Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-13T06:34:35.773Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 3 - Contexts: Empire, politics and culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2021

Ken Plummer
Affiliation:
University of Essex
Get access

Summary

All research is shaped by time and place, history and generation. Through listening to the experiences of a few of our Pioneers, this chapter will reveal something of the social, economic and political contexts in which they worked. It gives us glimpses of the changing twentieth century and sets the background for later chapters. It sets the scene.

From the outset we are dealing with a fundamental dilemma: how to link individual lives with their wider changing context, when both are moving in time, and not to a common tune – indeed, very often at differing speeds or in differing directions. In terms of family life the concept of generations gives a very useful basic structure based on parenthood, which is only roughly linked to time. Here it may help at the outset to think of researchers as also located in wider ‘generations’, in terms of specific age cohorts, with each generation broadly lasting some 20 to 30 years. All are moving forward into the mists of time, so that in the long term only the most remarkable individuals still stand out. Thus, our Pioneers were preceded by earlier researchers, earlier pioneers: Victorian, or post-Victorian, from the interwar years. And they are also already being succeeded by younger generations of innovators.

Our Pioneers can be seen as a double generation, divided by whether they experienced the Second World War as adults. Most of them published the prime of their work between the 1950s and 1980s. They lived through the post-war rise of the Welfare State, the left-wing political optimism of the 1960s, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the rise of migration as a political issue, and the later growth of post-colonialism, neo-liberalism and Thatcherism. Less dramatically, they could see the growth of cities and the decline of traditional rural life, and the ebbing of Christian religious practice. And their own lives were especially influenced by sharing unusually open opportunities brought by the dramatic expansion of the universities and unprecedented growth of social science research and teaching. In this sense they were a founding generation of modern social research.

Type
Chapter
Information
Pioneering Social Research
Life Stories of a Generation
, pp. 45 - 72
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×