Before the twentieth century, there was very little organised social research in Britain. Now, the age of organised social research is on us. While we may like to see creative pioneering work as the product of isolated creative minds, it rarely is. For creativity and original research depend on the opportunities and social conditions that enable it to happen. Even in the time of Leonardo, it was heavily dependent upon sponsorship. Some of our researchers certainly experienced isolation in their fieldwork, particularly those anthropologists who in the early postwar decades, set out – usually not even speaking the local language – to report on community and kinship in remote territories: but in fact most were supported by the Colonial Social Science Research Council. By the 1980s, with the fading of Empire, the focus of anthropology itself had shifted towards working more often in Britain, sharing fields with cultural studies researchers and qualitative sociologists. And certainly in the contemporary world there are now deep structures of funding, research organisations and professional groupings that profoundly shape opportunities, and provide organised ways of doing things that make research more of a collective product. But not simply more cooperative: at the same time a field for splits and battles for resources. So in this chapter we look at the impact on our researchers of a period of unprecedented university expansion, a shifting scene of disciplinary divides, new research agencies and academic centres, and a big swing towards sustained long-term statistical surveys.

Expanding universities and shifting disciplines

In 1939 there was a tight group of 21 universities in Britain with 50,000 students, less than 2 per cent of the population. Most of our researchers started from the longest-established institutions – Oxbridge or the LSE. But by 1961 student numbers had already more than doubled. Following the 1963 Robbins Report, expansion accelerated with the founding of seven new universities – Sussex, Kent, York, Lancaster, Warwick, Essex and East Anglia – all of which took a major interest in the development of social research and social science. At the same time, a large new polytechnic sector was emerging with colleges of advanced technology (CATs) set up from the late 1950s, many of them becoming universities a little later – including Aston, Loughborough, City, Brunel, Bath, Salford and Bradford. Finally, in 1992, the Conservative government turned all polytechnics into universities.