Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Professor David Lockwood
Oration given on 13 July 2001
Chancellor, the Senate of the University has resolved that
the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon DAVID LOCKWOOD.
How is society possible? What is the basis of social order? What
are the mechanisms of social change? These have always been the big
questions for Sociologists and Professor Lockwood has devoted his career to
wrestling with them. For him, societies are systems distinguished both by
their peculiar need to hang together and their occasional liability to fall
apart, hence the title of his magisterial book Solidarity and Schism.
Hence, also, Professor Lockwoods view that, rather like a drunkard, societies
just stagger along. How they manage to do so without actually falling over
is for him the real challenge to sociological explanation.
Because it is uniquely expressive of these alternations of consensus and
disorder, Professor Lockwood sees the study of social stratification as being
sociologys unique concern, since the unequal distributions of goods and power
in society offer an ever present potential for conflict. The
legitimisation of privilege and the regulation of wants are thus central to both
society and to sociology.
David Lockwoods research is grounded in an analysis of the tensions between
the claims of citizenship and the power of the market. Citizenship rights
such as the right to vote, the right to join trade unions, the right to health
care and social security are rights of equality won through political
struggle. They are about all people being treated equally, about what is
social in society. The market, on the other hand, is about inequality.
It individualises us; it is about self-reliance not reliance on society.
Or in the words of Lady Thatcher, there is no such thing as society, only
families and individuals. This balance between the claims of citizenship
and the power of the market is at the very heart of modern democratic politics.
David Lockwood has provided us with novel and original ways of looking at these
issues and their consequences for social cohesion.
Thus David Lockwood is that rare phenomenon a theorist with a passionate
interest in the real world of both today and of the past and one who pays
meticulous attention to fine detail. As his wife once observed, he is an
intellectual terrier. And to his colleagues, he can also be something of
an intellectual terror, especially when he decides in conversation to be
provocative. At such times he will make sweeping statements of both
breathtaking generality and doubtful accuracy which he will then defend with a
skill that would have made him a living at the Bar. It is a joke he plays
on others, part of the fun of intellectual life, but one with a serious purpose:
to stand problems on their head and see whether new perspectives emerge. Of
course, testing the intellectual mettle of colleagues is fun, too.
What can we say about David Lockwood as a person that might help us to
understand these various attributes of his scholarship? How might we link
his biography with his intellectual concerns and his personal style?
Chancellor, some would say that all you need to know about David Lockwood is
that he is a Yorkshireman. He was born to a working class family in
Holmfirth, near Huddersfield. Of course, Holmfirth has since become famous
as the setting for the long-running BBC television series Last of the Summer
Wine. It is tempting, perhaps, to try to situate David (who after all must
be about the same age as Clegg and Compo) against that background. But
whereas Holmfirth is now a smart commuter village-cum-TV theme park, at the time
he was growing up in the 1930s, it was a mill town in the middle of a
depression. Although he won a scholarship to the local grammar school, at
the end of the war, family circumstances forced him to leave school and take a
job in a local mill. He might easily have been lost to us as a scholar, to
have been, in the words of Grays Elegy, mute and inglorious, but for the
fact of National Service. After serving in the Army Intelligence Corps
between 1947 and 1949, he qualified for an army scholarship that took him to the
London School of Economics. In 1952 he graduated with First Class Honours
and proceeded to undertake a PhD. Within a year he was appointed to a
lectureship.
He was one of a remarkably talented group of sociology graduate students at
the LSE, all of whom were to make their mark in the discipline. According
to their distinguished biographer, David Lockwood was the most impressive of
them all. This was confirmed by the quality of his PhD thesis, a study of
the social position and class-consciousness of male clerks, and subsequently
published in 1958 as The Blackcoated Worker. In this book we find one of
his abiding concerns, the need to understand the importance of the social status
of an occupation, how people see themselves and are evaluated by others, as well
as understanding more objective aspects of an occupations position such as pay
and conditions. This approach spawned a whole new sociological industry,
applying his theory and methods to the study of a host of different occupations
from coalminers and shipbuilders to farm workers and farmers and culminating in
a major conference in 1972. The importance and continuing relevance of
The Blackcoated Worker may be gauged from the fact that it was republished by
Oxford University Press in 1989 with a substantial new postscript that offered
fresh ideas and reflected on the changing nature of clerical work.
In 1958 David Lockwood left the LSE on his appointment to a fellowship at St
Johns College, Cambridge and a University Lectureship in the Economics Faculty.
Why economics, you may ask? The simple reason was that Cambridge did not
then offer degrees in Sociology, but only the odd optional Sociology course
within the Economics degree. It was to be another ten years before
Cambridge University decided, after a fierce and acrimonious debate, that
Sociology was a fit and proper degree subject for its students to pursue.
There can be little doubt that the argument in Sociologys favour was swayed by
the importance and the quality of the work of David Lockwood and his colleagues
at Cambridge, and especially of one of the best-known studies ever undertaken by
British sociologists, The Affluent Worker. As its name implies, this
study examined the lives and aspirations of the new working class of post-war
Britain.
The Affluent Worker was published in 1968, the year David came to Essex as
Professor of Sociology. He has served this University at various times as
a Pro-Vice-Chancellor, as Dean of Social Sciences and as Head of the Sociology
Department and now as an Emeritus Professor. In 1995, the Sociology
Department honoured him with a conference to mark his retirement. So many
of the UKs most distinguished Sociologists attended that it was said that if
the earth had swallowed up the conference venue, most of British sociologys
past, if not its future, would have gone into the abyss. In 1996, the
British Journal of Sociology dedicated a special issue to him. And its a
pleasure to report that his retirement is purely formal he continues to be an
active and influential scholar.
Most recently he has been involved in the development of a new social
government classification for use with the recent population census.
Nor is it any surprise that the quality of Professor Lockwoods scholarship has
brought him many honours. In 1976 he was elected to a Fellowship of the
British Academy and in 1990 to a Fellowship of the Academia Europea. In
1998, he was awarded a CBE in the honours list for his contributions to
sociology.
So, a working class, Yorkshire background, born into the depression of the
1930s, growing up during the Second World War and one of the first beneficiaries
of the Welfare State created by the post-war Labour Government all these are
factors in shaping his politics and his scholarship and especially his keen
awareness of the importance of citizenship in offering opportunity and security
and of the powers ranged against it.
But there are two other important observations one should make about David
Lockwood. They also tell us something of his pedigree.
First, his family: He has been married for almost fifty years to another
distinguished academic, the social historian Leonora Davidoff. Their happy
relationship has been a vital ingredient of their mutual success. Their
three sons have established successful careers in diverse fields, reflecting
their parents intellectual and political concerns one is a Professor of
Economics, and the other two are each employed with charitable organisations in
the developing world. All of the five Lockwoods share one thing in common:
they are insomniacs. When staying in the Lockwood household, it is said
that one must always be aware of the fact that things really do go bump in the
night.
The second observation concerns Professor Lockwoods love of good company and
his ability to communicate with people from all walks of life. Those who
know him only as an acquaintance may find him somewhat reserved. They may
even think of him as a typical taciturn Yorkshireman. In fact, he is a
sociable person with a rare ability to engage people on their own level,
whatever that might be, and to put them at their ease. But he is also
endearingly diffident and shy so that he is only truly gregarious with his
family and closest friends. With them he is relaxed, lively, engaged,
witty, affectionate and capable of great kindness.
Chancellor, David Lockwood has served both the discipline of Sociology and
this University with great distinction. Unlike many social scientists
today, the latest intellectual fads and fashions do not sway him, nor does he
treat sociology as an amateur form of philosophy. Being a modest person,
it is no surprise that he is gently sceptical about what sociology can achieve;
but, being committed to his subject, he is extremely enthusiastic about its
potential to teach us about the world in which we live.
We who are his colleagues are proud of his achievements and grateful to him
for his service.
Chancellor, I present to you DAVID LOCKWOOD
Orator : Professor Peter Frank - written by Professor David Rose