Research note: Citation and social mobility research: self defeating behaviour?

Sara Delamont
Abstract
The citation patterns of schools of researchers studying social mobility in Britain are examined, and systematic neglect by each school of the work of the others demonstrated.

The publications by Payne (1987a, 1987b) from the Scottish Mobility Study are a welcome event. However, they crystallize an anxiety felt by outsiders to the 'core set' (Collins, 1985) of social mobility researchers in Britain. Instead of bringing together all the research on mobility in Britain into one cumulative (or contrastive) account, Payne, like all the other scholars writing on this topic, produces partial reviews of the literature. This research note demonstrates that the various investigators on social mobility in modem Britain have all failed to address the empiricalfindingsand theories of their competitors writing on the same topic, and then argues that benefits would arise from an adequate synthesis.' The problem demonstrated Since Glass and has colleagues (1954) studied social mobility in post-war Britain, the topic has been of central interest to many sociologists. A number of projects have been conducted focused on social mobility and the grading of occupations in various parts of Great Britain. The ESRC (1987) Horizons and Opportunities in the Social Sciences singles out 'studies of stratification' as one of British sociology's major strengths. Most of the authors have published journal articles over the years, but this note focuses on RouUcdic Itm 003-ia6l/S/372-332

Citation and social mobility research the monographs that have been produced, to show that the research is not being built into a cumulative database.^ To any disinterested observer, Britain in the last twenty years has seen four major surveys which gathered material on samples of English or English and Welsh men (a) Hopper (1981), (b) Richardson (1977), (c) the Oxford Mobility Study (Halsey, Heath and Ridge, 1980; Goldthorpe, 1980 and 1987), and (d) the Cambridge Study (Stewart, Prandy and Blackburn, 1980). There have been four projects on Scottish men (d) the Cambridge Group (Stewart, Prandy and Blackburn, 1980), (e) the Scottish Mobility Study (Payne, 1987a, 1987b), (f) the Project on Occupational Cognition (Coxon and Jones 1978, 1979a, 1979b; Coxon, Davies and Jones, 1986), and (g) and follow-up of the Scottish Mental Survey (Hope, 1984). Scottish mobility issues have also been illuminated by the research produced over the past two decades by McPherson and his colleagues on males and females. (See Gray, Raffe and McPherson, 1982; McPherson and Willms, 1987.) There has also been one Irish project from which no monograph has yet appeared. The authors of all these studies are selective in their citation of the others' publications and fail to compare and contrast their instruments, methods, findings or theories systematically. There is no secondary source which enables us to compare or contrast all these studies. Heath (1981) cites very little of the work done outside Oxford, and his review, like Newby's (1982) paper for the SSRC has been made to look rather dated by the spate of publications during the 1980s. Halsey (1978,1986) is accessible but does not recommend the reader to much research other than that of his colleagues at Nuffield. With the honourable exception of the work emanating from McPherson and his co-workers, all the projects can be criticised for excluding women though Newby (1982: 53-5) highlighted their neglect and Heath (1981) used secondary sources to examine female mobility. This complaint and the subsequent debates have received ample space in Sociology in the 1980s. Other problems with the research have been neglected, and these will be the focus of this note. The projects and publications based in England do not convey clearly whether theirfindingsapply to the whole of the UK or only to one or two of its constituent nations. No Scottish-based project dares to suggest that work in Scotland is applicable to the whole UK without justifying that suggestion. Several of the Englishbased projects write glibly of 'Britain' without a single caveat. No
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Sara Delamont Scottish-based team could ignore all English studies with impunity but the failure of researchers based in England to address the issues raised by. McPherson, Hope and Payne, has apparently passed uncensured. Both the Oxford and Cambridge-based groups ignore the material on Scotland gathered by the Scottish Mobility Survey based in Aberdeen (Payne, 1987a, 1987b) while talking loosely about Britain. At present, the failure of leading scholars to address the work of others is the most striking feature of the literature on mobility. Goldthorpe is a case in point. His theories about the class structure, the categories of occupational classification sociologists should use, and other related matters have been controversial for twenty years. Normally Goldthorpe does not deign to debate his position with his critics. Thus, Hopper (1981: 2) claims that the whole of the Oxford Mobility Project was a waste of public funds because the research team, particularly Goldthorpe, had failed to read, or perhaps to understand. Hopper's theories and research. To an outsider, this appears to be a fundamental criticism, yet Goldthorpe has not published a reply. Hopper's monograph does not even get cited in Goldthorpe (1987), or in Payne (1987a, 1987b). Hopper himself fails to articulate his own critique of Goldthorpe in his monograph, and then does not cite most of the other work on the topic compounding his own isolation. Goldthorpe may find Hopper's approach deeply flawed, but he has not explained his objections for the rest of us. Nor has he addressed the theories of the Cambridge-based research team associated with Stewart, Prandy and Blackburn (1980). Goldthorpe, Hopper and the Cambridge team are all united in one respect, however. All three have studiously avoided discussing the research of the Coxon and Jones Project on Occupational Cognitions (POOC). Coxon, Da vies and Jones summarise the credo of POOC as follows: thefirststage was concerned to demonstrate that the theories (of social stratification and mobility) adhered to by many traditional sociologists did not stand up to empiricd test. The second, by contrast, sought to develop an approach in which the conceptions and articulations of real people were given pride of place in a new description of the occupational structure. (1986:49) Admittedly, the original publications from POOC were densely written, very technical, and made few concessions. Yet the other
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Citation and social mobility research researchers on social mobility who have ignored them were the best qualified scholars in Britain to extract the message of POOC from those three volumes. Now there is a summary written for the intelligent laywoman (Coxon, Davies and Jones, 1986) that excuse has vanished. In all four books the main focus on the POOC critique has been Goldthorpe's work (Coxon and Jones, 1978, 1979a, 1979b), yet Goldthorpe has not been prepared to discuss these implications in print. His second edition does not mention Coxon once. Heath's (1981) account of thefieldomits many studies including those of Richardson (1977) and the Cambridge Group (Stewart, Prandy and Blackburn, 1980). Hope (1984) has published an analysis of Scottish men drawn from the mixed Scottish Mental survey of 1947, in which he fails to cite the research of almost everyone else investigating social mobility in the UK. Hope's work shows that the issue is not simply a neglect of Scotland and Scottish researchers by Enghsh ones. Payne's new books (1987a, and 1987b) fail to cite Hopper, or deal with the work of Coxon and Jones (1978, 1979a, and 1979b). Coxon, Davies and Jones (1986) themselves fail to cite Hopper, Hope, Richardson, the McPherson team, or Payne, and thus confound the problem of lack of mutual citation. Newby's (1982) review ranges wider than the others considered here, but still fails to include Richardson (1977), any of the papers produced by Payne and his colleagues during the 1970s, Hopper (1981), or Heath (1981) in his citations. Citation patterns, as the work the new historians and sociologists of science have shown us (e.g. Edge 1979, Gilbert 1977, Law and Williams 1982) are not measures of academic worth. Rather they serve rhetorical and networking functions. The failures of scholars to cite other relevant work tells us something about academic networks among mobility researchers. The most devastating way of demonstrating that another scholar is not part of the in-crowd is to leave them out of debate all together - to render them invisible. Ironically, the emergence of Goldthorpe into public debate on the topic of women and the class structure in itself gives greater credence to the criticisms of stratification theory as sexist than to the challenges from Hopper, Coxon and Jones, or the Cambridge Group. As Harry Collins (198S) points out, in any academic area engaging in a debate automatically gives greater prominence and credence to the ideas one tries to discredit. However, there is more at stake here than the fascinating spectator sport of 'spot the social network from the citations'. Two
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Sara Delamont important academic tasks need attention. First, all the studies on social mobility of men in Wales, Scotland and England should be brought together into one composite account. Second, the challenge of the approach used by Coxon and his colleagues should be answered. Only when experts have done these two tasks can non-specialists feel comfortable that they have the whole picture. It would be naive to assume that pulling all these bodies of research together will be easy. The sampling, instruments, occupational classification schemes, and theoretical perspectives are all different. However, such a synthesis would be invaluable for the non-specialist. It is time that a commentator who has a proper grasp of the mathematical models, no favouritism for any one project, and an understanding that Scotland is part of Britain, reviewed all the extant data on class, stratification and related issues to establish what is known about men in Britain. School of Social and Received 25 May 1988 Administrative Studies Accepted 9 September 1988 University of Wales College of Cardiff

Notes
1 I am grateful to Pat Harris for typing this piece more times than anyone could reasonably expect. Barry Cooper, Tony Coxon and Peter Davies all read it in draft, but are not responsible for the ideas. 2 The failure of many authors to dte other people's work is a failure to dte journal articles and conference papers which appear in advance of monographs. I have not given details of all the articles here, but, for example, Payne's papers are cited in his two books (1987a, 1987b).

References
Collins, H.F. (1985), Changing Order, London: Sage. Coxon, A.P.M. and Jones, C.L. (eds), (1975), Social Mobility, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Coxon, A.P.M. and Jones, C.L., (1978), The Images of Occupational htsige, London: Macmillan. Coxon, A.P.M. and Jones, C.L., (1979a), Class and Hierarchy, London: Macmillan. Coxon, A.P.M. and Jones, C.L., (1979b), Measurement and Memimp, London:
Macmillan.

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Coxon, A.P.M., Davies, P.M. and Jones, C.L. (1986), Images of Social Strat^ication, London: Sage. Edge, D., (1979), 'Quantitative measures of communication in science'. History of Science, 17:102-32. ESRC, (1987), Horizons and Opportunities in the Social Sciences, London: ESRC. Gilbert, N., (1977), 'Referencing as Persuasion', Social Studies of Science, 7:11319. Glass, D.V., (ed.), (1954), Social Mobility in Britain, London: Routlege. Goldthorpe, J., (1980), Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, Oiiford: Clarendon. Goldthorpe, J., (1987), Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modem Britain, (2nd edn), Oxford: Clarendon. Gray, J., Raffe, D., and McPherson, A.F., (1982), Reconstructions of Secondary Education, London: Routledge. Halsey, A.H., (1978), Change in British Society, Oxford: Clarendon. Halsey, A.H., (1986), Change in British Society, (3rd edn) Oxford: Qarendon. Halsey, A.H., Heath, A. and Ridge, A., (1980), Origins and Destinations, Oxford: Qarendon. Heath, A., (1981), Social Mobility, London: Fontana. Hope, K. (1984), As Others See Us, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopper, E. (l9Sl),Social MobUity, London: Blackwell. Law, J. and Williams, R.J. (1982), 'Putting Facts Together', Social Studies of Sdence, 12:481-98. McPheison, A.F. aiid Willms, D., (1987), 'Equalisation and Improvement', Jocio/oK)', 21,4:509-40. Newby, H., (1982), The State of Research into Social Stratification, Redhill: School Government Publishing Company for the SSRC. Payne, G., (1987a), MobUity and Change in Modem Society, London: Macmillan. Payne, G., (1987b), Epicymera and Opportunity, London: Macmillan. Richardson, C.J., (1977), Contemporary Social Mobility, London: Frances Pinter. Stewart, A., Prandy, K. and Blackburn, R.M. (1980), Social Strat^ca&m and Occupations, London: Macmillan.

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