Generational research: between historical and sociological imaginations

In an overview of the history of post war British sociological research Mike Savage traces a transition from what he describes as a ‘gentlemanly sociology’ – normative in intention drawing on narrative and secondary sources – to a technical and empirical project employing the new methods of the interview and the survey. The latter, he suggests, abandoned an evolutionary project of relating past and present to a focus on the now and emergent change – identified from a unique body of data generated anew. This methodological revolution was associated with a rise in post-war sociology as a discipline and the evolution of dedicated funding sources and publishing outlets. Where sociology had previously been a synthetic knowledge project, informed by a range of ‘social sciences’ as well as humanities and literary traditions, it became a distinctive paradigm that privileged the ‘internal inspection of a unitary or linked data set’ rather than comparing disparate sources. Savage characterises the resulting discipline as taking nothing for granted, refusing conventional normative framings and respecting the everyday and ordinary. He also argues that this new emphasis on the generation of original data went hand in hand with a drive to ‘abstraction’ taking individuals and communities out of the physical landscape and placing them within newly forged social landscapes within which trends could be discerned ‘allowing history to be arrayed by manipulating aspects of a singular data source, hence wrenching the present out of a necessarily separated, and therefore fraught relationship with past sources’ (2010:237). This move was also associated with the rise of systematic methods allowing for rigorous comparison and new ethical concerns to ‘protect anonymity, to champion confidentiality, to avoid making value judgements on their samples’ – a practice that Savage controversially suggests allows the social sciences to ‘ systematically conceal their own tracks’ (2010: 237).