Social science has put its wild past behind it and grown up, says Olga Wojtas
The British Sociological Association is bestowing honorary memberships on its oldest and most loyal supporters as part of a drive to ditch the subject's wild-child image as the quintessential 1960s subject and stress its long established role.
The BSA, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, is conferring the honorary memberships on people who have been in the association for 50 years. The awards are seen as a way of emphasising the longevity of the subject.
Speaking to The Times Higher ahead of next week's Social Science Week, run by the Economic and Social Research Council, John Brewer, BSA chairman and professor of sociology at Aberdeen University, revealed the BSA's thinking.
"We are not a product of the 1960s, and that is what we are trying to (indicate) in awarding these honorary memberships," he said.
"It's partly to honour the commitment of these people but also to publicise the institutional position of sociology in Britain."
Research has shown that sociology's roots go back to the mid-19th century.
The London School of Economics, the alma mater of most of the honorary members, first offered sociology lectures in 1903.
Laurie Taylor, The Times Higher columnist, was formerly professor of sociology at York University. He recalls many new academics in the late 1960s rejecting the BSA as a traditional organisation that cramped the thought of Marxist scholars. "Even though I knew nothing about it, I knew I was against it," he said.
Professor Taylor added that influential French thinkers such as Barthes, Baudrillard and Foucault had denounced the whole idea of disciplines.
But Professor Taylor said he thought that the BSA had now come into its own, particularly through the prestige of its refereed journals.
Things had changed since the days when sociologists either felt no need to write anything or produced articles titled "Smash the Bosses Now!" for "Class Conflict", he said.
The BSA has always acted as a learned society and a professional association. But it was particularly prominent as a professional association in the Thatcher era when the social sciences were labelled a hotbed of leftwing radicalism and came under fire.
Professor Brewer said that, despite Margaret Thatcher's proclamation that there was no such thing as society, these attacks paradoxically boosted the discipline by increasing the interest in and importance of social issues. "Sociology is no longer the enfant terrible , the rude child in the corner," he said.
"A large number of people who came through the Thatcher years have occupied very senior positions in universities, which demonstrates that not only has sociology survived Thatcherism, it's been strengthened by it."
BSA honorary members
Joe Banks, Michael Banton, John Barnes, Thomas Bishop, Gabriel Newfield, Peter Townsend, Samuel Waxman and John Westergaard
- Social science week: June 20-24