Professor Ray Pahl, FBA

Background and Research Interests:

Prof. Pahl was at the University of Kent from its foundation in 1965 until 1994, becoming Professor in 1972. From 1994-2004 he was with the Institute of Social Economic Research, University of Essex, as Visiting Research Professor. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Kent.

Commentary

Prof. Pahl has a research career stretching back to 1960, when he began work on class, community and social cohesion in Hertfordshire commuter villages. This turned into his PhD thesis, which was published by the LSE and Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1965.

From 1968 to 1979 he worked for the Department of the Environment in different capacities as a consultant. His most demanding task was to be an Assessor to the Greater London Development Plan. Sir Frank Layfield chaired the Panel and the Secretary (and main author of the Report) was Sir Geoffrey Chipperfield.

During the early 1970s he became interested in stress amongst senior directors in British industry, when he was encouraged by the Institute of Directors’ Medical Centre to develop the research that he had recently published on middle managers. A number of articles were published in the early 1970s in collaboration with Jack Winkler, his co-researcher, the most significant appearing in the book edited by Stanworth and Giddens in 1974 on Elites and Power in British Society.

He was founder member of the Research Committee on Urban and Regional Development of the International Sociological Association in 1970 and elected its President from 1974-1978. In 1978 the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research was founded and he served on its Editorial Board for ten years. He became the first Chairman of the Trustees of the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies from 1995-2002.

In 1976 he started a new line of research, which continued for twelve years. His concern was to broaden out the narrow view of work which was then characteristic of sociological texts and which perceived it as being synonymous with male employment. He received substantial grants from the Nuffield Foundation, the SSRC and Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust. This produced a regular flow of articles for over a decade. His main scholarly contribution during that period was Divisions of Labour (1984), which attracted considerable interest amongst academics and policy makers. In particular, the idea that skilled manual workers in formal employment also engaged in substantial work outside employment made the line between ‘enterprise’ and ‘fiddling’ more problematic. His documentation of a process of polarisation between work-rich and work-poor households led to these terms becoming part of the conventional wisdom of politicians and journalists. His edited book On Work includes brief summaries of his analytic contributions to the field.

In 1962 he made his first visit to Communist Europe and he continued to visit the area with the help of the British Council over the following thirty years. However, he did not get actively involved until 1989, when he returned to Moscow after a gap of 13 years. In 1990 he was the Director of a three-month Summer School for Soviet Sociologists, and in 1991 was asked by George Soros to establish the Society and Politics Programme at the Central European University in Prague. He later resigned on a matter of academic principle. He was a member of the East-West Initiative of the ESRC throughout its life.

From 1979 to 1989 he was a member of the University Grants Committee Social Studies Sub- Committee and visited nearly all of the 42 ‘older’ British Universities during that period. He took part in three Research Assessment Exercises, (the final one being for the Universities Funding Council) and was Secretary to the U.G.C. Review of Sociology in 1989.

In 1995 he published After Success, which subsequently led to visits to Sweden, Bulgaria, Austria and Japan, where he was a visiting Fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science in the autumn of 1996. He has lectured in most European countries and has been invited as a Distinguished Visitor to the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. He was a member of the Review Committee appointed by the Senate of the University of Cambridge to report on the Social and Political Sciences Faculty from 1997-1998. Sociology had received only 4 in the previous RAE. He was also a member of the Electoral Board for the Established Chair of Sociology. Sociology later raised its RAE grade to 5.

From 1998 to 2005 much of his work at ISER was on friends and friendship in collaboration with Liz Spencer. Their Princeton book takes issue with those such as Robert Putnam or Zygmunt Bauman who have written pessimistically about contemporary patterns of social relationships. Their detailed sociological analysis of personal communities reveals a neglected form of social solidarity.

Some Recent Publications:

Authored Books

• Re-Thinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today (with Liz Spencer), Princeton University
  Press, Spring 2006.
• On Friendship, pp. 189, Polity Press, 2000.
• After Success: fin-de-siecle Anxiety and Identity, pp. 218, Polity Press, 1995.
• Divisions of Labour, pp. 362, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984.

Articles in Journals

• Are All Communities Communities in the Mind?, Sociological Review, November 2005, pp621-640.
• Personal Communities: Not Simply Families of ‘Fate’ or ‘Choice’ (with Liz Spencer), Current Sociology, 2004, 52(2) pp199-221.
• The Changing Sociological Construct of the Family (with P.A. Wilson), Sociological Review, March 1988, 233-266.