Plagiarism aside, Rachel Reeves’ less discussed sin is theft of sociologists

Rachel Reeves’ book The Women Who Made Modern Economics has triggered a debate about the conventions relevant to plagiarism and citation in trade and academic books.

The shadow chancellor has admitted to not properly referencing sources after an investigation by the Financial Times found more than 20 instances of unattributed passages that appeared to have been lifted with no or minimal changes from other sources.

Less attention, however, has been paid to the book’s appropriation of figures who would more properly be associated with another discipline in order to pad out women’s contribution to the history of economics.

British sociology has a hard enough time getting recognition for its history and contribution to understanding the society that produces it. This is not helped when the work of its pioneers is casually subsumed into another discipline, especially when this is to compensate for that discipline’s dismal record on issues of gender.

While disciplinary boundaries were more fluid and less settled in the 19th century, it really does violence to the historical record to classify either Harriet Martineau or Beatrice Webb as an economist.

Martineau’s How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) has a fair claim to being the first text on qualitative research methods. This informed a series of substantial empirical studies of American and British society. She is a particularly valuable source on rural healthcare and the relations between providers and patients. Martineau also translated and abridged the work of Auguste Comte, who is generally accepted as the founder of sociology as a separate discipline. Comte was so impressed that he had it translated into French as an authoritative summary of his extensive body of work.

Beatrice Webb was largely homeschooled, as were many women of her class and generation. However, Herbert Spencer, a friend of her father, was a regular visitor to their home and became an intellectual mentor. Reeves describes Spencer as a philosopher, but he was, in fact, the first British scholar to identify as a sociologist and to publish extensively under that rubric. Every major international sociologist until the Second World War was either a follower or a critic of his.

Despite their political differences, Spencer and Webb remained lifelong friends until his death in 1903. Webb worked with Charles Booth on his pioneering study the Life and Labour of the People in London. She also carried out participant observation with Lancashire mill girls and eventually wrote a key text, Methods of Social Study (1932), with a preface by T. H. Marshall, who became the Martin White professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, and a first chapter titled “The province of sociology determined”.

While both Martineau and Webb certainly studied economic and industrial questions, those questions are clearly addressed from the perspective of sociology rather than economics. We might contrast their work with a 1901 study by an economist, Walter Wyckoff, that explicitly addresses an economic question. Wyckoff wanted to investigate the apparent market failure that led to unemployment in Chicago and labour shortages in Iowa. Why did unskilled workers not walk from Chicago to Iowa to find work, as classical economics would expect?

In those days, economists were willing to investigate such questions directly, rather than reaching for the most convenient set of official statistics and building a model. Wyckoff walked from Chicago to Iowa himself. From his conversations with tramps, he learned that the move was risky because being unemployed in Chicago gave access to networks of support that were not available in Iowa. Today, we might call this the “strength of weak ties”. Martineau and Webb were interested in class, welfare and systems of governance through their impact on human lives rather than in the construction of abstract models.

Being a sociologist in the UK sometimes feels like being a Scottish crofter displaced by the Highland Clearances to eke out an existence on rocky outcrops and fertilise the fields with seaweed. Meanwhile, the economist lairds grow fat on the profits of sheep and reserve the right to expropriate anything of value that we might create.

If Rachel Reeves really thinks that economics should re-engage with qualitative methods, everyday life and humane values, I am sure my discipline would be pleased to give her a few tips. Simply adopting some of our culture heroes without acknowledgement, however, is not the best way to start.

Robert Dingwall is a consulting sociologist and emeritus professor of sociology at Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham.