The <i>British Journal of Sociology</i> in the 1980s: a decade of eclecticism

The 1980s was a time of eclecticism and transition in the styles of research articles published in the BJS. There were articles that could have been published in mainstream American sociology journals alongside articles that evoked a more critical stance in the European tradition. There was also a heavy dose of articles that relied on techniques or approaches from outside the boundaries of the discipline, while other articles moved the sphere of their research outside of western society. Meanwhile, there were also articles noticing and discussing a schism between qualitative and quantitative approaches within sociological research. The eclecticism means it is particularly difficult to choose the best articles of the decade because the word ‘best’ varies so much according to the style and purpose of the research. In the end, I looked for articles that retained an enduring influence in the discipline of Sociology. This meant putting aside some particularly interesting articles because their influence was felt more in fields other than Sociology, as well as putting aside some particularly intriguing articles that could have been influential in Sociology but have been unduly neglected. I chose Robert Erickson, John Goldthorpe and Lucienne Portocarero's article ‘Social fluidity in industrial nations: England, France and Sweden’ (2010 [1983]) because it is such an excellent example of a then dominant paradigm in social stratification research found in Sociology on both sides of the Atlantic during the early 1980s. It is one of a trio of papers published by the three scholars in the British Journal of Sociology that helped steer research in the field of social stratification and mobility. Erickson, Goldthorpe and Portocarero went on to publish books separately and together on social class, class structure, and the inclusion of women in the social stratification research in the ensuing decades. Goldthorpe, in particular, has enjoyed a particularly long and productive career as an active scholar and is, remarkably, a co-author of one of the articles selected among the best published in the BJS during the 1990s. (The selections of the articles from the 1980s and 1990s for this anniversary collection were entirely independent on one another.) Although scholarly interest in issues of social stratification and social mobility receded slightly on both sides of the Atlantic during the late 1980s and into the 1990s, these issues have re-emerged during the last decade as important research concerns in the social sciences, among economists as well as sociologists. I picked Margaret Archer's piece ‘Morphogenesis versus structuration’ (2010 [1982]) because it worked to clarify and to critique theories that conflated the concepts of structure and agency. She, too, is enjoying a long and productive career and wrote several books that developed this early statement of her morphogenetic approach and the relations between key concepts such as ‘structure’, ‘culture’ and ‘agency’. These two articles also have the merit of showing the range of sociological styles of research that were well represented in the journal during the 1980s. Because I chose them in part on the basis of enduring impact, the pair of articles also shows that the discipline of sociology continues to be a broadly defined, with a wide range of research styles and research questions, and that general journals such as the BJS should continue to publish excellent articles that encompass the breadth of the discipline.

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