The Background

The ESRC grant to work on Passeron covered 60 per cent of my time. The grant was extended until December 2008, and further time allowance and funding was provided to enable the production of Sociological Reasoning for which I contributed a substantial introduction. There were several effects of this funding. Firstly, the time out consolidated my detachment from the university. Until 2002, I had felt that my thinking and my actions were all integrally related to the developing self-conception of the university. This sense had been most strong between 1970 and 1992 when my work had seemed to be inextricably associated with the political stance taken by the institution within the UK higher education system. It revived a little between 1997 and 2002 as my concept of ‘social politics’ seemed to correspond with some of the initiatives of the Blair government. At first, my disquiet at Blair's ideology was that it was insufficiently sociological. I soon realised that the problem was that the government's orientation was managerial rather than sociologistic. I saw a similarity between the deformation in France of Durkheimian sociology and the determination in England of the Labour Party to disregard the traditions of the trade union movement. I sensed that a covert moral idealism was rejecting positivist empiricism and that sociology was only being used as an instrument in policymaking rather than as a basis for reconceptualising society. For the first time, I had, after 1997, become involved in my local Labour Party. This has continued although I became disillusioned by the Labour government's disinclination explicitly to challenge some of the basic structural inequalities in our society, such as the monarchy, the House of Lords or public schools.

My detachment from the values of the institution – which had encouraged me to become involved in local party politics – was reinforced by the second effect of my ESRC research funding. Several of my publications had been submitted to the first Research Assessment exercise in 1996. This had eased my acceptance in the School of Social Sciences after my career in the School for Independent Study. Gradually, however, the process of securing funding for research and of contributing to income generation for the university through the recognition of my research outputs began to dominate. My work on Bourdieu was submitted in the Research Assessment exercise of 2001.