Sir Edward Elgar, born in the neighbouring county of Worcestershire and still Britain’s best-known and accomplished composer, described himself on one occasion as an amateur. He immediately qualified the remark by saying it was because he truly loved his work. In an age of professionalism, when the appellation ‘professional’ seems so important to status and credibility (for good sociological reasons that lie in the authority it confers), describing oneself as an amateur might appear foolish and using it to depict others is likely to be taken as highly offensive. Yet I love sociology to the point where I would be happy to appropriate Elgar’s meaning; and I still do so even though I am now well into my fifth decade as a practitioner, having left school in 1968 to transfer to a further education college on a 22-mile round trip every day deliberately to study it at A-level when it was not then available in the school curriculum.

I was head boy at my village school in Shropshire but I was fond only of PE, history and English, and on my last day when visiting teachers to say goodbye, which we did in a pack of eager and excited leavers, I recall being asked by my English master what I was doing next. On telling him that I would be attending FE college to study sociology (I remember well that I did not mention economics or politics as my other A-level subjects), he retorted dismissively that I did not even know what the word meant. ‘It’s the study of society, Sir’, I replied proudly, shutting him up for the first time in five years and feeling smug as I did so. Strangely enough, 45 years later, I still think that is the best quick definition of the subject. What has changed, I believe, is simply how we conceptualise and understand society. Society is a more intricate entity than I once envisaged or then imagined, but sociologists are still the experts in unravelling its complexity.

I now know, of course, that the 1960s was a period of rapid expansion in sociology in Britain and it had by then entered public consciousness for its strident critique of contemporary society.