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.