BRITISH SOCIOLOGYand Class Conflict in Industrial Society, published in
- Lockwood’s paper is notable because it be-
came the most widely read single paper by a British
sociologist at the time. Dahrendorf’s book, a criti-
cal reflection on Marx and Parsons, argued that
Weber’s ideas were useful in explaining the posi-
tive effects of conflict in Great Britain, and was
dedicated to this first cohort at the LSE.
British sociology was further developed in the
next decade by the work of John Rex at the Univer-
sity of Leeds. His work Key Problems in Sociological
Theory (1961) became the most popular British
sociological theory textbook in the 1960s. Rex
used a Weberian action framework in contrast to
the functionalist orthodoxy prominent at the time.
In addition to Leeds, departments of sociology
had been established at the universities of Leicester,
Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, and Hull. In
1967, three important works became available in
Britain, Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology, Berg-
er and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reali-
ty, and Schutz’s The Phenomenology of the Social
World. These books contained an implicit critique
of the kind of sociology that had been pursued in
Britain up to this time. They emphasized a qualita-
tive analysis of the ways in which social actors
create meaning and acquire social positions in the
context of language. The growth of the discipline
continued throughout this time with nearly every
institution of higher education in Britain housing
a department of sociology. This led some to make
the observation that it was growing with ‘‘explosive
force’’ (Heyworth 1965, p.11). Sociology as a disci-
pline was beginning to come into its own in Britain.
By the 1970s, there were many theoretical
currents in British sociology; not only were phe-
nomenological and Marxist arguments being pur-
sued, but also the works of Althusser, the French
structuralists, the ‘‘Frankfurt School,’’ and Habermas
and Gramsci. Links between British sociology and
European social theory were becoming stronger.
In addition there were important empirical stud-
ies being done; the best example is the 1972
Oxford Mobility Studies undertaken by a group of
sociologists at Nuffield College, Oxford, and greatly
influenced by the work of one of their team, John
Goldthorpe. Around this same time a dialogue
between the debates in social theory and empirical
understanding was initiated by Anthony Giddens
in his analysis of the founders of sociology, Capital-
ism and Modern Social Theory (1971). By 1979 he
had developed structuration theory to reconcile
the previous theoretical debates. Giddens’s sys-
tematic analysis of modernity is the most extensive
and widely disseminated work of any British soci-
ologist to date.Starting in the 1980s, the emerging theoretical
zeitgeist of British sociology was an increasing inter-
est in the study of culture. Cultural studies as
developed in the 1960s through the rather differ-
ent works of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson,
and Stuart Hall emphasized the social aspects of
culture and led to the specialization in the 1980s
and 1990s of the areas of media, feminism, and
ethnicity. Cultural analyses were developed as part
of an overall analysis of fundamental shifts in
modern societies around production, consump-
tion, and social interaction. Influenced by Europe-
an theories of politics, ideology, and discourse,
existing Marxist and functionalist theories were
seen as unable to adequately theorize the modern
social world.The work of sociologists based at the Birming-
ham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
represents an example of this analysis. In 1983, the
group consisting of John Solomos, Bob Findlay,
Simon Jones, and Paul Gilroy outlined a neo-
Marxist approach to racism in a series of articles
entitled The Empire Strikes Back. Gilroy’s book,
which followed the original articles, There Ain’t No
Black in the Union Jack, developed these themes
and stressed the contest over the meaning of
‘‘race’’ that occurs in the public sphere between
different social actors. Gilroy’s analysis is an exam-
ple of the wider move in British sociology away
from a Marxist analysis of class conflict toward an
emphasis on new social movements, such as the
women’s movement, youth movements, peace
movements, green movements, and others they
claimed were not easily reducible to class-based
politics. There is, of course, a continuing debate
between cultural-studies thinkers and Marxists,
such as Robert Miles, who argue that class conflict
is still far from dead, and remains a central feature
in explaining the production of racism. The diver-
sity and pluralism within sociology in Britain at
this time has been described as one of its great
strengths (Albrow 1989).