become academic fetishes. Given the central importance of the sociology of knowledge to the discipline since the 1970s, it is perhaps remarkable that sociologists have rarely turned their sceptical eye on sociology itself. While Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, Barry Barnes, and Harry Collins subject the natural sciences to intense scrutiny, sociology cannot exempt itself from its critical gaze. Halsey seeks to re-dress this absence of academic reflexivity. Intriguingly, if almost unwittingly, Halsey connects the development of British sociology, as an intellectual practice, with the main political economic régimes of the twentieth century. Thus, Halsey divides the history of British sociology into four periods: 1900 to 19501, 1950 to 1967, 1968 to 1975, and 1976 to 2000, broadly paralleling the régimes of economic regulation in twentieth-century Britain. Echoing the work of many other social scientists, Ernest Mandel (1975), for instance, has argued for three main periods of capitalism. Thus, a free market period ran from the Industrial Revolution of early nineteenth century to approximately the 1930s. Certainly the state provided the legal and institutional context in which the market operated, as Karl Polanyi so brilliantly demonstrated, but states did not macro-manage the economy as a whole. In the 1920s, this free market régime began to collapse, to be replaced by monopoly capital. The Wall Street Crash and the Depression demonstrated that the free market system of regulation was no longer a viable basis of economic development. The state sought to intervene in the management of the economy which was increasingly dominated by larger concentrations of capital. Roosevelt’s New Deal represented the rise of a new system of regulation which in Britain manifested itself in the form of Keynesianism, both solidifying as a new paradigm of regulation in the Second World War. In most of the rest of Europe, state interventionism in the 1930s and 40s took the dark form of fascism in Western Europe and Communism east of the Oder. Writing in the 1920s, Gramsci presciently described this new economic régime as “Fordism,” employing a specialist concept of mass production to describe a much wider political economic complex. As a system of mass production regulated by an interventionist state, Fordism was extraordinarily successful in raising living standards, especially after the Second World War. The 1950s constituted the high point of this régime of regulation when an affluent society emerged out of the disasters of the 1930s and 40s. Not 1. In fact, in the text, Halsey emphasizes the Second World War as the critical divide and, thus, 1945 not 1950. 1945 is used throughout the text to periodize British sociology itself.

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only did the new welfare state intervene in macro-economic management but it arbitrated between labor and capital to produce a distinctive triangular corporatist settlement. Fordism’s long boom itself came to an end toward the end of the 1960s, eventually collapsing in the 1970s. From the late 1960s, a series of industrial disputes undermined the corporatist settlement between labor and capital and it became impossible for the state to act as arbitrator between the two groups. Increasing economic competition, especially from Japan, and, finally, the oil crises of 1973 and 1974 undermined the state’s ability to regulate the economy. At this point, Mandel identifies the rise of a third political economic régime: multinational capital. In the late 60s, a series of mergers between major enterprises produced new capitalist conglomerates which began to compete transnationally with each other. They no longer only had markets in other nations but a global network of production and distribution. These multinationals were able to subvert the authority of the state through foreign direct investment. By the 1980s and especially the later half of that decade, a new régime of regulation had begun to emerge, to be described as postFordism by many commentators. Economic liberalism has returned as the dominant economic philosophy and states sought to regulate the competition between transnational corporations only indirectly. The twentieth century can be broadly periodized into four régimes; the liberalist era ran from 1900 to the 1930s, the Fordist from the 1930s to 1970, followed by the collapse of Fordism in the 1970s, and, finally, the rise of post-Fordism in the 1980s. Few of these specific terms appear in Halsey’s book but the parallel between his periodization of British sociology with its four periods and this standard account of twentieth-century economic development is too striking to ignore. Of course, there is no suggestion that there is any direct causal relation between sociology and the political economy in which it was conducted. Neither the economy nor the system of state regulation determined sociological inquiry directly. Rather, in each era, the central political and social issues of the day which confronted all members of British society also framed and channelled sociological research. Sociologists, institutionally embedded in universities, were themselves connected professionally and personally to other public and private sector organizations and groups. Consequently, they necessarily reflected the concerns and priorities of the wider culture which they analyzed. Sociology was part of the Zeitgeist. Ultimately, Halsey’s book insightfully implies that each era of the twentieth century gave rise to the kind of sociology which it deserved. This is a deeply suggestive way of comprehending the development of the discipline.

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Imperial Sociology: 1900-1945 “Who reads Hobhouse now?” (Halsey 2004, 53). Referencing Parsons’ famous question at the start of The Structure of Social Action (1956), Halsey neatly introduces an obvious question which confronts British sociologists. Why was British sociology so underdeveloped before the Second World War and is the work which was done in its name by Leonard Hobhouse and Edward Westermarck, in particular, now all but forgotten? The underdevelopment of sociology in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century is an anomaly which must be explained. In Germany, France, and the United States, by contrast, sociology enjoyed high academic status from the beginning of the twentieth century. The prominence of sociology in France and Germany was perhaps a product of the strength of the state in those countries and, therefore, the centrality of social issues to national debate. Sociology was an intellectual manifestation of the state and its power. In addition, flowing respectively from Hegel and Rousseau, there was a strong tradition of social philosophy in both countries. Yet, in the United States where the state, as in Britain, was always much weaker, a powerful tradition of sociology also developed before the Second World War. The Chicago School was the most obvious example of the academic status of the discipline but at both Harvard and Columbia strong sociology programmes had also been developed (Halsey 2004, 69). It is strange that sociology did not develop in Britain. Halsey does not provide a definitive explanation of why sociology was so neglected in Britain but he suggests some likely possibilities. In his chapter on pre-War sociology, Halsey concludes with a discussion of social anthropology on the grounds that “the boundaries without and divisions within sociology were defined more fluidly in the early part of the twentieth century” (Halsey 2004, 65). However, Halsey’s discussion of social anthropology suggests not merely a blurring of the two disciplines but the superiority of anthropology in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Halsey is necessarily diverted into a discussion of sociology’s sister discipline precisely because of the latter’s intellectual dominance in these decades. Sociology simply did not have sufficient intellectual autonomy to merit its own pre-War history. Indeed, it is notable that much of Edward Westermarck’s “sociology” explicitly focused on Islamic culture in North Africa and marriage practices in particular; it was indistinguishable from anthropology. Halsey does not explore the thesis but it seems highly probable that the pre-eminence of social anthropology and the concomitant underdevelopment of sociology in Britain was a result of the Empire. For Britain, the colonial

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encounter was a political and intellectual center of gravity, demanding analysis and debate. Although Asad’s (1973) critique of social anthropology is in places overly conspiratorial, he demonstrates the close institutional connection between social anthropologists and the colonial administration. To conduct his research on the Azande, Evans-Pritchard (1937) was given the local status of a colonial official, while S. F. Nadel’s A Black Byzantium includes a forward by Lord Lugard, former Governor General of Nigeria and the architect of British West Africa. Anthropologists were not necessarily apologists for the Empire but their close colonial connections aided their research and seem to have facilitated their high status within Britain. Anthropologists threw fascinating light on the sources of British greatness. Sociologists, by contrast, seemed to be concerned with less appealing issues; with the condition of the working class, industrialization, urbanization, and state policy. The exotic was replaced with a grim analysis of the mundane. Not only was sociology dissonant with Britain’s imperial self-perception but its interests and methods conflicted with the liberal consensus and the state’s laissez-faire approach to urban and industrial problems. The collectivist orientation of sociological theory contrasted with the dominant individualism of the time. It seems likely that sociology in Britain was underdeveloped precisely because Britain was an imperial power, therefore. The Empire may also have influenced the research which was conducted under the name of sociology. In particular, the colonial encounter seemed to have prioritized the issue of evolution—and, indeed Darwinism—in the works of early sociologists like Hobhouse and Westermarck. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Darwinism had not only colonized a whole area of scientific investigation but had also influenced much broader trends of thought, connecting closely with the imperial projects of the major European powers. In some cases, such as in the phrenological studies of the late nineteenth century or the writings of De Gobineau, Darwinism assumed a virulent form of racism. Darwinism was also sometimes mobilized to justify the liberal economy in which only the strongest companies could adapt and survive. Darwinism was part of a cultural paradigm which was dominant from the middle of the nineteenth century and reflecting this Darwinian hegemony both Westermarck’s and Hobhouse’s work was substantially concerned with social evolution. However, both sociologists sought to engage critically with and, ultimately, to reject Darwinian socio-biology even while adopting an evolutionary framework. Thus, Hobhouse’s Mind in Evolution (1901) and Morals in Evolution (1906) and Westermarck’s The Origins and Development of Moral Ideas (1906) dismiss biological accounts of human social development. For them, humans do not simply behave; they must collectively understand what they,

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as members of a group, are trying to do: “The heart of social life is human purpose, and purpose is to be interpreted not like an event in nature through its causes but in terms of its wisdom or unwisdom, its goodness or badness, in a word its value” (Hobhouse 1924, 12). Consequently, a biology based on individual organic evolution which ignores human consciousness must be inadequate to the explanation of human culture. Rather human social development had to be understood as “orthogenic evolution.” Human development is a cultural product of the social group, developed through social interaction and meaningful discussion. It was not the manifestation of bare individual need. For Hobhouse, “the true method of social enquiry is not scientific at all but philosophical” (Hobhouse 1924, 12). Sociology must be philosophical because it is concerned with meaning and understanding not with mechanics. In addition to the evolutionary theme, the work of Hobhouse and Westermarck is also characterized by a concern with individualism and liberalism. In this, their work was a reflection of the culture of the time. Although liberalism experienced a strange death after the First World War, even Hobhouse’s and Westermarck’s later work remained heavily influenced by liberal concerns. Hobhouse and Westermarck articulated the British political consensus in sociological form, elucidating the cultural origins of individualism. Nevertheless, as with evolution, they adopted an interesting sociological position on liberalism, arguing that individual freedom was a social product not the essential property of the individual. Opposing the merely “slack” freedom of simple societies, Hobhouse describes the positive liberty of “higher communities”: But there is also a freedom which is the soundest basest of efficiency—the willing partnership of the citizen in the common life, not cramping, but enlarging and enriching the individual personality. Such freedom is only possible if each man effectually feels the common good to be in some sort his own, that is, it implies some kind of measure of equality in partnership. (Hobhouse 1924, 35)

Positive freedom is, for Hobhouse, a collective good, produced in social groups as humans mutually support each others’ efforts to contribute to shared goals. In an interesting parallel with Durkheim’s Division of Labour—and in direct opposition to the liberal Cult of the Individual—Hobhouse claims that humans become freer as they become more dependent on each other. Unfortunately, although in many respects admirable, the work of Hobhouse and Westermarck is compromised by its concern with issues parochially specific to Edwardian Britain such as social evolution and liberal politics.

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Today, they remain, as Halsey rightly notes, almost unread. Halsey’s History sets itself an important task of illuminating the much neglected origins of British sociology. However, while always interesting, Halsey’s account lacks a level of detail and precision to provide a convincing story. Of course, in this, Halsey demonstrates only the reality of contemporary British sociology; there is very little intellectual connection between the work conducted under the name of sociology in Britain between the first and second halves of the twentieth century.

Keynesian Sociology: 1945-1967 While Halsey’s history of pre-War sociology is somewhat sparse, his book comes alive in his description of the institutionalisation of British sociology after the War. This is the strongest part of the book. It is obvious why Halsey’s account attains an authoritative and yet intimate tone in this section. This is precisely the period in which Halsey himself was inducted into the profession in which he was to become a leading light. He is able to fuse personal biography with institutional development in a rich description of the rise of an intellectual discipline out of the margins. Halsey notes in a pointed aside that Hobhouse and Marshall were both from public school. Indeed, he records Marshall’s honest deprecations of his “higher professional” class background: “Add to this my conventional schooling, first in a very select preparatory boarding school, and then at Rugby, a solidly bourgeois and not particularly snobbish ‘Public School’ and it is easy to understand how limited, and how naively unsociological was my youthful view of society” (Halsey 2004, 75). After the War, by contrast, sociologists were increasingly drawn not from public schools but from grammar schools and they had often served in the armed forces. Like many other British conscripts, the War acted as a crucible for a new political consciousness for these future British sociologists. They remained committed nationalists but they “argued themselves into democratic socialism and enthusiastic support for Attlee’s government on His Majesty’s ships, airfields and army camps” (Halsey 2004, 73). Above all, these new acolytes to the discipline regarded the working class as the central focus of their inquiries. While Marshall noted that he “knew nothing of working class life” (Halsey 2004, 75), they immersed themselves into the realities of urban existence in Britain. They constituted an intellectual arm of Beveridge’s strategy of universal enfranchisement, seeking to incorporate the working class into the very centre of academic discussion.

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In this way, these new sociologists were ultimately an element in the emergent corporatist consensus providing academic mediation between capital, labor, and the state itself. It was no accident that British sociology enjoyed its closest relationship to government during this period. Indeed, Raymond Aron dismissed British sociology as preoccupied with the intellectual problems of the Labour Party. Although intended disparagingly, Aron accurately identified the underlying ethos of the discipline. British sociology was forged in this distinctive cultural milieu when a new social cohort entered the discipline at a moment of changing national politics. These emerging academics, Halsey among them, had the energy and imagination to address the critical issues of post-War Britain. They sought to analyse the reality of British society in order to contribute actively to the One-Nation consensus. It was, according to Halsey, “a golden age” (Halsey 2004, 112). In one of the most evocative passages in the book, Halsey describes the unlikely ground in which the seeds of this intellectual florescence were sown. The LSE was an intellectual-cum-political Mecca. Its buildings sprawled in grimy vitality on the East and West sides of Houghton Street off the Aldwych. Demob suits and battle jackets, incongruously adorned by the college scarf, thronged the street between the two main lecture theatres. The library was heavily used, assailing the nostrils with the mustiness of books and the sickliness of human sweat. The students’ refectory was a clutter of cheap and unappetizing snacks, and the Students’ Union pub, The Three Tuns, normally permitted no more than standing in discomfort. But the aspiring sociologists were indifferent to the chaotic ugliness of the architecture. The inconveniences of the human ant heap were of no significance by comparison with the conversation and the visibility and audibility of great scholars. (Halsey 2004, 74)

It is interesting to compare this milieu with the sterility which Kingsley Amis (1954) records in his novel about post-War university life, Lucky Jim. Although an economic historian, the protagonist in that novel, a grammar school-educated social democrat represented precisely the profile of the postWar British sociologist and its disdain for enduring Edwardian archaism. This new intellectual culture manifested itself most clearly in the series of publications which began to appear from the late 1950s, documenting and analyzing the British working class. Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1956) was seminal in this regard, initiating a wave of publication on the working class. Clearly, Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s Affluent Worker number remains the most prominent among these but there were a number of major contributions in which this work should be situated, including Dennis’,

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Henriques’, and Slaughter’s Coal is Our Life (1969), Robins’ The Classic Slum (1971), Zweig’s The Worker in an Affluent Society (1961), and Jackson’s Working Class Community (1961). Illustrating the close relationship between sociology and contemporary politics, all of these books sought to examine directly or indirectly the validity of the “embourgeoisement thesis.” They analyzed how the working class was changing in the face of Fordist affluence and, indeed, whether the working class was disappearing entirely. Within that framework, the studies constituted the first sustained sociological studies of Britain conducted within the academy. The empirical focus of British sociology in the post-War era reflected the emergent political economic régime. Yet, the theoretical framework in which that work was conducted is also explicable historically. While Parsons dominated American sociology in the post-War period, his reception was less assured in Britain. While they recognized the importance of The Structure of Social Action, British sociologists were deeply sceptical of The Social System. Functionalism was certainly “not the undisputed sociological piety of the 1950s which the fashion of the 1970s made it out to be” (Halsey 2004, 85). On the contrary, “Both Parsons and Marx offered theories of society as a totality in terms of categories which were surely too arbitrary to carry the empirical weight of social analysis of a particular country in a particular historical period” (Halsey 2004, 85). For Halsey, Lockwood’s famous theory of system and social integration sought precisely to overcome the limitations of Parsons’ emphasis on norms and Marx’s account of the objective social system as fundamental to social order (Halsey 2004, 86). It represented a typically pragmatic middle way by British sociology. In fact, it is not at all clear that Lockwood had superseded Parsons. While he avoided Parsons’ “weirdly unwieldy and polysyllabic prose” (Halsey 2004, 85), his notion of an objective social system sustained at localized points by the inculcation of collective norms in processes of social integration was reminiscent of Parsons’ work. Yet, the unacknowledged parallel with Parsons ran much deeper than this. While dismissing Parsonian esoterica, the theoretical substructure of British sociology in the post-war era nevertheless demonstrated a close family resemblance to Parsons. Although British sociologists rejected the implied, though not necessarily intended, emphasis on social harmony in Parsons’ work, their work presumed that social order was ultimately based on normative consensus. Through their research, they demonstrated that pure objective economic factors are themselves not enough to comprehend the working class. The collective beliefs and understandings of the working class had to be considered for these beliefs had a decisive role in determining

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what the working class actually was. The working class demonstrated that social order was possible only through sharing norms, culture, and lifestyle. The efflorescence of British sociology after the Second World War occurred in a distinctive political situation. Precisely because Halsey was personally involved in these developments, he tells the story of this intellectual naissance with force. Within a convincing story of disciplinary developments, he weaves personalised leitmotifs to produce a genuinely sociological account of the rise of British sociology. Unfortunately, for Halsey, things were about to fall apart.

The Post-War Crisis: 1968-85 For Halsey, the sociological crisis of this period was closely related to the collapse of the Post-War settlement more widely. Halsey identifies student troubles, economic crisis, and the Thatcher government as fatal to sociology. Indeed, for Halsey, “it was the combination of social, political and economic forces which spelt at least temporary disaster for sociology” (Halsey 2004, 143). In particular, where sociology had enjoyed government patronage during the previous decades, the Thatcher governments from 1979 were actively hostile to sociology. Keith Joseph infamously rejected sociology’s claim to being a science, preferring the putatively “less ambitious and better established disciplines which are heirs to the grander claims of sociology—for example, human geography, social psychology and social anthropology” (Halsey 2004, 139-40). These institutional difficulties manifested themselves intellectually in the discipline. Halsey claims that the discipline began to decline and fragment in the 1970s. Above all, Halsey claims that the politicization of the discipline, first by Marxism, and then by feminism, “split and weakened the collective ranks of the sociologists” (Halsey 2004, 122, 143). Of course, both Marxists and feminists would claim that they did not undermine the discipline but raised it to a higher plane, overcoming the unseen normative biases of postWar sociology. Unfortunately, at this critical point in the development of the discipline in Britain, Halsey fails to engage with the work of British sociologists with any precision, vitiating his analysis of the discipline’s development. While Halsey vividly recalls Britain’s “golden age,” he only regrets developments in the 1970s and 1980s and the text becomes cursory. His comments on the putative destructiveness of Marxism and feminism are assertive at best.

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Yet within the framework which Halsey provides it is possible to comprehend the dynamics at work within the discipline in this troubled decade. In the 1970s, one of the most distinctive Marxian research programs within British sociology was represented by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS). The Centre was founded by Richard Hoggart in the 1960s for the sociology of working class culture and, by the 1970s, its leading figure was Stuart Hall. Recognizing that the economic focus of much of Marx’s writing was limiting, Hall mobilized Antonio Gramsci’s Hegelianized Marx to provide the theoretical framework for the Centre’s work. Class and class conflict remained the enduring focus of the Centre’s studies, comprehended within a historical trajectory, but the collective understandings of the working class and the hegemonic project of the state had to be an essential element of any sociological analysis. In Resistance Through Rituals (1976) and the celebrated Policing the Crisis (1978), Hall et al. conducted cultural analysis within a structuralist class framework. They sought to explain individual cultural responses to structural transformations of class: “conflicts of interest arise, fundamentally, from the difference in the structural position of the classes in the productive realm; but they ‘have their effects’ in social and political life” (Hall and Jefferson 1976, 38). These studies were sociologically important. Yet, they demonstrated the analytical tensions at work in sociology at this time. Although the BCCCS rightly disparaged the crude structural economism of Althusser and Poulantzas, their approach was ultimately only a revision of it. Although the cultural sphere had some partial autonomy, the origin of subcultures, resistance, and struggles against hegemony remained the “productive realm” and the objective class structure which arose therefrom. The economic structuralism of the BCCCS distorted their always fascinating interpretations of new working class subcultures. For instance, John Clarke described how skinheads sought the magical recreation of a working class community; “the skinheads had to use an image of what that community was as the basis of their style” (Clarke 1976, 100). Yet, although these young men understood themselves as protecting their locales, their strategies, from dress-style to football hooliganism and “Pakibashing,” denoted a quite radical transcendence of their parent’s culture. They were forming new groups and were engaged in quite new forms of social practice. Any image of a working class past mobilized by them was invented in the face of current exigencies. Clarke recognized the profound transformations which the skinheads embodied but armed with a structuralist theory could not fully acknowledge them. Thus, their imaginary re-creation of a working class culture nevertheless constituted a structural reproduction

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of their position. Clarke, like the skinheads he studied, searched for a pristine and authentic working class. Throughout these works, then, there is a tension between the rich dynamism of the empirical material and the more wooden theoretical system in which that material appears. Increasingly inappropriate concepts of class and structure were mobilized as analytical frameworks of inquiry which were not adequate to the collective cultural processes which the BCCCS sought to describe. In effect, Marxian sociologists of the 1970s and early 1980s were trying to analyze dynamic processes with static concepts. The Marxian sociology of the 1970s recognized the profundity of contemporary social transformations but its concepts were becoming as strained as the Keynesian principles which underpinned this order. A similar tension between conceptual rigidity and empirical insight was evident in emergent British feminism from the late 1960s. De Beauvoir’s Second Sex initially constituted a foundational text for the movement. However, while De Beauvoir’s work employed a sophisticated Hegelian theory of self-realization based on the Master-Slave dialectic, British feminists, in particular, adopted a more direct approach. While British feminists were spread on a continuum between Marxist and radical theorists who respectively understood women’s subordination as a product of capitalism or patriarchy, they were broadly unified around certain central premises (Jackson 1998, 13). Drawing on structural Marxism, British feminism—and particularly the patriarchy theory of radical feminism—understood women as a sex class. The exploitation of women by men was a universal fact. All women, like all workers, were unified by this exploitation whatever apparent social difference seemed to exist between them (Walby 1992, 21). Women who did not see their role as a form of exploitation or who did not act in accordance with the interests of their sex class were guilty of false consciousness. In the 1970s and 80s, feminism and patriarchy theory, in particular, was theoretically blunt but, on the basis of it, British feminists produced some very interesting work. The problem was, of course, that the concept of the sex class was theoretically and empirically reductive. It was simply unsustainable to demand the unity of all women despite the obvious social differences between them or to dismiss any female compliance as mystified. Moreover, the concept simply could not explain the dramatic social changes which were occurring to women at this point. Like Marxian sociology, feminism illuminated a hitherto ignored dimension of social reality but it framed its subject in a way which obscured many of the most interesting aspects of change. Similarly, although Halsey ignores the sociology of race beyond some very brief references to John Rex, the study of race in Britain assumed a similar structuralist form to Marxism

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and feminism.2 Halsey is not completely correct when he claims that Marxism and feminism undermined the discipline. On the contrary, they—along with the ignored study of race—drove it forward as they responded to contemporary transformations but, rather like British workers in their Ford Cortinas, outmoded concepts were still the vehicles of their analysis. Anthony Giddens, as the most prominent British sociologist, is particularly interesting here in illustrating the adherence to increasingly obsolete concepts in a changing era. Giddens’ rise to prominence in British and international sociology was a product of the important role he assumed in re-affirming the importance of classical sociology to the discipline at a time of radical change and the introduction of Continental theory as well as, above all, hermeneutics into British sociology. These two projects were closely related since Giddens effectively fused contemporary styles of European thought with a re-interpretation of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim in order to produce a social theory adequate to the 1970s and beyond. It is an achievement for which he has been rightly lauded. However, the tensions which are manifest within Marxian and feminist sociology of time are also evident in Giddens’ structuration theory (1984), albeit at a more abstract level. Structuration theory sought precisely to reconcile objectivist, functionalist approaches with (putatively) subjectivist, hermeneutic, and interactive social theories. It sought to explain how social institutions were reproduced but also potentially transformed by the individual. Each individual was confronted by objective social conditions but an individual was always free to do otherwise. An individual could always improvise and innovate. As a result of all these individual innovations, the social structure as a whole would be changed in a process of unintended consequences. Giddens’ structuration theory remains an important statement of social theory but it denotes the fundamental problem of sociology at that time. It preserves the concept of structure while emphasising the interactive dynamics of human social existence. Consequently, structuration theory seeks a new synthesis which re-interprets functionalist and hermeneutic traditions. Yet, ultimately, it falsely individualizes the hermeneutic tradition and then freezes these two approaches in an easy stand-off with each other; Giddens oscillates between 2. Thus, although Rex and Moore eschew economistic Marxism in their work on housing, structural concepts of class are central to their analysis of housing policy in Birmingham: “Once we understand urban society as a structure of social interaction and conflict, prejudiced behaviour may be shown to fit naturally into or even be required by that structure” (Rex and Moore 1967, 13). With some obvious exceptions like Michael Banton, the sociology of race in Britain from the late 1960s to the 1980s was often conducted within a class framework with racial and ethnic conflict being understood as a manifestation of structural economic contradictions.

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structure and agency. Like the BCCCS, Giddens recognized the potential of collective action but was unable to theorise it adequately. In this, structuration theory exemplified the post-War crisis more widely. Like the state itself, structuration theory was trapped by its adherence to obsolete categories and concepts which social reality consistently denied. The 1970s and 1980s may have indeed constituted a crisis of British sociology as they were for the British state. Yet, as with many crises, the 1970s stimulated great creative energy in sociology which produced diverse new lines of investigation. Certainly, many of the texts produced in this era may now appear problematic and even crude. There was also a high level of dissension and debate in the discipline at the time. However, it is inappropriate for Halsey to dismiss British sociology in this period by broad swipes at Marxism and feminism. Although his personal regret at the lost era of his youth is understandable, a genuine sociology of British sociology demands a more engaged approach to the work conducted in this era. It is a shame that Halsey did not explore these new lines of research more.

Post-Fordist Sociology: 1985 to the Present It is perhaps significant that The Constitution of Society was published in 1984, the year of the miner’s strike in Britain. Although it is easy to reconstruct Thatcher’s premiership as the inevitable triumph of political logic, in fact, Thatcher’s reforms were furiously contested in the early 1980s. The year 1984 marks the watershed after which a post-Fordist and liberal régime was established as the new political paradigm in Britain. After this date, no political party in Britain could seriously consider holding power unless they consented to the tenets of the free market. Crucially, her premiership was founded on a liberal concept of the individual expressed most famously when she denied the existence of collective social obligations: “there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families” (Morgan 1990, 440). It would take the Labour Party 13 years to reconfigure itself to this new paradigm. Thatcher was certainly assisted by the Falklands War but the decisive conflict of her premiership took place principally on the picket lines of south Yorkshire. Her triumph over the miners constituted the quietus of the postWar consensus. Analogously, in sociology, The Constitution of Society might be interpreted, like the miners’ strike, as the coda of the post-War consensus. This was the last attempt to sustain a post-War sociological consensus, sustaining the concepts and approaches in the face of historical change. The path which

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Giddens took after his final time on the sociological picket line, armed with concepts of structure, system and class, is instructive. After The Constitution of Society, the concerns and style of Anthony Giddens’ writing changes from the dense theoretical cogitations of the earlier period, to the breezier discussions of the defining characteristics of late modernity, which Alexander has satirically called “Giddens lite” (Alexander 1996, 135). For Giddens, globalization has liberated the individual; “The self is seen as a reflexive project, for which the individual is responsible. We are, not what we are, but what we make of ourselves” (Giddens 1995, 74). Significantly, the arena in which individuals establish their identities for themselves is no longer work but their lifestyles, which Giddens regards as gaining “primacy” in late modernity (Giddens 1995, 81). At this point, as he affirms the autonomous, consuming individual, Giddens unwittingly echoes the neo-liberal, Thatcherite rhetoric which was congealing as a new political paradigm. Giddens pointedly rejects Keynesian collectivism in favor of the individuals’ reflexivity and freedom to choose their lifestyle (Giddens 1995, 42). Giddens’ social theory reflects the seismic shifts in British society. He struggles to conceptualize a fragmenting order in the 1970s and 1980s through the application of compromised concepts which he subsequently rejected in the mid-1980s. Objectivists concepts of structure, system, and class are dispensed with in favor of an affirmation of the individual and consumption. In this, British social theory was a reflection of the times. It was becoming post-Fordist. Giddens is certainly the most prominent social theorist in Britain to have broken with the post-War consensus but he represents a paradigm shift in the discipline more broadly. It is particularly obvious among the very sociologists who clung most obdurately to class concepts in the 1970s, Marxists and feminists. Stuart Hall is an apposite example here. Stuart Hall has argued for the emancipation of the individual in contemporary society in manner consistent with Giddens. Thus, in promoting his “new times” project, Stuart Hall disparages his former Gramscian structuralism; “For a long time, being a socialist was synonymous with the ability to translate everything into the language of ‘structures’” (Hall 1990, 120). In place of structure, sociologists should focus their attention on the empowered individual agent: “One boundary which ‘new times’ has certainly displaced is that between the objective and subjective dimensions of change. This is the so-called ‘revolution of the subject’ aspect” (Hall 1990, 119).3 He is not alone. According to Scott Lash and John Urry, one of the distinctive features of the present era is the increasing significance of the individual; “Structural 3. Symbolically, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was closed in 2002.

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change in the economy forces individuals to be freed from the structural rigidity of the Fordist labour process” (Lash and Urry 1994, 5). For Lash and Urry, the individual, freed from structural constraint, has more agency and autonomy in post-Fordist society. This accelerating individualization process is a process in which agency is set free from structure, a process in which, further, it is a structural change itself in modernization that so to speak forces agency to take on powers that heretofore lay in social structures themselves. (Lash and Urry 1994: 5)

Critically, the sphere of consumption has been the decisive arena in which individuals are able to make and re-make their identities. Although Urry’s work on tourism (2002) analyzes the historical development of this industry very successfully, his concept of the “tourist gaze,” based on the figure of the “flaneur” is resolutely individualist (Urry 2002, 126-7). The experience of the post-tourist is private and personal rather than collective. Flaneurs do not engage in collective practice but merely gaze on each other and their surroundings, internalizing their mutual observations (Urry 2002, 135). In feminist studies, there has been a similar re-orientation, as scholars have reacted against the essentialism of patriarchy theory of the 1980s. Emerging principally out of France with the work of Kristeva and Mouffe, feminist theory from this period became increasingly dissatisfied with the concepts of the sex class, the equivalence of women, the universality of exploitation and the denigration of all “female” roles including motherhood. These concepts may have served an important contingent political function in women’s liberation but they were not consonant with the actuality of women’s lives. In the last two decades, British feminists adopted a new perspective on themselves and their work: “We have also recognized that the idea of a unitary, fixed rational self is not tenable, that it does not match the complexities and contradictions of our lived experience as women and feminists” (Jackson 1998, 25) Not only were these concepts empirically inaccurate, reductively unifying all women, but they were manifestations of precisely the phallocentric culture which feminists abhorred. Patriarchy theory only confirmed the male-female dichotomy of masculinist, western culture. In place of perduring essences, post-feminists sought to develop alternative concepts which de-centered female identity into evanescent moments. In contemporary British feminism, the same move away from structuralism to individualism is manifest. Feminists have become aware of the sources of pleasure in women’s lives as well as the sources of pain and deprivation; they are less inclined to dismiss

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pleasure as ‘false consciousness’ and more likely to take seriously as meaningful activities the pleasure of watching soap operas or reading romances. (Jackson and Jones 1998, 7)

It would of course be possible to analyze female leisure as forms of collective practices, but framed by postmodern conceptions, the growing interest in feminine consumption has comprehended these practices in individual and personal terms. Feminists have focused primarily on their meaningfulness to the individual, rather than on the way in which these practices are sustained and developed by groups of women, mobilizing shared understandings. Similarly, the study of race in Britain has moved from its structural phase in the 1970s and 1980s, to focus on identity politics from an individualist perspective. While Paul Gilroy was central to questioning structural class approaches to race in this period (Gilroy 1995, 27), he has placed increasing emphasis on individual agency to subvert old concepts of nationalism and race (Gilroy 2001). Indeed, he disparages all particularistic forms of social identity in favor of universal identification with the human race as a whole, each member of which has a unique self-conception (Gilroy 2001, 98-9). Ethnic and racial studies, more generally, now mobilize concepts like hybridity to analyze how individuals understand themselves and construct new identities for themselves in changing social environments—rather than collectives. Of these interesting and important developments and their connection to wider social change, Halsey has almost nothing to say. He bemoans only the development of postmodern theory and “its suicidal tendencies towards various forms of relativism” (Halsey 2004, 122). He recognizes that postmodernism is now in retreat but not before, he implies, it has done great damage to the discipline. In fact, it is possible to draw the kinds of connections, which Halsey successfully identifies in the middle of the twentieth century between wider social conditions and disciplinary developments in the current era. A parallel can still be drawn between society and sociology. Unfortunately, Halsey does not begin to analyze how or why this quite profound paradigm shift from the compromised structuralism of the 1970s to the individualism of the 1990s was possible. He remains a child of his times, understandably nostalgic about the lost days of his own formative professional years, but unable to comprehend the transformation of the discipline he knew or the birth of a new order. He is like a miner who constantly recalls the camaraderie of the pit disparaging its re-branding as a tourist attraction, even though this facility now provides employment for his community.

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Conclusion: Toward a Sociology of the Twenty-First Century Sociology in Britain emerged partly in response to the dominance of Darwinian evolution but in its early period it was always overshadowed by social anthropology. It then went through a “Keynesian” period focusing on working class culture empirically, conceptualized in terms of collective norms at the level of theory. This “golden age,” when sociology established itself intellectually and politically in Britain eventually foundered in the 1970s but fascinating new lines of research were explored through the use of increasingly obsolete structuralist concepts. From the 1980s, British sociologists rejected the structuralist concepts which had constrained them, turning to an apparently redeeming—but actually equally compromised— individualism. They moved from structure to agency. In a curious revanche of history, the social sciences are now once again threatened by biological imperialism in the form of genetics and a form of individualism analogous to Edwardian liberalism. The question is: what kind of sociology will be best capable of defending itself against intellectual colonization? As Halsey’s book illustrates, sociology has always reflected the historical conditions in which sociologists lived. The four disciplinary periods which he identifies can be related to wider social and historical circumstances. The four periods respectively reflect the liberalist consensus of early decades of the century, the rise of Keynesianism in the mid-century, its collapse in the 1970s, and finally the emergence of a new post-Fordist settlement in the 1980s. In confronting contemporary challenges, the historicism of sociology is potentially problematic, compromising its intellectual integrity. If sociology is indeed no more than a superstructural reflection of the conditions in which it has been conducted, then the discipline lacks intellectual validity. Like Marx’s “ruling ideas” in The German Ideology which were nothing more than ‘the ideal expression of the dominant material relations’ (Marx and Engels 1990, 156), sociology would have no critical or analytical worth. It would play only an affirmatory role, legitimating contemporary social order. It would be possible to deconstruct the discipline into a set of historically situated tropes and fictions which reflect only the dominant values of the society. It is possible to counter this historicist challenge. Sociologists need to be self-conscious and to recognize the social origins of their own investigations. Certainly, British sociology, like artwork, has assumed a certain style and focused on particular subjects which reflect the circumstances of its creation.

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However, British sociology—and indeed sociology internationally—is also unified by common concepts and a shared orientation which outlast the historical fluctuations of the twentieth century. In British sociology, for instance, the working class has been displaced by a focus on new social movements emerging around sites of consumption. That change is manifestly historical. Yet, these changing styles and foci are unified by a coherent disciplinary framework. Underlying the best work in British sociology is a common tradition. It is found in Hobhouse’s work on the self-realization of human reason through cultural development in the early twentieth century in Goldthorpe’s analysis of working class culture, Hall’s work on youth culture and the media, Rex and Moore’s study of housing (1967), Wacjman’s analysis of male and female managers (1996), Mackenzie’s work on nuclear weapons (2000), Banton’s work on race (1983), Collins’ and Pinch’s work on science (Collins 1998; 1991; Collins and Pinch 1996) and, indeed, in Giddens’ concept of practical consciousness—as well as many other writings. In these works, neither structure nor agency is prioritized; abstract theorising is rejected. In its place, these British sociologists focus on the way in which social groups mobilize themselves within a specific historical context on the basis of collective understandings. They examine the way these collective understandings co-ordinate action within these groups so that they can engage in specific forms of social practice. Thus, Elias has rejected the reification of society into a thing which confronts the individual (Elias 1987a). By contrast, through a rich analysis of the development of “civilized” practices among western European elites, he demonstrates how emergent bourgeois groups began to unify themselves against the land-owning nobility through new concepts of civility, thereby orienting themselves to common shared political and economic goals (Elias 1987b, 1982). Similarly, Barry Barnes (1988) has stressed the centrality of understanding to social interaction. For him, society is a self-referential reality in which the way a group collectively understands itself constitutes what it actually is. Once the self-referential nature of society is recognized, apparently objective forces such as power assume a quite different reality. Power no longer emanates from a single individual or from structure to impose on others. On the contrary, power is at every point dependent on the shared understandings of the social group: “We shall not be able to treat power as independent of knowledge of power, or the distribution of power as independent of knowledge of that distribution” (Barnes 1988, 53). Group members must collectively defer to designated authority for power to exist; leaders are given “discretion” to do certain things by the group which recognizes them. Consequently, power is a collective product sustained by social

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networks on the basis of members’ shared understanding of themselves and their relations with each other. Barnes gives the example of the Iranian revolution in which the Shah lost his power as a result of a transformation in the way Iranians understood themselves and their social hierarchy (Barnes 1988, 62). The Shah himself was the same person and, indeed, even after the revolution he was very rich and formally held his title. However, decisive Iranian groups no longer recognized the discretion they once invested in him. The power which he seemed to hold was in fact conferred on him by prominent groups in Iranian society. When critical social groups mobilized themselves on the basis of alternative understandings, envisaging an alternate political order pursuing different collective goals, he lost his power. To be powerful, a ruler has to be recognized as powerful. These processes are ubiquitous. At the time of writing, England is competing in the World Cup Finals in Germany and the entire country is dominated by this international spectacle. Enduring and transient networks have mobilized themselves around their collective support of the national team in ways which illustrate the dynamics of human social life. Thus, in April 2006, England’s best player, Wayne Rooney, broke his foot in a domestic league match for his club, Manchester United. Manchester United and the Football Association (FA), which organizes the national team, were locked in a dispute following the injury over whether Rooney was fit to play in the World Cup Finals or not. The club, who pay the majority of Rooney’s wages and who fear the loss of a multi-million pound asset, insisted Rooney was not fit. The FA, which has analogous but opposite interests in ensuring that Rooney played, asserted that his injury had healed. The dispute was intense before the World Cup and remained latent while the competition continued. Rooney’s foot stands as a useful sociological example. The institutions Manchester United and the FA are manifestly powerful. Indeed, in the case of Manchester United, it is one of the most famous and powerful clubs in the world. Yet, the basis of this power seems fragile. The might of Manchester United is based on nothing more solid than the fact that millions of people around the world believe themselves to be Manchester United fans. These millions follow Manchester United and support the club financially by paying to watch games at the ground or on television and by buying club merchandise. This mere act of collective understanding, realized in moments of effervescent celebration, has produced a manifest social reality; an economically powerful club capable of criticizing the FA and questioning the national team as the primary interest of football fans in England. Manchester United illustrates a critical sociological truth which is evident in the best work of British sociology.

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Society cannot be understood as the interaction of independent individuals nor in terms of either structural, economic, or biological determination. On the contrary, human consciousness and understanding are fundamental to all forms of social life. Humans must orient themselves to shared meanings because their actions can be co-ordinated only insofar as all have a common understanding of what they are trying to achieve. These collective understandings are constitutive of their social relations and practices without which the latter would not exist. Indeed, shared understanding is a self-constituting act of collective alchemy, creating something concrete—a group—where nothing existed before. As John Searle has noted, social facts have “no analogue among physical facts” because the attitude we take toward the phenomena is partly constitutive of the phenomena (Searle 1995, 34). Merely by believing themselves to be Manchester United fans, attending games, following the team, and wearing red shirts, millions of individuals have formed a potent social group. Moreover, once the members of a social group mobilize themselves around shared understandings, humans orient themselves toward the distinctive collective goals of the group. By co-operating in the pursuit of shared goals, group members contribute to the production of collective goods from which they also benefit. Social groups from small subcultures, including football fans, to professional status groups utilize the mechanism of honor and shame to enforce adherence to collective goals and exclude outsiders. Group members who contribute to the collective good are honored and awarded easy access to shared goods while those who try to free-ride or who fail to contribute are shamed and eventually expelled from the group. In each historical era and in each social group, the particular patterns of this social dynamic are distinctive. Diverse groups engage in alternative social practices, oriented to particular goals, on the basis of different shared understandings. These groups are themselves always situated in a unique social configuration in relation to other groups and institutions which influence what the group can be. Sociological analysis must always aim to depict these historical realities. Nevertheless, the most successful sociology whether the analysis is of sexuality, scientific practice, or of the largest scale organizations is able to demonstrate how the dynamics of the group interaction— informed by shared understanding—produces specific forms of collective practice at any particular point. Underlying the different schools in the twentieth century, British sociology is unified by this common understanding of the human group, however large or small it is. As long as the members of the discipline adhere to this collective understanding and direct themselves to common research goals on the basis of it, British sociology will endure. Whatever the political and commercial interests of genetics, psychology, or

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economics, sociology will remain a viable and, indeed, unassailable part of the academy. There is, of course, another future for British sociology. It will forget its common origins and endeavors; it will forget the distinctive social ontology on which the discipline is justified. Sociologists will be carried passively along by contemporary trends, reflecting rather than analyzing the current era. They will comment loosely on important social themes rather than mobilizing sociological theory to analyze the precise character of contemporary social developments. Sociology will become merely “decorative” (Rojek and Turner 2000). In this debased form, sociology will not be able to sustain attacks from genetics, nor from the other social sciences, such as politics, economics, or psychology. Only the current heirs of those exciting days in the Three Tuns can ensure the legacy of the early pioneers like Halsey. We must recognize the distinctive character of social reality—and therefore—the special contribution which sociology, as a form of empirical philosophy, can contribute to the academy. Andrew Halsey’s book begins to sketch the trajectory of British sociology. Unfortunately, at critical points it fails to provide a sufficiently sustained account of the development of the discipline in Britain. Nevertheless, it may prevent one possible future for the discipline ever happening. Whatever its shortcomings, Halsey does encourage that the reader to consider the British “sociological community,” including its great figures, as well the role of the discipline in Britain. Moreover, Halsey’s despairing asides at the contemporary decline of the discipline warn what might happen if sociologists fail to abide by the central collective understandings of the discipline which have endured from Hobhouse onwards. In this, Halsey’s book may play a role in preventing British sociology becoming history.

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Collins, H. 1991. Artificial experts: social knowledge of intelligent machines. London: MIT Press. Collins, H., and T. Pinch. 1996. The Golem: What everyone should know about science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dennis, N., F. Henriques, and C. Slaughter. 1969. Coal is our life. London: Tavistock Press. Elias, N. 1978a. What is sociology?, London: Hutchinson. ———. 1978b. The civilising process. Vol. 1:The history of manners. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1982. The civilising process. Vol. 2: State formation and civilisation. Oxford: Blackwell. Evans-Pritchard, E. 1937. Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon. Giddens, A. 1984. The constitution of society. Cambridge, UK: Polity. ———. 1993. The transformation of intimacy, Cambridge, UK: Polity. ———. 1994. Living in a post-traditional society. In Reflexive modernisation, edited by U. Beck, A. Giddens, and S. Lash. Cambridge, UK: Polity. ———. 1995. Modernity and self-identity. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Gilroy, P. 1995. There ain’t no black in the Union Jack. London: Hutchinson. ———. 2001. Between two camps. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goldthorpe, J., D. Lockwood, F. Bechhofer, and J. Platt. 1969. The affluent worker. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hall, S. 1990. The meaning of new times. In New times: The changing face of politics in the 1990s, edited by S. Hall and M. Jacques. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S., C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke, and B. Roberts. 1978. Policing the crisis. London: Macmillan. Hall, S., and T. Jefferson, eds. 1976. Resistance through rituals. London: Macmillan. Hobhouse, L. 1901. Mind in evolution. London: Macmillan. ———. 1906. Morals in evolution. London: Chapman and Hall. ———. 1924. Social development: Its nature and conditions. London: George Allen and Unwin. Jackson, B. 1961. Working class community. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jackson, S. 1998. Feminist social theory. In Contemporary feminist theory, edited by S. Jackson and J. Jones. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jackson, S., and J. Jones. 1998. Thinking for ourselves: An introduction to feminist theorising. In Contemporary feminist theory, edited by S. Jackson and J. Jones. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lash, S., and J. Urry.1994. Economies of signs and space. London: Sage. Mackenzie, D. 2000. Inventing accuracy. London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mandel, E. 1975. Late capitalism. London: New Left Books. Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1990. The German ideology. In Karl Marx: Selected writings, edited by D. McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morgan, K. 1990. The people’s peace: British history 1945-89. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nadel, S. 1942. A black Byzantium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parsons, T. 1966. The structure of social action. New York: Free Press. Polanyi, K. 1957. The great transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Rex, J., and R. Moore. 1967. Race, community and conflict: A study of Sparkbrook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robins, R. 1971. The classic slum. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rojek, C., and B. Turner. 2000. Decorative sociology: Towards a critique of the cultural turn. Sociological Review 48 (4): 629-48. Searle, J. 1995. The construction of social reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Walby, S. 1990. Theorizing patriarchy. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Anthony King is a professor of sociology at Exeter University. He has published widely on football and social theory, including The European Ritual: Football and the New Europe (Ashgate 2003) and The Structure of Social Theory (Routledge 2004), and is currently completing a research project on the transformation of Europe’s armed forces. The monograph from this research will be written next year.

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