We have seen how research grows out of historical social conditions. As times change, so the problems, strategies and, indeed, the very methods of research are transformed. Even the histories of disciplines and research can come to look out of date very quickly. Reading A. H. Halsey's A History of Sociology (2004) is salutary: it shows how few women were involved before the 1970s, how there was a major neglect of race, and demonstrates the lack of interest in anything remotely postcolonial or ‘queer’. Halsey's important history, published only 17 years ago, already documents a very different bygone world: a much more gentlemanly and privileged world. The worlds of research methods and its subjects keep being constructed and reconstructed, moving on through time and space.

In this chapter, we take issues of class, race and gender as major examples. Ill-defined and often absent in research of earlier periods, these become key issues strategically developed through research fields and methodologies. We show briefly how by the mid-1980s a major multiple/intersectional research field of social divisions was being carved out – one that did not exist before.

Researching social class

As Frank Bechhofer recalled of the 1950s:

As Bechhofer's observation suggests, the 1950s were a prime time for interest in social class. It was not always so. A cumulative inventory of post-1945 researching on social class suggests four major emerging concerns that helped construct it: the long-standing evolving history of research on poverty; the popular interest in community studies and change; the growing awareness of just how education and culture was shaping society – possibly creating new possibilities for less privileged groups to advance in social life; and, finally, the growing concern with finding how to measure both class and mobility.