Subjects: Psychology

In this program Willis talks about how his interest in culture and counter culture led him into exploring working class culture and its reproduction from the inside. He discusses his ethnographic research methods, how he chose his subjects and his relationship with the notorious ‘lads’. In contrast to the conventional sociological view of the time that saw the education system ‘failing’ working class youth, Willis argued that the lads he observed were deliberately failing themselves in recognition of the inevitable manual working future that awaited them.

It was widely believed that poverty in Britain had been all but eliminated with the construction of the welfare state and post War affluence. But while politicians were telling people they had never had it so good, social scientists were re-discovering poverty. The most influential of these was Peter Townsend, whose study of poverty in the 1960’s and 70’s was one of the most detailed ever undertaken in Britain.

A wet bank holiday weekend in Clacton: some fights broke out on the beach, huts were damaged and somebody fired a starting pistol. Hardly a riot, but that was how the media reported it. Reading the reports, Stan Cohen thought it would be an ideal case study for the newly evolving labeling theory. He describes his research in a number of seaside resorts, ploughing through newspaper reports, visiting social control agencies in suit and tie and changing to do participant observation research on the beaches in the clubs.

To believers, the Moonies offer truth, enlightenment and the spiritual unification of the world. To critics it’s an evil form of bondage, where vulnerable young people are reduced to a mental condition where they can only follow the orders of the organization. Eileen Barker set out to discover the truth behind the headlines. Do people choose to become Moonies or are they brainwashed? The Moonies also seemed an excellent case study to explore the wider sociological issue of the relationship between the individual and society.

In this program Ann Oakley talks about how she started her research on housework and the opposition she encountered. She goes on to discuss her sampling methods, her interview techniques, the importance of keeping some social distance as well as avoiding leading questions, and why she highlighted particular case studies.

Sociology began as an attempt to make sense of the ‘great transformation’ from traditional to modern society; the development of industrial production, the mass movement of people from the land to the towns and the rise of a new economic order, modern capitalism. Tony Giddens talks about how he conceived the project (lying on a beach in California), why he chose Marx, Durkheim and Weber and why he centered the work on the genesis and consequence of capitalist society.