Academic Sociology and Social Policy Think Tanks in Britain and Australia: A
Personal Reflection
by Peter Saunders
University of Sussex
Sociological Research Online, 16 (3) 10
<http://www. socresonline. org. uk/16/3/10. html>
10.5153∕sro.2273
Received: 8 Dec 2010 Accepted: 6 Jun 2011 Published: 31 Aug 2011
1.1 After 24 years teaching sociology at the University of Sussex, I made a double career-switch in 1999,
moving from Britain to Australia, and from university employment to working for public policy think-tanks.
Reflecting on my experiences of British and Australian sociology, as well as the academic and applied
policy worlds, what stands out most is the ideological conformity and closure of academic sociology in
both countries.
1.2 Part of the problem is the lack of respect and understanding for empirical evidence. Unlike the USA
(where I taught in 1996), most academic sociologists in the UK and Australia have no expertise in
quantitative methods or statistics. They justify their ignorance through fatuous appeals to anti-positivist
philosophy, which in practice means their claims are rarely testable and are not even expected to be so.
This has enabled left-wing and feminist ideas to maintain a stranglehold on the discipline, and few
sociologists in either country see this as a problem. Despite the image it has of itself as ‘open’, ‘tolerant’
and ‘critical’, academic sociology in Britain and Australia is, in my experience, none of these things.
1.3 Like most young people drawn to a career in sociology, I started out on the left. My politics were
reflected in my early research and, I suspect, in my teaching. Writing on class, housing and the state at a
time when Althusserian Marxism was driving the urban sociology agenda, I made a reputation for myself as
a ‘left Weberian,’ challenging Marxist orthodoxies, but from a safely-socialist standpoint. My career
blossomed. Articles were published, publications got cited, invitations were received to prestigious foreign
conferences, research grant applications were favourably reviewed, and promotions followed.
1.4 But during the 1980s, my politics changed. After falling out with the Labour Party over its refusal to
allow working class people to buy their council houses, I started to wonder why they should not also be
free to choose the schooling and health services they wanted. Before I knew it, I was attending lunches at
the Institute of Economic Affairs and reading Friedrich Hayek. This was not a good career move in a
discipline where the gatekeepers were (and still are) overwhelmingly socialist (90% of sociology professors
in Britain describe their politics as moderate or far left: Halsey 2004). While friends and colleagues at
Sussex remained friendly and collegial, the sociological establishment outside the university became
increasingly antagonistic. Our growing estrangement can be traced in my CV.
1.5 In the mid-1980s, I was on four journal editorial boards. By the early 1990s, I was on none. For a period
in the mid-eighties, I was serving as external examiner at three different universities simultaneously. A few
years later, all the invitations had dried up. It was the same story with PhD examining, and with peer-
reviewed research grants. The quarter of a million pounds of ESRC funding I received in the 1980s had
dwindled by the 1990s to a single, £8,000 personal grant (a sum small enough not to require approval by
peer review).
1.6 I used this grant to support some research into social mobility, from which I concluded that Britain is
more meritocratic than most sociologists believe (summarised in Saunders 2010a). My report was praised
by ESRC officials as ‘a major study,’ and they featured it on the front page of their newsletter (ESRC,
1996). Emboldened by this, I applied for more funding to develop the work, but this meant negotiating the
peer review process. Predictably, I was blocked, twice, by hostile academic assessors. On the day I
received the second rejection, I met somebody who had just been given thousands of pounds by ESRC to
study social behaviour in graveyards.
1.7 It was clear that I could no longer get research funding, and I was struggling to get published. I finally
realised it was time to get out when a first-year undergraduate told me her VI Form College careers adviser
had warned her against applying to Sussex because she might get taught by the right-wing professor there.
1.8 In Australia, I was initially employed as research manager at the government-funded Institute of Family
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/10.html
31/08/2011