Participating in the Knowledge Society: Research beyond University Walls

Participating in the Knowledge Society Researchers Beyond the University Walls

Edited by Ruth Finnegan

Participating in the Knowledge Society

Other titles by Ruth Finnegan ORAL LITERATURE IN AFRICA MODES OF THOUGHT: Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-western Societies (joint editor) ORAL POETRY: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context CONCEPTIONS OF INQUIRY (joint editor) INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: Social Issues (joint editor) LITERACY AND ORALITY: Studies in the Technology of Communication THE HIDDEN MUSICIANS: Music-making in an English Town ORAL TRADITIONS AND THE VERBAL ARTS: A Guide to Research Practices FROM FAMILY TREE TO FAMILY HISTORY (joint editor) SOURCES AND METHODS FOR FAMILY AND COMMUNITY HISTORIANS: A Handbook ( joint editor) SOUTH PACIFIC ORAL TRADITIONS (joint editor) TALES OF THE CITY: A Study of Narrative and Urban Life COMMUNICATING: The Multiple Modes of Human Interconnection

Participating in the Knowledge Society Researchers Beyond the University Walls Edited by

Ruth Finnegan

Selection and editorial matter © Ruth Finnegan 2005 Individual Chapters © the chapter author 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–3946–3 ISBN-10: 1–4039–3946–2 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Participating in the knowledge society : researchers beyond the university walls / edited by Ruth Finnegan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–3946–2 (cloth) 1. Interdisciplinary research—History. 2. Learning and scholarship— History. 3. Amateurism—Research. I. Finnegan, Ruth H. Q180.55.I48P37 2005 001.4—dc22 2005043742 10 14

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Contents List of Figures

vii

Contributors

viii

Preface

xii

Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls Ruth Finnegan

Part I

Looking Back

1

21

1 To the Heavens in Rural Lancashire: Jeremiah Horrocks and His Circle, and the Foundation of British Astronomical Research Allan Chapman 2 Collectors Harnessed: Research on the British Flora by Nineteenth-Century Amateur Botanists David E. Allen 3 Scientific Inquiry and the Missionary Enterprise David N. Livingstone

23

36 50

4 Listening and Learning? Audiences and Their Roles in Nineteenth-Century Britain Sophie Forgan

65

5 Locating Industrial Research: Universities, Firms and the State, 1916–39 Keith Vernon

79

Part II

93

Outside and Across the Walls

6 A Brief History of Field Archaeology in the UK: The Academy, the Profession and the Amateur Alexander J. Hunt 7 Inside-Out or Outside-In? The Case of Family and Local History Michael Drake v

95

110

vi Contents

8 Community Historians and Their Work Around the Millennium John H. McKay 9 Researching Ourselves? The Mass-Observation Project Dorothy Sheridan

124 138

10 Science With a Team of Thousands: The British Trust for Ornithology Jeremy J.D. Greenwood

152

11 Think Tanks and Intellectual Authority Outside the University: Information Technocracy or Republic of Letters? Dolan Cummings

166

Part III

181

Openings and Challenges through the Web?

12 Everyday Domestic Research in the Knowledge Society: How Ordinary People Use Information and Communication Technologies to Participate Ben Anderson

183

13 Building Knowledge through Debate: OpenDemocracy on the Internet Caspar Melville

198

14 Blogging: Personal Participation in Public Knowledge-Building on the Web Mark Brady

212

15 Using the Internet as a Research Tool: Between Information and Communication William Davies

229

Part IV

243

Reflections: Are There Lessons for the Present?

16 Research, Universities and the Knowledge Society Frank Webster

245

17 Re-opening Research: New Amateurs or New Professionals? Ronald Barnett

263

Index

278

List of Figures 12.1 Online ‘Everyday research’ activities. Percentage of Internet users in each country who reported using the Internet to do these activities online in the last 3 months, e-Living wave 2 (2002) 12.2 Distributions of online job and health ‘research’ by age. Percentage of all Internet users in all six e-Living countries pooled, e-Living wave 2 (2002) 12.3 Distributions of online job and health ‘research’ by years of Internet experience. Percentage of all Internet users in all six e-Living countries pooled, e-Living wave 2 (2002) 14.1 Typical layout of a blog 14.2 Screenshot from the Chocolate N’ Vodka blog showing 3 posts 14.3 Blog posting bringing together many different articles into a single posting

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187

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189 213 214 221

Contributors

David E. Allen is an Hon. Research Associate of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, UK, and of the Natural History Museum. A plant taxonomist by recreation, he has spent most of his career administering research grants. His books include The Victorian Fern Craze (1969), The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (1976/1994), a sesquicentenary history (1986) of the Botanical Society of the British Isles (of which he is a past President), and Naturalists and Society: The Culture of Natural History in Britain, 1700–1900 (2001). Ben Anderson is Deputy Director of Chimera, the Institute for Socio-Technical Research and Innovation at the University of Essex, UK, where he leads a range of projects analysing the relationship between ICTs and society through (predominantly) longitudinal mixed-method research. In previous lives he has been a Senior Research Scientist at BT and a university contract researcher. He has a PhD in Computer Studies from Loughborough University and a BSc (Hons) in Biology and Computer Science (1992) from the University of Southampton (for more see http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~benander). Ronald Barnett is Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK, where he was Dean of Professional Development in 1994–2001. His books include The Idea of Higher Education (1990), Improving Higher Education: Total Quality Care (1992), Higher Education: A Critical Business (1997), Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity (1999) and Beyond All Reason: Living with Ideology in the University (2003). He has conducted consultancies for many major national bodies in the UK and is currently Chair of the [international] Society for Research into Higher Education. Mark Brady is studying his PhD, looking at blogging as a social innovation, at Chimera, the Institute for Socio-Technical Research and Innovation at the University of Essex, UK. Before this he worked at BT as a contract researcher working on technology, user needs and social networks. He has an MSc in Human-Centred Computer Systems from the University of Sussex (2001), and a BSc (Hons) in Cognitive Science from the University of Hertfordshire (2000). viii

Contributors ix

Allan Chapman is a historian of science at the Faculty of Modern History and Wadham College, Oxford University, UK. A Lancastrian, he has had a long standing interest in Jeremiah Horrocks and his circle, and also in the historical and contemporary relations between science and Christianity. He was Visiting Professor in the History of Science at Gresham College, London, and his latest book is England’s Leonardo, the life of Robert Hooke. Dolan Cummings is research and editorial director at the Institute of Ideas (IoI) in London, UK. He edited a special issue of the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISPP) based on the IoI’s 2003 ‘Ideas, Intellectuals and the Public’ conference. He also edits the IoI’s reviews website, Culture Wars (www.culturewars.org.uk). William Davies is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, where he leads the Digital Society programme. He specialises in the study of new media, social networks and communities, and has published two reports on this topic, You Don’t Know Me But . . . : Social Capital & Social Software (Work Foundation 2003) and Proxicommunication: ICT and the Local Public Realm (Work Foundation 2003). His academic background is in social theory and philosophy. Michael Drake, Emeritus Professor, The Open University, UK, has spent his career encouraging people ‘outside the walls’ to enhance their local history, particularly its demographic aspects, by a more ‘inside the walls’ approach. Former editor of Local Population Studies and Family and Community History, his publications include ‘Infant mortality: some family and community approaches’ (Family and Community History 6, 2003), Time, Family and Community (ed. 1994), Sources and Methods for Family and Community Historians (joint editor 1994/1997). Ruth Finnegan is Visiting Research Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University. Her publications include Information Technology: Social Issues (ed. with Graeme Salaman and Kenneth Thompson, 1987), Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (1988), The Hidden Musicians (1989), Oral Poetry (2nd edition, 1992), From Family Tree to Family History (ed. with Michael Drake, 1994), Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Interconnection (2002). Sophie Forgan is Visiting Research Fellow, School of Arts and Media, University of Teesside, UK. Her research crosses the disciplinary divide between architecture and science. She has published on the history of learned societies, universities, museums and exhibitions, and recently

x Contributors

on representations of science in the mid-twentieth century, ‘Atoms in wonderland’ (History and Technology 19, 2003). Jeremy Greenwood is Director of the British Trust for Ornithology and Honorary Professor of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia and University of Birmingham, UK. His research interests have included ecological genetics of snails, breeding ecology of birds, arctic ecology, behavioural ecology of predation. His current interests are macroecology and the use of population monitoring in wildlife conservation science. Alex Hunt has worked as a researcher within and outside the walls of the academy, including as project researcher and director of the Archaeological Investigations Project in the School of Conservation Sciences at Bournemouth University, Local Authority Archaeologist in Hertfordshire, and the Council for British Archaeology’s Research and Conservation Officer. He maintains his interest in the interface between archaeology and public policy in his current role as Regional Policy Officer for the National Trust in Yorkshire and the North East, UK. David N. Livingstone is Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen’s University of Belfast, UK and a Fellow of the British Academy. His publications include The Geographical Tradition (1992) and Putting Science in Its Place (2003). He is currently working on Adam’s Ancestors, a study of the history of ideas about race, religion and human origins, and on a project on tracing the ways in which Darwinism has been differently read in different venues. John H. McKay, Edinburgh, spent 33 years in Customs and Excise before becoming a part-time Associate Lecturer, Open University in Scotland, having studied part-time for an Open University BA (1976) and PhD (1985). He is currently researching Scottish industrial history in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods with particular reference to the shale oil industry. Caspar Melville is the editor of the New Humanist Magazine. Previously he worked as Executive Editor for the global affairs website openDemocracy.net, and as a part-time lecturer for Goldsmiths College London. His early career was in music journalism, specialising in ‘black music’ genres like jazz, funk and hip hop; this included working as a freelance, a columnist for Blues & Soul in Britain, founder editor of the US jazz magazine On The One and work in radio and television.

Contributors xi

Dorothy Sheridan is Director of the Mass-Observation Archive, Head of Special Collections and Co-Director of the Centre for Life History Research, University of Sussex, UK. Research, teaching and publishing interests include Mass-Observation (for example, Writing Ourselves, 2000, with B. V. Street and D. Bloome), contemporary social research, life history and literacy, women in the Second World War and the practice and ethics of archival management. Keith Vernon is Senior Lecturer in History, University of Central Lancashire, UK. He has done research on the development of state policy towards scientific research in the early twentieth century and his current research is on the history of English universities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recent publications include Universities and the State in England, 1850–1939 (2004). Frank Webster is Professor of Sociology, City University London, UK. He was at the University of Birmingham from 1999 to 2002. Recent books include The Virtual University? (with Kevin Robins, 2002); Theories of the Information Society (2nd edition, 2002); Manuel Castells, 3 volumes (with Basil Dimitriou, 2003); The Intensification of Surveillance (with Kirstie Ball, 2003); and The Information Society Reader (2004).

Preface Researchers outside the university are commonly overlooked. It is true that historians have paid them some attention, so too, more recently, have some contemporary analysts of serious leisure; we are now also more aware of the enthusiasm with which people jointly build software and knowledgeably utilise the Internet. And of course the independent astronomers, ornithologists, family historians, philosophers and a host of other non-university researchers know well the richness of their chosen avocations. But they are seldom if ever brought into the current discussions about the functions of universities, participation in the knowledge society, or role and organisation of research today. In such debates researchers outside the university walls might as well not exist. This interdisciplinary and transhistorical volume is an attempt to redress the balance, and provide a glimpse of the extraordinary contribution and commitment of this vast and regularly ignored sector of knowledge production. It brings together case studies from the past as well as present, using these as not only of interest in themselves – which indeed they are – but also to throw light on some more general issues to do with the generation and recognition of knowledge as it is carried on outside or across the university walls. These wider themes are also taken up more directly in the opening and concluding chapters which reflect on the implications for the present and (perhaps) future world of knowledge and the role of universities and research within it. This amazingly rich and diverse field can only be considered in a most selective way. The book presents only a small sample of short case studies and focuses primarily on British examples (though these in fact quite often have international ramifications). There are a few examples from the more professional end of the complex amateur–professional continuum (industry and think tanks in particular), for even these have often been brushed out of the picture. Researchers from the more amateur and part-time sector have been even more neglected however and it is thus to them that the main weight is given here. These illustrative cases are intended not as any kind of comprehensive or representative survey, then, but as occasions for sharpening our vision of what is already there but only too often missed, leading hopefully to a clearer and more informed perspective on the current and developing world of knowledge. xii

Preface xiii

The immediate occasion for embarking on this book was a one-day meeting at the Open University where many of the authors met to present and discuss ideas about researchers outside the university walls. That shared experience provided a major impetus for gathering together and enlarging this collection. Its roots go back further however. Several of the contributors had already published or researched on aspects of the topic – though not necessarily in the same framework as here – and/or were themselves directly involved as researchers outside academe and interested in the kinds of issues considered in this book. For myself it came out of a long interest in the informal and unofficial activities that have so often been rendered invisible in currently conventional definitions, including in the spheres of artistic expression, of communication and of knowledge. Several Open University colleagues, including myself, had also had our appreciation of the attainments of researchers outside universities greatly spurred by the Open University ethos in which we were working, and in particular by our involvement in an undergraduate research course in family and community (described in Michael Drake’s chapter); we were especially struck by the numbers of its graduates who afterwards continued with their research independently. This stimulated our interest in those other researchers in different but perhaps comparable fields who, so often invisible in formal university assessments or official statistics, were nonetheless engaging in the pursuit and creation of knowledge.

Acknowledgements Some of the many thanks I have to express will be evident from the comments above. First of all then to the Open University and, in particular the Pavis Centre in the Faculty of Social Sciences, for supporting our initial meeting, specially to Denise Janes and Karen Ho for their wonderful organisational skills, also for particular help both then and afterwards to Richard Collins, Michael Drake, Sophie Watson, and Yvonne Cook. I am grateful to all those who contributed so interestingly on that occasion, whether or not they also appear in this book, and appreciate in particular the illuminating comments both on the day and later from John Naughton, Gerrylyn Roberts and Steve Woolgar. I would also like to express warmest thanks to colleagues and students on the Open University course ‘Studying family and community history’ for the high level of research and commitment which so many participants on that course demonstrated both then

xiv Preface

and later, shattering the easily held assumption that it is only with the formalised apprenticeship of PhD training within a university setting that people can embark on ‘real’ research. Thanks to many others on the way too. Though too many to list individually, let me at least convey my thanks to the wonderful Open University Library staff; to all those whose brains I have picked on the many complications of this subject; to Brigid and John Duffield for opening my eyes to some relevant dimensions of the world of the web; to Charles Briggs and Meg Brady for most welcome encouragement during a recent visit to the US; to two publishers’ readers for their constructively challenging comments; and, as ever, to my husband David Murray for his unparalleled and continuing intellectual and moral support (and specially for the fun we’ve had discussing this and much else during our walks in the woods with the dogs). I would like finally to record my sincere gratitude to each and every one of the authors here, not only, most obviously, for their chapters but also for the interdisciplinary spirit in which they were prepared to write and their generous responsiveness to my demands over many months; I owe particular thanks to Ben Anderson for help in times of crisis, to Mark Brady for filling an unforeseen gap at impossibly short notice, and above all to David Allen, Ronald Barnett and Frank Webster for their encouragement and wisdom through the long process of completing this book. Ruth Finnegan Bletchley, January 2005

Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls Ruth Finnegan

In its consideration of the remarkable extent and variety of non-university researchers, this book takes a broader view of ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’ than in many current discussions about today’s knowledge society, ‘learning age’, or organisation of research. It goes beyond the commonly held image of ‘knowledge’ as something produced and owned by the full-time experts to take a look at those engaged in active knowledge building outside the university walls. The on-going debates commonly take as their frame of reference the knowledge production and knowledge society of today. Here again this book looks more widely. As Manuel Castells rightly reminds us To label our society an information or knowledge society is a bit pretentious. Why? Because that would imply that in all other societies in human history, information and knowledge were not important. And I know no society in which information and knowledge have not been absolutely decisive in every aspect of society. (Castells 2004: 3) The historical range here, limited as it is, can set present-day concerns into longer perspective and enlarge our appreciation not just of the past but of the currently developing worlds of knowledge in which researchers find themselves engaged.1

Researchers in or out of the universities Contemporary accounts commonly reflect the belief that the university has, at least till very recently, been the prime centre for knowledge generation and recognition: ‘the institution most closely aligned with 1

2 Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls

knowledge production processes in the history of the West’ (Fuller 2000: 47), ‘the key knowledge-producing institution’ (Scott 2000: 191). There are constant references to ‘the traditional near monopoly of the university over ownership and transmission of established knowledge, and validation of new knowledge’ (McNair 1997: 36), sometimes, as here, with some concern that this may now be under threat. ‘Research’ belongs prototypically to those practising in university settings. In Britain today – though the general trend is more widespread – this conviction is reinforced by government-sponsored Research Assessment Exercises that rank university departments by their research: massive and highly publicised competitions with dramatic financial and reputational gains for the winners. Universities accordingly attach high priority to enhancing and advertising their research and, as Frank Webster comments in his chapter,2 academics are happy to be labelled participants in these ‘powerhouses of research’. It is easy to go on to assume that all research happens within the portals of universities. Thus a recent influential review, after a brief bow to ‘other sources’ of funding, is categorical that assessments of research in universities and colleges provide ‘comprehensive and definitive information on the quality of UK research in each subject area’ and capture the ‘UK research system’ (Roberts 2003: 2, 5). But researching is not confined to universities and colleges. Industrial firms, public and private research institutes, government, consultancies, charities, think tanks, Royal Commissions, survey organisations, newspapers, broadcasting organisations, activist bodies and much else – all are settings in which research takes place. And over and above such evident examples – though these too are often overlooked – lies a host of even less noticed independent researchers working on a vast span of topics, from local history to entomology and microscopy, cartography to seismology or church law, theology to contemporary history and current affairs. Some are indubitably more organised, competent or systematic than others, but all are to one degree or another creative participants in the world of knowledge. The chapters here give some flavour of these variegated researchers. We encounter the remarkable country gentlemen in seventeenth-century Lancashire villages who laid the foundations of British astronomical research; the Victorian amateur botanists who so largely worked out the national distribution of Britain’s wild plants and whose counterparts today carry out massive periodic flora stocktakings; missionary researchers on languages or meteorology; contributors to the Mass-Observation archive; and the extensive body of researchers beyond and across

Ruth Finnegan 3

university walls in ornithology, archaeology and family history. And then, besides the industrial firms and contemporary think tanks, there are the emergent processes of knowledge production and dissemination through the Internet. The examples here are by no means unique. This book’s coverage flows together with other recent work: with transdisciplinary studies of informal and grassroots practices, of peripheries as well as centres, and of the cultural contexts in which knowledge has been created and formulated. The complexities behind the once-simple story of the depersonalised advance of modern science are being appreciated through studies of individuals and groups outside the official establishments of the time, like Mary Somerville, the nineteenth-century scientist who was barred from education and learned libraries (Chapman 2004), the scientific contributions of the eighteenth-century Lunar Society of Birmingham with its dissenting and artisan networks (Uglow 2002), or the myriad dispersed contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary (Winchester 1998, 2003). Nor are independent researchers just something of the past. Amateur research in astronomy did not end with the seventeenth-century scientists here. In the nineteenth century the amateurs were sometimes ahead, unfettered by curriculum constrictions or state patronage (Chapman 1998), and today thousands of skilled amateur astronomers work in global research networks in partnership with professionals (Ferris 2002, Percy and Wilson 2000). Archaeology, philology, folklore, geography, literary analysis, biography, language studies, theology, philosophy, analyses of space-probe data – all have been carried forward by independent scholars. Non-professionals produce historical studies, family historians crowd local record offices and expertly utilise the web, ‘public history’ is developed by and for community participants. Amateurs and professionals have long interacted in the field sciences like (among others) agronomy, biogeography, botany, ethology, forestry, genetics, geology, geophysics, oceanography, palaeontology, public health and zoology; in the field amateur-professional distinctions remain blurred but if anything the amateur sphere may be expanding (Kuklick and Kohler 1996: 5). Laboratory-based ‘big science’ is nowadays less accessible, though even in the physical sciences amateurs still develop innovative projects and instrumentation (documented for example in the ‘Amateur Scientist’ columns in Scientific American) and of course the foundational theoreticians have not themselves always been professional scientists. In recent years the ‘opensource’ software system Linux was famously forged collaboratively by

4 Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls

thousands of fellow enthusiasts just as teams of volunteers have now created the Firefox browser, while the bloggers described by Mark Brady actively build and debate knowledge on the web. Indeed, far from being outdated, a recent think tank report heralds a reversal of the twentiethcentury shift to professionals by a new breed of ‘pro-am’ enthusiasts (Leadbeater and Miller 2004). Non-university researchers do not form a clearly defined or uniform sector. They are diverse in both interests and practices. Some have little directly to do with universities or shade into individual hobbyists who might better be termed occasional dabblers rather than researchers. Others (like several of the authors here) merge into the professional academic researchers, sometimes moving in or out of universities; or, while opting against a university career, still make serious intellectual work integral to their lives. A number of special-interest societies and publications straddle the university walls. The boundaries between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’, ‘independent’ and ‘institutional’, ‘work’ and ‘leisure’, ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ are fluid and overlapping – oppositions which are anyway becoming less identifiable in the world of today. Despite the lack of definitive demarcation, the broad spectrum of researchers operating more, or less, outside the university is clearly substantial. Just from the fields considered here we could note not only the proliferation of natural history clubs in Victorian Britain but the five to ten thousand individuals still engaged in active botanical research today (Allen); the tens of thousands of amateur ornithologists (Greenwood); the 4500 (at least) independent archaeologists in contemporary Britain (Hunt; Leadbetter and Miller 2004: 28); the 270 historians, almost all ‘outside the walls’, whose research informed a classic population history of England in 1981 (Drake); the substantial recent publications in community history (McKay); or the 387,000 active family historians (estimate by Family Records Centre, London – Leadbetter and Miller 2004: 28) complemented by the 210 societies within the UK Federation of Family History Societies. In some countries there are now generic associations for independent scholars3 to supplement the plethora of special-interest associations. We must add too the uncounted multitude working through the web or searching in domestic settings where ‘in pure head-count terms most “research” gets done’ (Anderson). These researchers are largely financed by themselves. In institutions like industrial firms or research institutes researchers may be formally employed, and some charities and national societies are prepared to make (small) grants towards independent scholars’ expenses (the Linnean

Ruth Finnegan 5

Society even has a fund reserved for amateurs). But in general it is remarkable how many draw on their own resources: they work for love, not pay. The Linux developers were not unique in expending ‘money and effort to be able to contribute to the advancement of their . . . project’ (Tuomi 2002: 1), for outside researchers commonly contribute not only time – invaluable resource – but substantial amounts on equipment, books, journals, travel, communication, library fees, and subscriptions. These researcher-participants in knowledge, unsupported as most of them are by government finance or university backing, represent a substantial knowledge resource, part of the nation’s – and the world’s – intellectual capital. The view of research as essentially a creature of the universities is notably a partial one.

Capturing knowledge and its creators This absence of non-university researchers from current accounts of knowledge production is startling – but not altogether surprising. Conceptualisations of knowledge and its creators have always been formulated through specific terminologies, intertwined often enough with categorisations of inclusion and exclusion. Thus as the authors of the tellingly titled The Invisible Industrialist point out, the extensive production of scientific knowledge in industrial settings is effectively obscured by the dominant picture of knowledge-transfer from ‘research settings to production sites’, never the other way round (Gaudillière and Löwy 1998: 5). Similarly business is projected as the recipient of the ‘knowledge and expertise that universities and colleges create and accumulate’ (HEFCE 2004: 1, 2). Practitioner knowledge is brushed aside. And yet the application of an idea in a new context, invented and developed in use, can be an act of knowledge creation ‘perhaps more original than one of the more derivative types of academic paper’ (Eraut 1994: 54). The literature on knowledge creation and development is organized around assumptions . . . [in which] the principal actors are the [academic] research community, whose perspective dominates most of this literature, and the governments upon whose sponsorship they depend. By implication, other professionals are not only excluded from the knowledge creation process but assumed to suffer from knowledge deficiency . . . The situation looks very different if we move the academic researcher from the centre of the universe. (Eraut 1994: 54)

6 Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls

The word ‘amateur’ also carries connotations. Once a term of approbation, it is now often used – especially in circles where amateur research is unfamiliar – to banish certain people or activities as untrained, low level, marginal and unvalidated or, more radically, to blot them from view. And when the definition of reality is still so often tied to ‘professional’ status or, alternatively, to public funding or commercial success, the (more, or less) amateur practitioners disappear. Those directly involved of course know well of their existence and achievements. But they seldom enter official statistics and even social scientists have in the past often disregarded them. And yet, harder to capture than the full-time, paid and publicly documented practitioners, amateur and independent activities may now be attracting more interest. Historians have always paid them some attention, but perhaps increasingly so now with the more social approach to the history of science and greater visibility for the field sciences. Studies of popular science are challenging the model of downwards dissemination to passive receivers to reveal the participation of co-creating audiences and interpretations (Forgan; also Secord 1996, Gieryn 1999). And even students of the present are starting to be more alert to the contemporary significance and prospects of amateurs (Booth 1999, Ferris 2002, Leadbeater and Miller 2004, Percy and Wilson 2000, Stebbins 1992; 2001). ‘Amateur science – strong tradition, bright future’ is the apt title of Forrest Mims’ article in Science on the farranging and substantial contributions of those who do science ‘because it’s what they love’ (1999: 55). Using varying terminologies (for given the fluid boundaries none are quite satisfactory) these more recent analyses have helped to illuminate certain features of this complex range of activity. Ronald and Beatrice Gross list the characteristics of ‘independent scholars’ as ‘enthusiasm, energy, zest, and love for the subject they study’ (1983: 23) while, more recently, the ‘pro-am’ is someone who ‘pursues an activity as an amateur, mainly for the love of it, but sets a professional standard’ (Leadbeater and Miller 2004). The ‘hacker’, in its original rather than derogatory sense, is ‘an expert or enthusiast of any kind’, motivated not by money but ‘a desire to create something that one’s peer community would find valuable’ (Himanen 2001: x). Robert Stebbins (1992, 2001) uses ‘serious leisure’ in his classic studies of committed amateurs across many fields, including science. He portrays their perseverance (‘working at it’ despite setbacks); endurance over time (not just an evanescent occurrence); personal effort based on specially acquired knowledge, training or skills; personal experience such as self-actualisation or

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belongingness; a unique ethos within which they act; and strong identification with their chosen pursuit (Stebbins 1992: 6ff.). Such characterisations apply well to the independent researchers considered in this book, practising, as we have seen, in substantial numbers – yet there are still many circles in which they remain invisible. Marginalising certain activities or people, or defining them out of existence (and reward systems) are well attested social processes. We might prefer not to admit it, but they demonstrably happen with knowledge production too. Though with varying settings and boundaries – universities have not always been at the centre – exclusionary definitions and practices have always been part of the worlds of learning. Interacting with both conventional wisdom and the ideologies and perhaps self-interests of currently powerful protagonists, some topics, activities or practitioners are classed as somehow counting, others not. The Enlightenment focus on decontextualised knowledge, rationality and secular science is one powerful example, turning attention away from people and practices that do not fit the paradigm. It is certainly extensively challenged by many cases here. Livingstone for example is explicit that if missionary science, with its religious commitment and messy politics, runs counter to the established scientific story ‘then it is time to revise our notion of what constitutes scientific knowledge’. That particular account was never wholly encompassing however, and the point here is the more general one that the demarcations and practices of knowledge are always liable to change and diversity. Feminist, cross-cultural, and postmodernist perspectives and ‘cultural’ approaches to the history of science, for example, have been reappraising the definitions of knowledge and research. Social researchers have reframed their ‘objects’ of study as ‘colleagues’ and ‘co-researchers’ or highlighted the dialogic – the interactive and emergent – dimensions of knowing. ‘Mode 2 knowledge’ is now on the agenda too: applications-based knowledge produced by short-lived, relatively unstructured transdisciplinary teams on short-term problems, arguably now supplanting the discipline-based ‘Mode 1 knowledge’ (Gibbons et al. 1994, Nowotny et al. 2001). Some aspects of this (somewhat generalised) thesis remain controversial but it brings out yet again that definitions and practices of knowledge are heterogeneous, set by human formulation rather than some eternal natural order. As emphasised at many points here, especially in the two concluding chapters, we have to entertain the notion of a plurality of co-creating participants and knowledges, ‘local’, situated and diversely defined rather than always monolithic or officially sanctioned – and open, furthermore, to change and dispute.

8 Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls

Neither ‘knowledge’ nor ‘research’ are neutral terms. ‘Research’ sometimes comes in the open-ended sense of any active, careful and systematic process of inquiry and its outcomes. But it can also be a highly loaded word. It is used rhetorically to justify think tank reports (Cummings) or to include or exclude particular activities, as in the changing approaches to qualitative methodologies charted in Sheridan’s chapter. Like ‘knowledge’, it can be wielded to convey value-laden claims about particular forms of inquiry and who should control them. One striking example is the current drive across British universities to re-define ‘research’ by restricting it to activities likely to earn high gradings in official Research Assessments, thus in effect disqualifying everything else as not ‘really’ research nor, by implication, knowledge. Earlier delimitations are neatly encapsulated in the rhyme about the famous head of Oxford’s Balliol College: I’m the Master, Benjamin Jowett There’s no knowledge but I know it. I am Master of this college What I don’t know isn’t knowledge (as circulating in popular tradition 1960s (originated 1870s)). Changing definitions of what counts as knowledge and who has the right to capture it are nothing new. New institutions, methodologies, and personnel supplant earlier ones. Disciplines and subjects are replaced by upstarts from unexpected places, move in or out of the walls, straddle them or shift their boundaries. Family and community history are now mostly outside universities but occasionally included in (Drake, McKay), archaeology once outside but now partially within, while metal detectorists are being drawn, amidst controversy, into archaeological research, the boundaries widened to encompass their data (Hunt). New instruments and technologies too have played a part in changing conceptualisations and practices of knowledge. The data revealed by newly invented telescopes and precision angle-measuring instruments went along with radically new concepts of the power of sense-knowledge (Chapman), binoculars underpinned greater openings for amateurs in ornithological fieldwork (Greenwood). Portable cassette-recorders enabled wider participation in life history, folklore, and oral history and authorised their products, just as inexpensive telescopes have opened far-reaching astronomical observation to those outside ‘big science’ laboratories. The gradual supplanting of Latin as

Ruth Finnegan 9

the language of knowledge similarly had implications for defining both knowledge and who could participate (some might adduce a modernday parallel in the excluding ‘dense and jargon-soaked’ language of some academic writing today (Webster), ‘turning inward’, as Russell Jacoby has it, ‘to fetishize their profundity’ (2000: xxi)). There is also the salient example of hardcopy print, arguably the dominant technology in recent centuries for capturing knowledge and the main currency of accredited university research. As William Davies among others asks, might the definitions and practices of knowledge be in any way reshaped in the technologies now deployed by many independent researchers – multimodal as well as verbal, electronic or broadcast as well as print? It is worth recalling that it has often been those outside established institutions that have taken the lead in exploiting new technologies, methods or fields of study. From ‘science’ in the nineteenth century, excluded as not up to the mental discipline of classics or mathematics, to more recently recognised fields like black studies, astrophysics, African literature, oral history, dance studies, ethnomusicology, women’s studies, contemporary history, popular music and much else, the founding scholars commonly started outside established curricula and without official academic recognition. Amateurs and outsiders could take risks and venture beyond disciplinary regimes and regurgitations. As Peter Burke notes for earlier centuries, the social history of knowledge is a history of the interaction between outsiders and establishments, between amateurs and professionals, intellectual entrepreneurs and intellectual rentiers. There is also interplay between innovation and routine, fluidity and fixity, ‘thawing and freezing trends’, official and unofficial knowledge. On one side we see open circles or networks, on the other institutions with fixed membership and officially defined spheres of competence, constructing and maintaining barriers which separate them from their rivals and also from laymen and laywomen. (Burke 2000: 51–2) Does this have relevance for today? Certainly some already argue that the best work in the humanities now comes from beyond the universities (Harvey 2002) with the most creative research perhaps happening outside academe in contexts of applications (and implications), in public places where the heterogeneity of knowledge production is exposed rather than in

10 Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls

autonomous spaces from which all forms of contestation that do not conform to scholarly and scientific practice are excluded. (Peter Scott in Warner and Palfreyman 2001: 200, also Barnett, this volume) Whatever the judgements on specific examples, there are clearly grounds for looking beyond the defensive walls to the possibly more open and innovatory pursuits outside. Non-university researchers also play a part in the complementary activity of consolidating established fields and filling gaps or uncertainties in the current corpus of knowledge. Researchers do not have to produce revolutionary new advances to yet contribute to knowledge and both innovative iconoclasm and painstaking documentation within existing frames are to be found both inside and beyond academe. As Burke continues (2000: 52), ‘The reader is probably tempted to side with the innovators against the supporters of tradition, but it is likely that in the long history of knowledge the two groups have played equally important roles.’ The outside researchers, no less than their more visible counterparts within the universities, actively participate in both these groups (perhaps more accurately, both these overlapping dimensions). Capturing the full world of knowledge and its creators is only feasible by going beyond partial and restrictive definitions, however powerful these may be in some circles, and including the extra-university researchers within the picture.

The practice and recognition of research Outside no less than within universities, researching does not happen of itself nor take place in a vacuum. Individuals play their part, indubitably – it is striking how many named men and women appear in these pages. But here as elsewhere the researchers are also commonly linked into wider networks and collaborations. One recurrent theme is of being engaged in a shared and worthwhile endeavour. It is partly of course the sheer love of the chase – but also something more. Amateur botanists undertake fieldwork ‘with some manifestly useful end’ (Allen), community historians conduct ‘a serious pursuit whose outcome might be useful to others’ (McKay). The hackers and software enthusiasts, for all their fun and freedom, are fired by building a larger system that goes beyond once-off pleasure. Even the Mass-Observation panellists who never met face-to-face felt part of a collective endeavour, ‘a sense that they belonged to a larger community of people like themselves whose reports would be, cumulatively, more

Ruth Finnegan 11

significant than the contribution of any single individual’ (Sheridan) – not a trivial hobby for personal enjoyment but a collaborative and serious enterprise. Sharing the research and its outcomes is another thread. Communication crops up continually, raising the familiar question of how far a lone uncommunicative investigator, inside or outside academe, is fully a creator of knowledge. Most researchers here look to some wider constituency for interchanging and distributing knowledge – witness the recurrent mention of lectures, letters, personal contacts, printed books and articles, electronic posting, discussions on the web. . . . They interact within known networks and conventions, and envisage their work as of use to others beyond the present moment or locality. Missionaries created dictionaries and meteorological datasets, botanists their pressed plant collections, family and community historians their transcriptions and archives – building blocks for future researchers. The communication of knowledge raises the issue of its validation. Many of these researchers are in one sense responsible primarily to themselves – not accountable to employers or government regulators but free to follow their own enthusiasms where they will. Nor do they necessarily feel any need for explicit external authorisation. But in the apparent absence of university endorsement, the question seems to arise of the credibility of their work. Contrary perhaps to expectation, the knowledge processes here are far from merely personal and idiosyncratic. They are recognised in variegated and often multiple and overlapping ways, it is true, with a range of (often implicit) criteria and expectations. But familiar themes in fact emerge – appropriate training, making public, recognition through significant others, and a degree of shared values. Qualifying oneself to carry out the task competently is one dimension. Many of these researchers have completed undergraduate or graduate degrees, later taking up research in the same or (remarkably often) another field; from some viewpoints at least they and their research are legitimised by their earlier passage through university-endorsed channels. Other training is less paper-accredited, though not for that reason unimportant. It can be self-learning and practical experience, sometimes building up skills and knowledge over lengthy periods, like the ornithological field skills that, Greenwood notes, ‘come through years of experience rather than a university degree’. There are some more formalised (not necessarily certificated) routes. In family and community history for example there is a flourishing tradition of freelance courses and advice packs, and, as in many popular research fields, a plenitude

12 Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls

of readily available and avidly read specialist magazines packed with research hints and reports. Here as elsewhere some knowledge is restricted, but in general sharing and making public function as one form of endorsement. Peerto-peer communicating is a recurrent theme, at least in the sense of interchanging, trying out and being recognised by others. The ‘publics’ and audiences looked to are diverse: sometimes large or actively participant but sometimes more symbolic than actual, perhaps in practice quite small self-referencing in-groups who nevertheless provide a stamp of authority. Making public through print is frequently mentioned, seemingly a mark of quality assurance whether or not the published products are actually much read. But this pre-screened hard-copy route, guarded by authorising gatekeepers and of key validating significance within academe, is also sometimes side-stepped by post-publication assessment and dialectic as authors expose their products to critiques and interchanges on the Internet (see Part III). Are we, as Barnett asks, on the verge of a new kind of public and more dialogic space, ‘building knowledge through debate’ as Melville has it? The institutions or groupings to which these researchers in some sense look for endorsement are multiple. Sometimes they do indeed include universities, though usually as just as one among several sources. The validation of inter-war industrial research came overlappingly via government, commercial interests, universities, and professional associations like the Society of Chemical Industry. For archaeologists it has been varying combinations of national and local associations, government, commercial interests, and universities. Part II refers to several ‘across the walls’ cases where authority partly comes from university involvement though also perhaps from the aims of particular organisations, individuals, and groups. Universities are not always in the picture however, certainly not at its centre. Professional and national associations often play a part, not least through the expectations by which researchers judge themselves and others. Relevant too are the less formalised but nonetheless influential networks of local societies with meetings, co-researchers, publications, and (nowadays) websites. Validation can also come from personal correspondence and exchanges (communication again . . .), unofficial but effective ways of gaining both feedback and recognition from fellow practitioners even if the precise boundaries or authority of the relevant reference group(s) are far from explicit. The criteria and frames of reference are again often implicit rather than verbalised. Particular fields develop shared – if sometimes also

Ruth Finnegan 13

disputed or shifting – standards and expectations about the accreditation brought by, for example, particular people, locations, topics, methodologies, outcomes, or shared experiences. The perceived authority of think tank reports for example partly lies in their effects on public policy and visibility in the media (Cummings), for missionary science in its indisputable field location (Livingstone), for professional practice in how far it ‘works’; while for industrial firms ‘ultimately, if a piece of research gave rise to commercially beneficial results, what further validation was required?’ (Vernon). On the web endorsement can come among other things from personal reputation (Davies) or ‘popularity’ metrics which count links to and from particular blogs (Brady); or it may be bound into a self-generating culture like the openDemocracy contributors’ ‘mutual respect, inquiry and willingness to change according to new information . . . self-regulation and accountability without the need for heavy-handed policing’ (Melville). For family and community historians the pursuit in part justifies itself, as a personal sphere where the researcher has a right to go – highly particularistic, perhaps, yet to the participants something that gives their research validity. Certain values are to an extent common across these otherwise varying fields. Like their university counterparts, these researchers are mostly serious about their pursuit, putting in effort and resources to attain their own, often demanding, standards. Seriousness, enthusiasm, care, a wish to ‘get it right’, sharing with significant others – all these recur, overlapping in many ways with Barnett’s proposed knowledge ethic for today, and in a sense their own self-accreditation. Here as elsewhere knowledge-validation turns out a complex affair, relating not only to the processes, personnel, background, or locales taken as the justified ones for the ‘creation’ of knowledge but also for its recognition, dissemination, outlets, accountability or the accepted practices, aims, and criteria governing its valid capture and control. Multiple endorsement sources are often in play, sometimes contradictory or shifting; and even within relatively agreed systems some researchers are less cautious or less acquiescent than others in observing the (more or less) shared norms. But however informal, multidimensional or at times contentious, it would not be correct to say that processes of validation are absent among researchers outside academe. Perhaps there is after all not such a clear distinction from the validating processes in university settings. It is true that universities have been widely seen as the authorising agent for knowledge formation (though possibly more for curricula and educational accreditation than research?) and the norm against which outsiders should be judged. But

14 Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls

university practices around endorsement are diverse too, similarly shaped through multiple and sometimes disputed overlapping interests: governmental finance and recognition, for example, disciplinary boundaries, commercial payoffs or the controls and conventions of particularistic reference groups; sometimes the ideas of ‘public scholarship’ or ‘community-based research’ creep in too, with researchers accountable in some way to a ‘public’ other than their academic peers. Inside as without academe scrutiny by peers, citation counts or ‘metrics’ – much spoken of in university contexts – can be bound into circles of self-referencing insider networks and expectations, of reputations and locations, and of selective knowledges and personnel (see Fuller 1997, 2002: 232ff.) Validation through making public also looks more controversial now that hard-print publication, that privileged route for academic knowledge endorsement, is sometimes bypassed by post-publication assessment on the web. Ultimately there seems no absolute divide between knowledge creation outside and inside the universities. Variegated as both are, they overlap in personnel, fields, ethics, processes, and in the multiplicity of authority sources to which they appeal, the divergences and overlaps shifting in different periods and settings. It would be misplaced either to denigrate the assessment procedures of university-based research or to exaggerate those of independent scholars – they are highly diverse after all, some certainly less careful or committed than others. But it is emphatically not a case of uncontrolled, haphazard and irresponsible investigators outside universities as against accountable, organised and uniformly high-minded researchers inside.

Participating in the world of knowledge today Many voices suggest we are living in unparalleled times. Some portray certainty dissolved into fluidity, with knowledge everywhere contested and fragmented and the once-legitimising university walls crumbling to an unprecedented host of knowledge-competitors. Others salute the new technology-based knowledge economy with its ever-increasing need for yet more authoritative knowledge-production. Both positions overlook precisely the kinds of researchers considered here and the long-playing contests and pluralities of knowledges of the past not just the present. There have doubtless always been researchers outside the elite-controlled domains of knowledge and, as Webster aptly reminds us, research has not in fact always or everywhere been an important function of universities. To fully understand today’s knowledge

Ruth Finnegan 15

society we must include in the frame the wider research world which has in one way or another always existed and still continues. This larger view is in fact all the more important in the situation of today. Not only do people live longer active lives, often with resources for chosen pursuits alongside or following paid jobs, but increasing numbers are completing university studies and gaining research experience through projects and independent work at school as well as tertiary level. And just as ‘open learning’ successfully challenged the model that once restricted higher education to an elite ‘within the walls’, so a parallel recognition of ‘open research’ may yet extend ‘lifelong learning’ into a possibility of lifelong ‘researching’. Most ‘learning age’ analysts talk in terms of ‘learning’ but a few now bring out its ‘inquiry’ dimensions and in doing so challenge the mystique and exclusivity associated with ‘research’ (Bligh et al. 1999: 90, Jarvis 2001, Wells 2002). This may well be reinforced by the developing technological opportunities for public and private collaboration on the web, even perhaps for new involvements in big-science projects through web interactions or interlinked computing. In short, there are growing numbers of people with the opportunities, experience, and confidence to actively participate in knowledge through their own researching. This is not a plea for governmental support or university incorporation. As a productive and vigorous sector of intellectual life these researchers do not need patronising exhortations to ‘participate’ – they already do so. Their enthusiasm and dedication will continue, self-motivated. But one should not romanticise the downsides or forget that some regimes are less open than others to their participation. The problems earlier identified by US independent scholars have not gone away: of access to libraries and archives (opening hours, not just cost), rejection by in-groups controlling publication or grants, lack of colleagueship and support, and a sense of exclusion, missing the recognition they might have had within a university (Gross and Gross 1983: esp. 33ff.). Now too non-university researchers can be frustrated – at the least put to cost and trouble – in getting access to the kinds of funding, libraries, labs, equipment, networking or even in some cases electronic databases that come more freely to those within the university sector. Some independent scholars’ associations have attempted to develop routes through such barriers, and individuals found backstairs ways into university networks and resources; but others accept it in silence, do not even consider applying for grants that could be open to them, or simply lack the expectation of more open opportunities. The free pursuit of knowledge celebrated in many university visions does not always extend to those who would participate from beyond the walls.

16 Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls

The starting point must surely be a greater recognition of their existence. Here is a substantial, vibrant and largely self-financed sector of the knowledge society, uneven and sometimes wild no doubt, but with a major role in both extending and consolidating our frames of knowledge. And if indeed there is, as Barnett and others have suggested, a growing democratisation of knowledge production then this widening spread of voices should be heard. Some policy-makers and commentators would fence out their contribution and delimit ‘research’ by corralling it into ever more restrictive, disciplinary and centrally controlled pens, perhaps closing doors that were once open. Others may yet warm to a view formulated some twenty years back but surely still valid: If the encouragement of intellectual diversity and enterprise are central to the goals of a cultural democracy, then those whose interests lie outside current academic norms play an essential role. . . . Independent scholars, their contribution, and the organizations they represent are a necessary enlargement of the world of learning. (Gross and Gross 1983: 26) Universities will remain, and rightly so, as powerful nodes for the generation, accumulation and evaluation of knowledge. But to look just to them is to miss the full intellectual capital of which they are only part – the immense world of active players beyond the walls not just in industry, commerce, government or think tanks, but in homes, in charities, in associations large and small, in informal groupings, and networks, and through the whole complex spectrum of amateur and independent researchers. As Webster concludes, universities ‘have a major part to play now and in the future. In fulfilling that role, however, they have no need to make claims either that research within the walls is their pre-eminent contribution or that research outside the walls is of a lesser order.’ This is reinforced in Barnett’s final plea for an ethic of knowledge more suitable for today: one not for policing boundaries but built around such concepts as openness, accessibility, diversity and dialogue, of hospitality to other presences and voices; an ethic that would ‘help unify the knowing efforts and the forms of inquiry within and beyond the walls of the academy’. Only with this larger perspective can we gain a realistic insight into the richnesses and the challenges of knowledge creation today, and the notable ways in which those beyond as well as within the universities do more than just ‘participate’ in the world of

Ruth Finnegan 17

knowledge – they take an active, serious and enthusiastic part in creating and sustaining it.

Notes 1. The related literature is clearly too vast to even start to reference here but recent analyses I have found particularly helpful include Barth 2002, Brown and Duguid 2002, Burke 2000, Delanty 2001, Fuller 1997, 2000, 2002, McCarthy 1996, Nowotny et al. 2001, Scott 2000, 2004, Strand et al. 2003, Thomas 2002, Swidler and Arditi 1994, Webster 2002, Webster et al. 2004, Whitley 2000. 2. Otherwise unattributed references are to chapters in this book. 3. US National Coalition of Independent Scholars (www.ncis.org), Independent Scholars Association of Australia (www.independentscholars.asn.au) and the fledgling British Association for Independent Research (www.association forindependentresearch.org); also Society for Amateur Scientists (www.sas.org).

References Barth, Fredrik (2002) ‘An anthropology of knowledge’, Current Anthropology 43, 1: 1–18. Bligh, D., Thomas, H. and McNay, I. (1999) Understanding Higher Education, Exeter: Intellect. Booth, Wayne (1999) For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. (2002) The Social Life of Information, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Burke, Peter (2000) A Social History of Knowledge, from Gutenberg to Diderot, Oxford: Polity. Castells, Manuel (2004) ‘Universities and cities in a world of global networks’, Sir Robert Birley Lecture, City University London, available at http://www.city.ac.uk/ social/birley2004.htm/. Chapman, Allan (1998) The Victorian Amateur Astronomer: Independent Astronomical Research in Britain 1820–1920, Chichester: Wiley. Chapman, Allan (2004) Mary Somerville and the World of Science, Bristol: Canopus. Delanty, Gerard (2001) Challenging Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society, Buckingham: Open University Press. Eraut, Michael (1994) Developing Professional Knowledge and Competence, London: Falmer. Ferris, T. (2002) Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers are Probing Deep Space and Guarding Earth from Interplanetary Peril, London: Simon & Schuster. Fuller, Steve (1997) ‘Life in the knowledge society: A case of some really artificial intelligence’, Theory, Culture & Society 14, 1: 143–55. Fuller, Steve (2000) The Governance of Science: Ideology and the Future of the Open Society, Buckingham: Open University Press. Fuller, Steve (2002) Knowledge Management Foundations, Boston: ButterworthHeinemann.

18 Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls Gaudillière, J.-P. and Löwy, I. (eds) (1998) The Invisible Industrialist: Manufactures and the Production of Scientific Knowledge, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Gieryn, T.F. (1999) Cultural Boundaries of Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994) The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, London: Sage. Gross, Ronald and Gross, Beatrice (1983) Independent Scholarship: Promise, Problems, and Prospects, New York: College Board. Harvey, A.D. (2002) ‘5* means nothing off campus’, The Times Higher 25 January. HEFCE (2004) Council Briefing 54, Bristol: Higher Education Funding Council for England. Himanen, P. (2001) The Hacker Ethic, London: Secker and Warburg. Jacoby, Russell (2000) The Last Intellectuals. American Culture in the Age of Academe, 2nd edn, New York: Basic Books. Jarvis, Peter (2001) Learning in Later Life, London: Kogan Page. Kuklick, H. and Kohler, R.E. (eds) (1996) Science in the Field, special issue, Osiris Second Series 11. Leadbeater, Charles and Miller, Paul (2004) The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts are Changing our Economy and Society, London: Demos, online www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/proameconomy. McCarthy, E.D. (1996) Knowledge as Culture: The New Sociology of Knowledge, London: Routledge. McNair, S. (1997) ‘Is there a crisis? Does it matter?’, in Barnett, Ronald and Griffin, Anne (eds) The End of Knowledge in Higher Education, London: Cassell. Mims, Forrest M. III (1999) ‘Amateur science – strong tradition, bright future’, Science 284, 2 April: 55–6. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2001) Rethinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity Press. Percy, J.R. and Wilson, J.B. (eds) (2000) Amateur-Professional Partnerships in Astronomy, San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Roberts, Gareth (2003) Review of Research Assessment: Report by Sir Gareth Roberts to the UK Funding Bodies, http://www.ra-review.ac.uk. Scott, Peter (ed.) (2000) Higher Education Re-formed, London: Falmer. Scott, Peter (2004) ‘Prospects for knowledge work: Critical engagement or expert conscription?’, New Formations 53: 28–40. Secord, A. (1996) ‘Artisan botany’, in Jardine, N., Secord, J.A. and Spary, E.C. (eds) Cultures of Natural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stebbins, Robert A. (1992) Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Stebbins, Robert A. (2001) New Directions in the Theory and Research of Serious Leisure, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Strand, K., Marullo, S., Cutforth, N., Stoecker, R. and Donohue, P. (2003) Community-Based Research and Higher Education: Principles and Practices, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Swidler, Ann and Arditi, Jorge (1994) ‘The new sociology of knowledge’, Annual Review of Sociology 20: 305–29. Thomas, Keith (2002) ‘The life of learning’, Proceedings of the British Academy 117: 201–35.

Ruth Finnegan 19 Tuomi, I. (2002) Networks of Innovation: Change and Meaning in the Age of the Internet, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uglow, Jenny (2002) The Lunar Men, London: Faber & Faber. Warner, D. and Palfreyman, D. (eds) (2001) The State of UK Higher Education: Managing Change and Diversity, Buckingham: Open University Press. Webster, Frank (2002) Theories of the Information Society, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Webster, Frank (ed.) (2004) The Information Society Reader, London: Routledge. Wells, Gordon (2002) ‘Inquiry as an orientation for learning, teaching and teacher education’, in Wells, Gordon and Claxton, Guy (eds) Learning for Life in the 21st Century, Oxford: Blackwell. Whitley, Richard (2000) The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winchester, Simon (1998) The Surgeon of Crowthorne. A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words, London: Viking. Winchester, Simon (2003) The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Part I Looking Back

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1 To the Heavens in Rural Lancashire: Jeremiah Horrocks and His Circle, and the Foundation of British Astronomical Research Allan Chapman

In continental Europe, the astronomical revolution of the Renaissance was the product of great urban centres and powerful patrons who backed and promoted the work of figures such as Galileo and Kepler. In the British Isles, however, things were very different. Queen Elizabeth I and the succeeding Stuart kings were relatively hard up, by European standards, whereas England in particular had one of the richest and most powerful middle classes in the world. This chapter describes how it was from these people that Britain’s own astronomical revolution was born.

Astronomical research and the scientific revolution in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe The scientific revolution in continental Europe was, in so many ways, the product of institutions. The 40-year analysis of astronomical tables, and their errors, which led Nicholas Copernicus to propose in 1543 that the earth moved around the sun, was accomplished through the time and resources made available to him from the revenues of the Polish Cathedral where he was a Canon. Tycho Brahe’s re-observation of the northern heavens between 1572 and 1598, which released a flood of new data into the scientific community, was performed on the strength of generous official grants from the Danish government; while both Galileo and Johannes Kepler, in addition to holding university professorships, benefited from the support of powerful monarchs. Galileo, after rising to fame in 1610, became a scientific courtier to the Medici family in his native Tuscany; 23

24 Looking Back

while Kepler inherited Tycho’s last appointment – though not his lavish revenues – as mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor. All of these men, and a good number besides, had come to wrestle with one of the most intractable intellectual problems of the Renaissance: why did the planets not move as the astronomical tables said that they should? Why was it that, when one took the historic observations and tables of the Greeks such as Hipparchus and Ptolemy, of medieval Europeans such as John de Sacrobosco, or of fourteenth-century Arabs like Ulugh Beigh they all failed to predict the motions of the heavens with accuracy? Of course, all these astronomers took it as axiomatic that the sun, moon, planets, and stars rotated around an earth that was fixed in the centre of the universe, and believed that one could explain the apparent speeding up and slowing down of certain planets, such as Mars, by making adjustments to the geometrical models which they believed could be used to account for the complex motion of the heavens. Yet the idea that the earth actually moved around the sun, and that the earth and planets might well move in elliptical and not circular orbits, was one of the most profound realisations about the world in which we live ever to have been made by the human mind. Its imaginative power was immense, for the notion that the earth might be spinning in space flew in the face of reason and common sense, for how did we avoid being flung into space? On the other hand, these seemingly absurd ideas did make it much easier to model the movements of the planets, so that observed astronomical phenomena agreed with geocentric mathematical predictions. And of course, what had played a fundamental role in gathering this fresh evidence was a radically new concept of the power of senseknowledge. Did this include no more than what our five natural senses revealed to us, or did it also encompass the new and very precise data revealed to us by the telescope and recently invented precision anglemeasuring instruments which raised our age-old senses to a more refined level of perception? Indeed, in 1665, Robert Hooke was to refer to these instruments as ‘artificial Organs’, in so far as they presented to the human senses an abundance of new information of which mankind had been ignorant since the dawn of time. By 1630, therefore, the nature of the heavens, the possibility of the sun being at the centre of the solar system, and the interpretation of the new telescopic discoveries, such as Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter or the spots on the sun, were being discussed across learned Europe. And needless to say, they were being debated in the British Isles as well, as people read the works of Galileo and Kepler, and bought

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telescopes – often made in Holland or Paris – with which to look at the planets for themselves. Yet so far the British response to these great continental discoveries was generally the conservative one of admiration, wonder, and gradual acceptance. For even by the 1630s no Englishman (except the reclusive, unpublished and now deceased Thomas Harriot) had made major independent discoveries in the New Astronomy, whether in London, Oxford, Cambridge, or at the artistically cultured court of King Charles I. On the other hand, one might suggest that at the same time as the Italian Renaissance was giving expression to the genius of Galileo and England was witnessing the flourishing of Shakespeare, so England was on the verge of making another of its contributions to Renaissance civilisation, by taking the European astronomical discoveries where Kepler and Galileo had left off, to take them yet further. For in so many ways England’s great legacy to the Renaissance lay in her sciences.

Amateur astronomers in north-western England While it is true that in the early seventeenth century Henry Briggs and Henry Gellibrand at Gresham College, London, were making major experimental advances in our understanding of the nature of terrestrial magnetism (in the wake of William Gilbert’s De Magnete of 1600), the next advances in astronomy, after those of Galileo, Kepler, and Pierre Gassendi, were unfolding in the most unexpected of places: rural Lancashire, and across the Pennines in West Yorkshire – a part of England, moreover, which was thinly populated, relatively poor, and lacking in major educational resources. One of the very last places, indeed, where one might have expected to find a group of men who were actively wrestling with the great continental discoveries, and making advances beyond them. For what had been done in Florence, Prague and Paris was being examined and further developed in Salford, Liverpool, and villages such as Much Hoole near Preston, and Middleton just outside Leeds. Why the English astronomical Renaissance should have sprung up in this north-western environment is not easy to explain. There were no especial lines of patronage in the region that were fundamentally different from what one might have expected to find in Norfolk or Devonshire, let alone what could have been possible in London, Oxford, and Cambridge. After all, there were intellectually inclined county squires, small merchants, and clergy spread across the country, though their interests tended more to literature or the arts, rather than to science. Nor did the region possess any particular local attributes which may have

26 Looking Back

led to the cultivation of astronomy in a serious way. Yes, it is true that Liverpool was a port, but in 1630 it was still very much of a regional port serving the Irish Sea and the coasting trade, and would not necessarily have been stimulated by the astronomical needs of global navigation. In that respect, London, Bristol or Plymouth would have provided more fertile astronomical soil. Quite simply, there is no obvious set of social or economic circumstances that can be invoked to explain why the European Astronomical Renaissance took root in rural Lancashire and West Yorkshire, beyond the contingent presence of a small group of individuals who happened to be interested in the subject. The most intellectually significant of these individuals was Jeremiah Horrocks (1618/19 to 1641), the son of a Toxteth, Liverpool, yeoman farmer with family connections to the local watch-making trade. Horrocks’s brother Jonas also had astronomical interests, and probably owned a telescope, though we know nothing of Jonas beyond a few passing remarks by Jeremiah. Then there was William Crabtree (1610–44), a clothier, or cloth-dealer, of Salford, who was already established as a serious astronomer by 1636, and was a formative influence on the young Horrocks. And there was also William Gascoigne (1612–44), who seems to have been descended from a Catholic landed family at Middleton near Leeds, and to have received part of his education at Oxford. Very clearly, these three north-country astronomers had each received a good general education. Horrocks and Gascoigne had attended university (Horrocks had matriculated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he resided between 1632 and 1636), though neither had taken degrees. William Crabtree had attended the ‘Manchester School’, which would probably have been a grammar school attached to the Collegiate Church (now Manchester Cathedral). Yet while none of these men would have encountered the New Astronomy of the European Renaissance on a formal curricular basis at school or university, all three would have received a good grounding in Latin, the language of learning in the early seventeenth century, and hence would have had access to the writings of Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, Gassendi, and the other European discoverers. We know that they did have access to the works of these men for the simple reason that they mention them in their surviving correspondence, along with the works of lesser figures such as Philip Lansberg, Ismael Bouilleau, and others. Crabtree especially seems to have owned a decent library of both contemporary and historical astronomy, having no doubt acquired these works through his contacts in the textile trade, which in those days operated through London and Flanders. We also know that Crabtree had some sort of correspondence with Samuel Foster, Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London, for he mentions him by name in a letter to Gascoigne.

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Yet these three figures, Horrocks, Crabtree, and Gascoigne, very clearly had correspondence with and connections to a wider diaspora of learning in the region and did not operate in isolation. Their active and sustained correspondence for instance fed into and advanced their individual researches making them to some extent a connected endeavour and acted as one sounding board for their discoveries and applications. They were part of a wider circle rather than individuals in isolation. Common to them all, for instance, were the brothers Charles (Snr) and Christopher Towneley, of Towneley Hall near Burnley, Lancashire, and to a lesser extent the Sherburnes of Stonyhurst. Both the Towneleys and the Sherburnes were old Roman Catholic gentry families, largely frozen out of public life because of their faith, yet still forces to be reckoned with and generous patrons of learning in their native Lancashire. It is almost certain, moreover, that they were connected with the Gascoignes, a family of the same social rank and Catholic faith, living just a few miles to the east on the Yorkshire side of the Pennines. We also know that men from both the Towneley and Gascoigne families died in the Royalist cause in the great Civil War battle fought on relatively nearby Marston Moor, Yorkshire, on 2 July 1644. The Towneleys in particular were active in science, both as practitioners and patrons, through at least two generations. In the early 1660s, for instance, the Halifax, Yorkshire, physician Dr Henry Power was conducting barometric experiments at the top and bottom of Pendle Hill, Lancashire, with Charles Towneley, along with investigations into the ‘fiery’ and other ‘damps’ found in coal mines and other deep pits in the vicinity. Richard Towneley, son of Charles Towneley (Snr) and nephew of Christopher, then became in his generation a friend and correspondent of the Revd John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, in the 1670s, and when Richard Towneley drew up his will in 1706, he specifically mentioned the value of the scientific instruments that he owned. It had been Richard Towneley who not only came to acquire some of the surviving instruments and papers of Horrocks, Crabtree, and Gascoigne, but who also made them available for the young Flamsteed to study when he visited Towneley Hall in 1672, and who played a part in passing on their achievements to the Royal Society and on to the wider realm of learning.

The achievements of Horrocks and his circle So what did Horrocks, Crabtree, and Gascoigne do that was so original? They were certainly not the first English Copernicans, nor were they the first to read the works of Galileo and Kepler; while Thomas Harriot and Sir William Lower had probably discovered sunspots as early as

28 Looking Back

December 1610, which was some months before Galileo, though they did not seem to fully grasp their significance, and failed to publish their findings. The real significance of Horrocks and his circle lay in their attitude towards the nature of new knowledge, and the emphasis which they placed upon original observations made with modern instruments (as opposed to a relatively uncritical acceptance of the achievements of the past), added to which they were confident that they, and fellow ‘moderns’, belonged to a new epoch in the history of astronomical discovery – an epoch, indeed, in which mankind would break free from the shackles of ancient authority, which they believed had bound astronomical knowledge since the days of the ancient Greeks. This new trust in instrument-derived sense-knowledge is clearly manifested in Horrocks’s and Crabtree’s correspondence after 1636, where they express disillusionment with the errors present in the standard published tables – Horrocks had an especial animus against the Tabulae Motuum of Philip Lansberg – and in their constant concern with observing, measuring, and recording. It is also displayed in William Gascoigne’s invention, around 1639, of that historically portentous instrument, the telescopic eyepiece micrometer, whereby very tiny angles could be measured to a critical level of accuracy through the telescope. But most of all, Horrocks’s, Crabtree’s, and Gascoigne’s scientific confidence derived from the telescope itself. For did not Galileo’s ‘perspective cylinder’ of 1610 show that the telescopic universe was a very different place from the universe seen solely by the naked eye? For to the naked eye, the planets were but moving stars, whereas through the telescope, they appeared to be spheres and worlds in their own right. Jupiter, moreover, even had four hitherto unknown satellites going around him, thereby nonplussing those conservative astronomers who said that the earth was the only point of rotation in the universe, because it was at the centre. What is more, Venus showed phases, which strongly suggested that it turned around the sun and not the earth; while even the sun itself, far from being serene and changeless as the ancients had taught, was revealed by the telescope to rotate on its axis every 28 days, and was sometimes blotted with sunspots. And perhaps most of all, it was the moon which most undermined classical astronomical authority, for through the telescope, the lunar surface showed a complex geography of craters, ‘seas’, bays, and mountains, that reminded one of maps of the earth’s surface. Was the moon a world like our own, with ‘Selenite’ (from the Greek moon goddess Selene) inhabitants? Now Horrocks, Crabtree, and Gascoigne invented none of these ideas. They had simply spilled across Europe after Galileo’s monumental

Allan Chapman 29

Siderius Nuncius (‘Starry Messenger’) of 1610, in which he had announced his first telescopic discoveries, and which had made him famous across learned Europe. But what these Galilean discoveries did was to make people realise that if they could build yet more powerful telescopes and even more delicate measuring instruments, then they might discover yet more celestial wonders. This sense of new possibilities suffuses the correspondence of Crabtree and Horrocks during the late 1630s, and in one letter of 7 August 1640, Crabtree describes his own telescopic observation of some recent sunspots, and uses them as evidence of the fact that the sun possesses an independent axial rotation. Then in addition to the telescopic discoveries, the new celestial mechanics of Johannes Kepler had a profound influence upon the northern astronomers, and from a surviving list of 31 astronomical books which Jeremiah Horrocks knew in 1635, no less than four titles were works by Kepler. Crabtree, moreover, seems to have owned an even larger astronomical library. Kepler’s significance lay in his announcement in 1608 that the planet Mars, instead of moving in a circular orbit, as had been thought to be the case since time immemorial, actually moved in an ellipse. Then in 1619, Kepler amplified his original discovery by describing an exact mathematical ratio in accordance with which Mars and by extension the other planets sped up and slowed down as they orbited. And of course, it was around the sun that Kepler argued the planets orbited, and not the earth. And what this new Keplerian celestial mechanics did was provide astronomy with its first exact mathematical laws. For in Kepler’s eyes, the planets did not move because they were attached to great transparent spheres which rotated about the earth, as the ancients had concluded, but rather moved in empty space, under the control of some invisible yet mathematically exact force which he believed emanated from the sun. Later astronomers would call this force gravity. But what is of crucial importance in the present context is that Jeremiah Horrocks was the first scientist in Britain and in Europe to take the concept of orbital ellipticity and develop it further. From a series of meticulous observations and measurements, Horrocks had come to conclude by 1638 that the moon also moved around the earth in an elliptical orbit, of which the earth occupied one of the geometrical foci. This breakthrough enabled him to begin to make sense of the very complex orbit which the moon describes around the earth as part of its 28 day and longer orbital cycles when its changing position is measured against the positions of the fixed stars. This changing earth–moon distance, moreover, predicated that the angular diameter subtended by the moon, as observed from the earth,

30 Looking Back

must vary across the lunar cycles, and if one could measure these changing angular sizes accurately, one could check the theory by means of something like an experimental test. This is one reason why the telescope eyepiece micrometer which William Gascoigne invented around 1640 was to become so crucial, for in its capacity to measure celestial angles to within a few arc-seconds, it enabled one to apply stringent tests to a theory. For as the north-country astronomers came intuitively to understand, scientific knowledge was to be most effectively advanced when new discoveries enabled the framing of new hypotheses, and where in turn, these hypotheses had to pass the acid test of scrupulous physical investigation and proof if they were to stand firm. It was not for nothing, therefore, that when Crabtree saw Gascoigne’s early micrometer in 1640 he wanted one for Horrocks and himself, and asked Gascoigne ‘Could I purchase it with Travel, or procure it for Gold?’ Horrocks’s work on the moon’s motion, and his theory of how it moved in an elliptical orbit, would itself have been a spectacular work of genius by any standards; but then, from his analyses of the orbital data, Horrocks drew a further conclusion, namely, that the long axis – or apside line – through the lunar orbital ellipse does not remain in one place with reference to a given point in the starry background, but actually rotates back upon itself, or precesses, as the earth–moon–sun position constantly changes in space. These lunar orbital dynamics discovered by Horrocks would later prove invaluable to Sir Isaac Newton when he developed his theory of Universal Gravitation, half a century later. At the heart of Crabtree’s, Horrocks’s, and Gascoigne’s work was a great deal of practical, hands-on observation of the heavens, especially of the sun, moon, and planets as they moved amongst the stars of the zodiac. And whilst these men used the basic geometry of the zodiac, with its 12 signs each encompassing 30° of sky, it should be emphasised that they displayed no sign of interest in astrology or astrological prediction. Indeed, in some of their letters and surviving writings they pour contempt upon astrology. Yet on the other hand, they saw no reason why the immemorial zodiac divisions should not be used to monitor the physical motions of the planets, quite apart from their occult connotations. Measuring the exact distance of the sun, moon, and planets from each other, and from the First Point of Aries (Spring Equinox) was crucial for these northern astronomers, because that was the way in which they uncovered the errors in the standard astronomical tables, and went on to draw original conclusions about the planetary motions. And for this, they used a variety of probably home-made mathematical instruments

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whereby they could read degrees and minutes of arc in the sky. Both Horrocks and Crabtree owned several types of ‘Astronomical Radii’ and at least one quadrant for measuring lateral and vertical angles in the sky, while in addition Crabtree seems to have timed observations with a clock. With these instruments, they were able to construct new tables for the motions of the planets that were more accurate than the published ones. Indeed, Horrocks’s and Crabtree’s letters are full of these observations, measurements, and comparisons with the standard published tables, and it is clear that they were consciously trying to obtain regular results that were more accurate and more reliable than those tables. We do not know whether William Gascoigne’s invention of the micrometer was spurred on by what Crabtree and Horrocks were doing in Lancashire, or whether the micrometer was the product of his own wrestlings with the same problems as they were dealing with. Yet what is beyond doubt is that the micrometer was one of the watershed inventions in the history of optical and mechanical technology. It came from the astronomer’s need to be able to measure very small angles through the telescope, such as the varying angular diameters of the sun and the moon at different seasons of the year, to see if the variations conformed to predicted Keplerian criteria, or else to note the positions of the planets from dim stars in the starry background. For while the telescope had been around as a scientific instrument since 1609, it had so far proved impossible for astronomers to devise a way whereby a pair of marker points – like the crosshairs in a modern rifle sight – could be inserted into the telescope’s field of view to enable the observer to measure the relative positions of objects in that field. But Gascoigne made that crucial optical discovery – where to place a marker to make it stand out in a telescope field – at his father’s house near Leeds in 1640, and then went on to develop it further. He next had the bright idea of inserting two marker points into the same field, and controlling each with a delicate screw so that an astronomer looking at the moon, let us say, could carefully adjust one screw-controlled marker point to one side of the moon, and the other to the other side. Once this had been achieved, the astronomer could use his knowledge of the optical geometry of his telescope to calculate the angle subtended between the two marker points to a critical level of accuracy. And by 1640–41, Gascoigne was using his micrometer to monitor the changing seasonal diameters of the moon, in accordance with the Keplerian theory of elliptical orbits mentioned above. Quite simply, an instrument which would come to be recognised as of prodigious scientific importance had been thought out, built, and used to elucidate the

32 Looking Back

most abstruse scientific puzzles of the age by a young country gentleman living in an obscure Yorkshire manor house. It is hardly surprising that when Gascoigne’s friends Crabtree and Horrocks heard of the device, they also wanted micrometers to give a new level of precision to their own telescopic observations. Yet it would not be until the 1660s that Gascoigne’s instrument came to be known to the wider world, in consequence of the chaos of civil war which descended upon Britain in 1642. It was in 1639, however, that Jeremiah Horrocks made the discovery which would immortalise both himself and Crabtree. Now while Kepler, in his own study of planetary dynamics, had correctly predicted that the planet Venus would pass across the sun’s disk in 1631, no one had observed this because it happened after sunset for European observers. Kepler had said that another Venus transit would not occur until 1761, but in October 1639 Horrocks, now working in some ecclesiastical capacity (though still too young to be a priest) in the village of Much Hoole, near Preston, Lancashire, calculated that on 24 November 1639 Venus would once again transit the sun. He told Crabtree and other astronomical friends, but only he and Crabtree saw the event on that cloudy late November day. Horrocks had found that the celebrated Kepler had made an error in the orbital theory of Venus; he corrected that error, and, along with Crabtree, became the first person on the face of the earth to witness a Venus transit. Horrocks then wrote a short Latin treatise describing his and Crabtree’s work, in which he reminded his intended readers of the importance of not simply following others, but of relying on one’s instruments and observations if one wanted to make original discoveries and to advance scientific knowledge. He also used his Venus in Sole Visa (‘Venus in transit across the sun’) as a manifesto for his Copernicanism, as he drew unambiguously sun-centred solar system evidences from the transit observation. Only five other Venus transits occurred after 1639, falling in 1761, 1769, 1874, 1882, and, most recently, on 8 June 2004. Another will occur in 2012, but after that, we must wait until 2117. These three astronomers all died young, Horrocks and Crabtree of natural causes in 1641 and 1644 respectively, while Gascoigne fell at Marston Moor in 1644. After their deaths Richard and Christopher Towneley began to collect what survived of Horrocks’s, Crabtree’s, and Gascoigne’s books, manuscripts, and instruments. What is clear, however, is that these three men’s work inspired others in the vicinity. Jeremy Shakerley, a Lancashire client of the Towneleys, was deeply influenced by ‘Our worthy Country-man, Master Jeremy Horrox’, and

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became the first writer to mention Horrocks’s name in print, in his books published between 1649 and 1653. Then there was Nathan Pighells, and the young Sir Jonas Moore. It was Moore, indeed, who would take the work of this Lancashire circle to London, and after 1660, into the ranks of the newly established Royal Society, which august body would, in 1672, publish Crabtree’s and Horrocks’s surviving correspondence, rightly deeming it the beginning of a critical, observational and experimental tradition of British science. Yet a clear indication of the perceived international importance of the work of Horrocks and his friends can be seen in the fact that Horrocks’s Venus in Sole Visa was first published in Dantzig, Poland, in 1662. It seems that in the early Royal Society, a manuscript copy of the Venus treatise came into the hands of the illustrious Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, when he was on a visit to London. Somehow a copy passed from Huygens to Hevelius in Dantzig, and Hevelius published it at his own expense in 1662. And as Huygens and Hevelius were two of the most illustrious astronomers in Europe at that time, one gets some measure of how the work of the northern astronomers was coming to be perceived by the international world of learning.

Conclusion As was indicated at the outset, there is no easy or obvious explanation why the great European astronomical Renaissance should have taken root in what was then the remote and relatively backward north-west of England in the 1630s. But that is simply what happened. What is more, the researches and personal friendships that sprang up between Horrocks, Crabtree, Gascoigne, Towneley, and others begs more historical questions than can be easily answered. These questions, moreover, encompass such topics as the way in which books and ideas spread across Europe, the precise nature of the motivations which drove these men, and the relationship between their astronomy and their wider beliefs. Particularly fascinating in this latter context were their religious beliefs, for in addition to the fact that they were sincere and devout Christians, their friendships cut across denominational lines, for Horrocks and Crabtree were Protestant Anglicans, while Gascoigne and the Towneleys were from Recusant old Roman Catholic families: ancient gentry families which had simply refused to acknowledge King Henry VIII’s Protestant Reformation. Indeed, there were a good many of these old Recusant Catholic families in Lancashire, and in some cases

34 Looking Back

they paid a heavy price for their faith: crippling Recusancy Fines to the Protestant government, severe punishment if Roman Catholic priests were found to be visiting their houses, and exclusion from the public life of their class, for Recusants could not generally serve as magistrates, regular military officers, or Members of Parliament. Perhaps one reason why the Towneleys, Gascoignes, and Sherburnes developed such conspicuous scientific and wider cultural interests is because these were subjects from which English Catholic intellectuals were not excluded by law. Yet to find Recusants on such amiable terms with their intellectual Protestant neighbours forces us to revise some of the hoary myths not only about Catholics and Protestants in the seventeenth century, but also about the wider relationship that existed between science and religion. For what all of these men saw in science, in addition to its technical fascination was an avenue for the deepening of their Christian faith as they explored the intricate wonders of God’s Creation. For as the devout Protestant Johannes Kepler put it, scientific discovery was but ‘thinking God’s thoughts after Him’. This view would also have been concurred with by Galileo who, in spite of his brush with the Inquisition for teaching the Copernican theory as a fact when he could not prove the same, lived and died a devout Roman Catholic, as would the Jesuit astronomers in the Collegio Romano. Indeed, to attempt to make historical sense of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution without recognising the powerful inspiration exerted by the Christian faith upon Catholics and Protestants alike would be like some future historian trying to understand the history of twentieth-century Russia while ignoring the impact of Marxism. Yet what is hard to explain in social and historical terms is why it was in rural Lancashire that the European astronomical revolution first took root. And that rooting and flourishing was acknowledged not only by Christopher Towneley and Sir Jonas Moore, who lived long enough to see the British establish a powerful metropolitan base in the Royal Society, but when the Revd John Flamsteed’s magnum opus, the Historia Coelestis Britannica (‘British Account of the Heavens’) was brought out in three thick folio volumes in 1725, he commenced this, the first great star catalogue of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, with five pages of hitherto unpublished observations and correspondence that had passed between Crabtree and Gascoigne between 1638 and 1643. For to Flamsteed, these north-country amateur astronomers, supported by their own financial resources rather than by institutions, laid the foundation stone upon which subsequent British astronomical research was built.

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Acknowledgement I wish to thank Dr Robert van Gent, of Utrecht University, Holland, for information regarding the passage of Horrocks’s manuscript to Hevelius by Christiaan Huygens.

References General bibliography Aughton, Peter (2004) The Transit of Venus: The Brief, Brilliant Life of Jeremiah Horrocks, Father of British Astronomy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Bailey, J.E. (1882) ‘Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree, observers of the transit of Venus, 24 November, 1639’, The Palatine Note-book II (Manchester): 253–66. Bailey J.E. (1883) ‘The writings of Jeremiah Horrox and William Crabtree’, Palatine Note-book III (Manchester): 17–22. Chapman, Allan (1982) Three North Country Astronomers, Swinton: Neil Richardson. Chapman, Allan (1986) ‘Jeremy Shakerley, 1626–1655(?)’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire: 135, 1–14. Chapman, Allan (1990a) ‘Jeremiah Horrocks, the transit of Venus, and the “New Astronomy” in early seventeenth-century England’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 31: 333–57. Chapman, Allan (1990b) Dividing the Circle: The Development of Critical Angular Measurement in Astronomy, 1500–1850, Chichester: Praxis (also 1995 Chichester and New York: Praxis/Wiley). Chapman, Allan (2004) ‘Horrocks, Crabtree, and the 1639 transit of Venus’, Astronomy and Geophysics 5, 45: 26–31. Flamsteed, John (1982) The ‘Preface’ to John Flamsteed’s ‘Historia Coelestis Britannica’ 1725 (edited and introduced by Allan Chapman and based on a translation by Alison Dione Johnson), National Maritime Museum Monograph No. 52, Greenwich: National Maritime Museum. Shirley, John (ed.) (1974) Thomas Harriot, Renaissance Scientist, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Reproductions of original Horrocks, Crabtree and Gascoigne correspondence Horrocks, Jeremiah (trans. A.B. Whatton) (1859) The Transit of Venus across the Sun, and Whatton’s ‘Memoir . . . to Horrocks’, London. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 2 (1667), 542–4 for micrometer; vol. 27 (1711) for Crabtree’s sunspot letter, 1640; vol. 30 (1717) for Crabtree’s letters. Rigaud, S.J. (1841) Correspondence of Scientific Men of the Seventeenth Century 1, Oxford (33–59 for Gascoigne letters). Wallis, John (ed.) (1673) Jeremiae Horrocci . . . Opera Posthuma, London.

2 Collectors Harnessed: Research on the British Flora by Nineteenth-Century Amateur Botanists David E. Allen

Introduction Botany and geology have always enjoyed one great advantage over the third of the trio of studies to which the label ‘natural history’ eventually came to be restricted: unlike zoology, they have much more obvious practical utility. Geology, however, was a late-developer, for it began to cohere intellectually only as the eighteenth century was drawing to its close. Botany therefore had the field effectively to itself during the thousands of years in which it functioned as a branch of medicine, growing out of the need to distinguish the different kinds of herbs. As if it was not enough to form part of the best-regarded of all professions, it had a subsidiary usefulness in the guise of horticulture, with physic gardens acting as an intermediate domain in which two great streams of curiosity about the earth’s botanical riches converged to their mutual benefit. Botany’s achieving of autonomy, breaking free from its medical parent, was a very long drawn-out process. The healing role of plants was so much the dominant concern, so much a source of prestige and profit, that there may well have been a general reluctance to recognise that searching for herbs could sometimes tip over from a workaday necessity into a pursuit enjoyed for its own sake. In so far as it was in the course of expressly medical activity that such shifts in motive took place, on occasions when apothecaries or herb-gatherers were temporarily diverted into displays of expertise without ulterior purpose, the significance of these lapses doubtless passed without comment or even 36

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notice. All the same it is hard to believe that ‘herbarizing’ (as that off-duty indulgence came to be termed) occurred within the professional framework of medicine exclusively: there was nothing to prevent others discovering that pursuit from another direction. The urge to list or classify can arise in any person anywhere and does not require the prospect of financial gain or the aim of usefulness to set it in train. Despite the existence of the convenient pretext of serving the needs of medicine, there could always have been a compulsive cataloguer or two who happened to fasten on plants, and particularly unlabelled plants in the countryside at large, as the outlet for that compulsion, a choice encouraged by the fact that this was already a widespread and respected form of study. One likely looking candidate for this more purely amateur category is a Dominican friar, Father Henry Daniel, who as early as the mid-fourteenth century, during the reign of Richard II, if not before, was noting plants he came across in widely separate parts of England, recording where he found them in some cases with striking precision and, significantly, without mentioning alleged medicinal properties (Harvey 1981). The medieval monastic houses seem not to have been the major repositories of medical skills – as opposed to owning libraries of accumulated learned lore on the subject – that scholars have tended to assume, but rather to have bought those skills in from outside as and when needed (Rawcliffe 1999: 160). Thus a herbarising monk need not have had the remedying of ailments as the reason for that activity – or at any rate the primary one. There is a second credible candidate three centuries later. This is John Goodyer, who was the steward of a manor by lifelong profession. As the training for that was mainly legal in character, the prolonged and detailed study of the plants in his home area of south-east Hampshire, of which he has left abundant evidence, can only have been recreational. It is true that in his case the notes betray at times medicinal interest, but if he did put his knowledge of plants to a practical use, and that probably only latterly, there is no reason to suppose that the motive was financial (Gunther 1922: 19).

The advent of modishness That medical aura continued to cling to the study of plants, to its no small advantage, for many more years to come; indeed, it has never even today disappeared entirely. Halfway through the eighteenth century, however, a series of developments quite unconnected with medicine overtook the subject and propelled it, with comparative

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abruptness, into the cultural mainstream while at the same time greatly elevating it socially. Perhaps the most fundamental of these developments was the widespread awakening to the attractions of the countryside in the layer of society that could afford to indulge in the leisurely tours made possible by a markedly improved road system. But that might not have done botany much good had not the study chanced to undergo concurrently a great reduction in complexity. Thanks to Linnaeus, the string of Latin epithets that every kind of plant had hitherto borne by way of a standard name was now swept away and replaced by two words only, one describing the genus and the other the species. Thanks to Linnaeus too, an entirely artificial system of classifying plants devised by him, whereby the identity of any unfamiliar one could be established merely by noting the number and arrangement of its sexual organs, gained a sway over its rivals that lasted for half a century. Resisted in vain by some who refused to stomach what they saw as a perversion of the natural scheme of things, this speedily won favour among the less intellectually fastidious by virtue of its very simplicity. Because it was to the plant world that this novel classificatory system was patently the more applicable, it was in botany that Linnaeus’ innovations had for some years their most noticeable impact and for which they captured an early and eager following in many fashionable salons. This following extended into Court circles and even to Queen Charlotte herself, who proceeded to engage a succession of botanists of repute to provide her and the princesses with instruction in the subject. The King’s chief minister too, the Earl of Bute, took to the study so wholeheartedly that he not only hunted for plants around his country seat (ultimately falling off a cliff to his death in the course of this), but went so far as to propagate an improved version of the Linnaean system, of which he was the joint deviser, in a series of works of unexampled grandiosity printed at his personal expense (Miller 1988). So numerous were the devotees won for botany in the eighteenth century’s later years, as a field pursuit as well as in its guise of horticulture, and so great the resulting market for books enabling enthusiasts to put a name to what they found, that publishing these in English, instead of Latin, became feasible commercially. This offended the scholarly diehards, to whom it had the appearance of a contemptuous disregard for the needs and opinions of the rest of Europe’s learned, for whom Latin continued to serve as the time-honoured lingua franca (and in which new plants or animals still had to be described if the names bestowed on them were to command universal acceptance, a requirement

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which several British authors failed to fall in with, to their lasting detriment). With less to lose, those who wrote these new, more accessible works were typically people who had received a scholarly education but not achieved any prominence in the study as yet.

Appeal to women and artisans Prominent among this new breed of authors were women. With the possible exception of shell-collecting no other aspect of natural history proved to have such an appeal to them as botany, from the scientific study of which they had previously been excluded by their lack of the necessary command of Latin (Shteir 1984, 1987, 1996). For an explanation of their disproportionate allegiance to it there is no need to look further than the prevailing character of natural history at this period and for many years afterwards, for to a very great extent it was synonymous with the forming of personal collections of specimens. The botanical version, by now generally known as a ‘herbarium’ (which had supplanted the antiquated ‘hortus siccus’), was typically a combination of reference system, holiday mementoes and solid evidence of discoveries made, in some cases greatly augmented by means of exchanges, gifts or even purchases (though these last were far less usual in botany than in other branches of natural history). On the whole the collecting and preserving of plants was blessedly free of complicated, laborious or distasteful procedures that were inseparable from the catching and preserving of birds, say, or butterflies and moths. Plants needed no shooting or chasing; they did not have to be hammered out of rocks; they merely had to be picked and then dried slowly under pressure, a technique requiring only a modicum of skill and reassuringly akin to familiar domestic routines (Allen 1980: 249). The minimal expenditure on equipment that botanical collecting entailed, in contrast to entomology in particular, was in turn a factor in winning the study an impressively extensive and lasting popularity among manual workers in some of the heavily industrial districts, though field botany’s close affinity with herbalism contributed in their case too (Secord 1994, 1996). In extremis, any reasonably sized tin container could do duty for the botanist’s one special implement, now becoming known as the ‘vasculum’; any sharp instrument could sever stems or shoots; specimens could be pressed under books or a carpet and then stored between sheets of newspaper. The one absolute essential was regular access to a book with a reasonable range of illustrations depicting the commoner species. Not even illiteracy was a barrier to entry.

40 Looking Back

The edge that botany had over its rivals thanks to this simplicity of its modus operandi helpfully made up for its deterringly large vocabulary of Latinate technical terms and, in contrast at least to butterflies and birds, the much larger number of species liable to be met with almost everywhere and in need of being identified. Add to those advantages for collectors the study’s high standing socially and its image of usefulness, and it is little wonder that by the time the nineteenth century opened it had built up imposing strength across a remarkably broad front.

An amateur world Ironically, just as botany in Britain had achieved self-sufficiency, its medical parent temporarily re-embraced it. This was an unanticipated outcome of the Apothecaries’ Act of 1815. Under that, with the aim of putting out of business the all-too-numerous purveyors of quack medicines, all would-be entrants to general practice in England and Wales – and those included no small proportion of the large output of the Scottish medical schools as well – thenceforward had to be licensed. The body already conducting an examination of acceptable rigour that could serve as the necessary sieve for that purpose was London’s old established Society of Apothecaries. As the historical role of that sector of the medical profession included the making-up of plant-based potions, the Society had long been testing its apprentices on their knowledge of herbs, wild as well as cultivated. To their general dismay, the majority of intending doctors now found themselves having to acquire a smattering of a type of knowledge that they had come to think of as a thankfully outdated relic, while the medical schools, taken by surprise, hurriedly instituted courses for the purpose and cast around for people to teach them. Two wonderful windfalls for botany resulted. One was a sprinkling of new posts in the subject – even though many were only part-time – for some of which amateurs of proven scholarly standing (such as the ex-brewer, W.J. (later Sir William) Hooker, who would go on to turn the Royal Gardens at Kew into a world-class scientific institute) were the only suitable candidates available. The other was the product of a widespread revival of field classes, most conspicuously and fruitfully in the two leading Scottish universities. Ever since the late Renaissance, medical schools in many parts of Europe had been in the practice of deputing one of the professors to lead students out into the neighbouring countryside in order to familiarise them with a range of wild herbs, if only to save them from being sold ineffective and dangerous

David E. Allen 41

ones when the time came for them to buy in the markets (Allen 2000). Though many of the students now introduced to this tradition doubtless regarded such outings as a time-wasting joke, a proportion, once exposed to botany in the field, were captured for the pursuit and continued with it in their leisure in after years. This influx into the study of men well trained in microscopy was to have a specially valuable impact in those areas of botany that amateurs had hitherto tended to steer clear of, for want of access to distinctions that were too minute to be scrutinised with a hand-lens. Had circumstances been different, many in this fresh wave of medical recruits to botany would doubtless have preferred to adopt that as their profession instead, now that it was coming to be seen as an autonomous study. A degree in medicine was still the one form of certification available in Britain that was nearest in relevance for a career in one of the natural history sciences. Alas, though, the requisite openings barely yet existed. The one or two who did become full-time botanists, turning their back on their medical training, were in the fortunate position of having sufficient private means to do so as amateurs. Though there were nominal chairs in botany and the like in most of the universities, it was only exceptionally that those subjects were treated seriously enough to be examined as subjects: classics, theology and mathematics were, as ever, the ones that counted. Previously, private patronage had made up in part for that deficiency. John Ray had been supported by a young fellow-enthusiast, Francis Willughby, when he felt obliged to resign from his university position on grounds of conscience. Even better had been the experience of Johann Jacob Dillen, a young German botanist of promise talent-hunted from Giessen in 1721 by a rich London apothecary, James Sherard, to catalogue his horticultural collection as well as assist his brother William with his life-long project of producing an authoritative list of all the plants known in the world up to then. As a reward for his protégé’s conscientiousness, his patron then endowed what Oxford University still calls the Sherardian Professorship of Botany on the precondition that Dillenius (as he is better-known) was appointed to it. The first full-scale, full-length professional career for a botanist in Britain was thus entirely the product of private initiative. State patronage could reasonably have been expected to take over from that in the less aristocratic nineteenth century, but although that happened in France and especially in the German States, in Britain the temper of the times chronically obstructed such a development. The prevailing political philosophy disallowed public funding of museums and analogous

42 Looking Back

institutions at anything other than a grudgingly parsimonious level (cf. the similar situation in archaeology (Hunt, this book)), while the social code continued to categorise the furthering of knowledge as primarily a matter for leisured savants, denying gentlemanly status to any in paid employment in other than a traditional handful of select occupations (Berman 1974). As a result, until the 1880s at the earliest, the pursuit of science in Britain was perforce left very largely to amateurs, of whom by now there was only too obviously anything but a shortage. Such few career posts that did exist were mainly routine administrative ones, designed for clerks and remunerated accordingly. Without the crutch of some private income anyone accustomed to a higher standard of living who was rash enough to take one of those had to sacrifice much time and energy that would otherwise have been devoted to research to bookwriting on the side and other sources of supplementary earnings (Allen 1985). With the notable exception of the Geological Survey there was no significant number of professional naturalists in any one institution, so a country-wide corps of people with career concerns in common had little chance of emerging. It was necessarily with scholarly amateurs that this scatter of professionals consequently communicated and mixed with, for the most part extramurally – except in so far as they were able to travel and meet their opposite numbers on the Continent. Botany and zoology had in any case barely advanced as disciplines in Britain to the point where research demanded laboratories and costly equipment, so the paid and the unpaid essentially worked and thought alike. The sole edge that the professionals tended to have was continual access to much more extensive collections, as a basis for the taxonomic work that for almost all continued to be the staple.

Main thrusts of amateur research As with the majority of amateur botanists today, the flora of the country in which they had their home was the preponderant concern of their Victorian predecessors, if only because that was the most accessible physically and intellectually. When the century opened, much of Britain was still seriously under-explored and the chance of adding species to the national list were very much greater than it would be by the time the century ended; moreover, far fewer people were then in the practice of holidaying overseas, even if they were well able to afford it. Charles Cardale Babington, the leading expert on Britain’s flowering plants and ferns, though a well-to-do bachelor with ample leisure for

David E. Allen 43

most of his life never once crossed over to the Continent (though he did make a trip to Iceland); Hewett Cottrell Watson, his counterpart in the study of that flora’s distribution patterns, never crossed over to it either (though, with a parallel contrariness, he was not deterred by a voyage to the Azores). Although inland transport soon became plentiful and efficient once the railway system expanded – and that ended up by covering much more of the country than today, it needs to be remembered – it was much less usual to travel great distances. Many botanists, in common with the population as a whole, were anchored for much of their lives to the district in which they grew up. Even if they were members of the clergy and were moved around from one living to another, in between each move they could lead an existence that was both static and remote. Although there were always some field botanists, as in other branches of natural history, whose main concern was to see as many of the country’s species as possible, even if that took a lifetime, on the whole the focus in the subject was much more restricted geographically than in entomology or ornithology. This was partly because in a limited area there are typically many more kinds of wildflower than there are of butterflies or birds, which leaves the local worker much more enduringly challenged and content, partly because plants are much less mobile and tend as well to display patterns in their spatial occurrence that call for prolonged investigation. For this reason the compiling of book-length catalogues raisonées known as ‘local floras’ has traditionally been a more popular activity for botanists than has been the compiling of the zoological equivalents. In their classic form these projects have had a county as the area covered, an area large enough to be investigated with tolerable thoroughness over a reasonable span of years. The genre dates from the catalogue of the plants of Cambridgeshire that John Ray produced while a don there and published in 1660, and for a long time it scarcely evolved beyond a standard list of species with a note of their frequency and often a string of place-names after the rarer ones as a pointer to where those could be found. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, volumes of a much more elaborate type started to appear, the result in particular of attempts to make fieldwork more stringently systematic and less subject to individual biases. They also acquired a historical dimension, as herbaria and the past literature were both combed more thoroughly, which made it easier to tell how far species had increased or declined. On the downside, the consequently much greater bulk, added to a probably only local sale by and large, made the completed works much more

44 Looking Back

dauntingly expensive to put into print, providing a pretext for deferring publication indefinitely and continuing with the more congenial task of logging ever more finds. The record period of gestation so far has been a flora of Gloucestershire, which took 71 years from conception well inside the nineteenth century to eventual birth well inside the twentieth (Allen 2003: 272). It was only county pride and the commitment of a sponsoring local learned society that ensured the survival of such perilously long-running enterprises. The compiling of a local flora often generated as a by-product specialist study of one or more groups of plants that for one reason or another – rampant hybridisation, maybe, as in willows, or an asexual reproductive system, as in dandelions and blackberries – are particularly difficult to master. In some cases this built up in the course of time into a full-scale national monograph, involving much corresponding and exchange with fellow specialists, critically appraising the literature in several European languages and even putting together for sale extensive sets of specimens labelled with authoritative names. Especially to the fore in this line of work were some of the Anglican clergymen who provided so much of the intellectual backbone of natural history in the second half of the nineteenth century, increasingly taking the place of that earlier wave of medical practitioners. That clerical prominence should come as no surprise, for probably the greatest concentration of university graduates was to be found in the Church of England, a high proportion of them in rural parishes in which there were few recreational outlets apart from natural history for a man of scholarly leanings and, in that era, relatively ample leisure (cf. Hunt, this book).

Mapping distributions But it was out of the prevailing practice of forming personal herbaria that one of the greatest steps forward came. Because most kinds of botanical specimens, once pressed and dried, were by this period normally then mounted on largish sheets of paper (either constituting the pages of one or more albums, as earlier collectors tended to prefer, or stored loose in a series of folders), there was space at the foot of the sheet to write in the Latin and English names of the specimen concerned along with details of where, when and by whom the specimen had been collected. Increasingly, this information was entered on printed labels specially designed for the purpose, with headings which served to ensure that none of these items were omitted. Thanks to the almost invariable adoption of this easily observed routine, botanical

David E. Allen 45

specimens were by Victorian times much better documented than specimens in other branches of natural history. Of flowering plants and ferns alone, nearly three thousand identifiably separate herbaria of specimens collected in the wild within the British Isles are known or suspected to have been formed, of which three-quarters survive today in whole or in part, mostly in museums (Kent and Allen 1984). There were probably quite a number more that were too insignificant to have earned a mention in the literature and that failed to outlive their owner. In addition, there were and still are many analogous collections of mosses and liverworts, of lichens, and above all of seaweeds – those favourites of mid-Victorian holidaymakers. As a high proportion of all of these date from before 1900, the survivors constitute an invaluable body of readily checked historical evidence on which much present-day research is able to draw. Botanical collecting also enjoyed the special advantage that pressed specimens, whether mounted on sheets or not, were both light enough and easy enough to pack and protect to be confidently entrusted to the mails, particularly after those became cheaper and more reliable after the introduction in 1840 of the country-wide penny post. In theory, therefore, augmenting and enriching one’s collection with specimens from outside one’s home area was a simple matter; in practice, though, locating fellow collectors willing and able to supply one’s needs could involve much time-consuming correspondence. However, following the founding in 1836 of two national botanical societies, based in London and Edinburgh respectively, that problem was solved by organising exchanges on a mass basis. Conscious of the appeal such a service would have, both societies lost little time in inviting those members who collected to send in as many specimens as they could spare, with a view to receiving back once a year a parcel made up from the collective total proportional in size and interest to what they themselves had contributed. Thousands of specimens poured in in response, quickly overwhelming the individuals to whom these complex and onerous operations had been airily entrusted. The Edinburgh society soon discontinued its service as a result, but the London one persisted and, after a radical overhaul, managed to keep it in being until the society itself petered out in 1856 (Allen 1986). So greatly valued had that service been that a successor body was conjured into being shortly afterwards with the conducting of exchanges as its sole function, but this time with a membership restricted to no more than a dozen or two, in order to keep the amount of labour involved to a level that the volunteers who henceforward acted as the annual distributor found just

46 Looking Back

about tolerable. Under various guises that new body not only survived for a further century, but prompted several imitators over the years, including ones catering for collectors of mosses and lichens respectively. Through this means examples of difficult or newly discriminated entities were circulated for examination and comment, the individual verdicts being then brought together and placed on record in annual reports. The taxonomic study of the British flora was greatly advanced as a result (Lousley 1957). Out of that exchange activity, in turn, came the collective working out of the distribution of each species across the British Isles. As herbarium sheets (or the labels attached to those) included the specimens’ geographical provenance, a mass of data on that aspect was accumulated by these two societies in the late 1830s and 1840s as a by-product of their exchange services. The potential value of this for his researches into what he termed ‘topographical’ botany was not lost on the pioneer of that work in Britain, Hewett Watson, a fearsomely touchy but industrious and far-sighted individual blessed with unlimited leisure, and he drew on it heavily in those years for the basis of what would prove to be a succession of major publications on the subject (Egerton 2003). Initially, the amount of information available was too limited to justify his using a mapping unit finer than blocks of several counties grouped to form what he termed ‘provinces’; in time, though, as the records multiplied it eventually became feasible to switch to a series of smaller areas. Termed, rather unfortunately, ‘vice-counties’, these were a mixture of single counties and the products of Watson’s specially devised subdivisions of the larger ones. The 112 numbered units that resulted when Great Britain was divided up on this basis and the Isle of Man added (Ireland, then too little explored, had to be excluded and had to wait till the start of the next century to undergo similar treatment) were not nearly as equiformal as France’s départements, but they were serviceable for what Watson regarded as a halfway stage en route to what he had seen explicitly from the very first as the ultimate destination: a mapping unit as small as a dot (Dandy 1969). The vice-county system, unveiled by Watson in the last of his massive compendia in 1873–74, presented the field botanists of Britain with a challenge that they thoroughly relished: establishing the presence of species in vice-counties from which they were as yet unrecorded and so making the provisional picture that Watson had provided steadily more complete. A stimulating extra dimension was thereby added to the average amateur’s plant-hunting, and for some years a club even flourished

David E. Allen 47

that had the filling in of the blanks left by Watson as its primary function (Allen 1986: 89). Following Watson’s death a succession of individuals with a comparable taste for compiling took upon themselves the task of producing periodic updates. Proceeding hand in hand with the ever-continuing output of county and other local floras, this work imparted an additional sense of collective purpose, even if the goal it led towards was faintly visible to only a perceptive few. That goal was not indeed to be reached until the middle years of the twentieth century, in the shape of the first of the long and magnificent series of national distribution atlases, based on the ten-kilometre squares of the National Grid and produced by automatic data processing machinery, that the botanists, able to put into the field a force of 1500 by then (Perring and Walters 1962), pioneered and then stimulated many other communities of naturalists to copy. Truth to tell, it was a goal that Britain’s field botanists were shamefully tardy in arriving at, well beaten to its equivalents by their counterparts in several other countries. But even though it took them rather more than a hundred years, they did successfully attain it in the end. Despite the subsequent rise of professional biology and the development of advanced research techniques effectively inaccessible to those without the necessary specialised training, the study of the wild flora of these islands continues today to attract a not inconsiderable amateur following. In common with the other areas of natural history that dominated the scene in the nineteenth century, though, it cannot hope to match the immense popularity achieved by ornithology since that transformed itself into bird watching (Greenwood, this book). Amateurs still largely monopolise the compiling of local floras and the mapping of distributions; a few also work away at the further disentangling of various difficult groups, in some cases in conjunction with the handful of professionals who have survived the latest purge of taxonomic research and teaching within the universities. But two major new preoccupations have sprung up alongside those. One is the identifying of the multitude of non-native plants that have increasingly colonised the countryside from one source or another, more especially gardens. The other is conservation, into which has become channelled much of the energy that previously went into the forming of private collections. Together, those provide ample outlets for that minority who want to undertake fieldwork with some manifestly useful end. That minority in turn constitutes much of the membership of the five national societies that cater for the respective sub-communities of which field botany is composed: flowering plants and ferns (easily the largest, as ever),

48 Looking Back

mosses and liverworts, lichens, algae, and – though no longer part of the plant kingdom, strictly speaking – fungi. Despite overlapping, this corps d’élite must currently total between five and ten thousand individuals. Though far less obtrusive than a century ago, this thus still remains a flourishing area of activity.

References Allen, D.E. (1980) ‘The women members of the Botanical Society of London, 1836–1856’, British Journal for the History of Science 13: 240–54. Allen, D.E. (1985) ‘The early professionals in British natural history’, in Wheeler, A. and Price, J.H. (eds) From Linnaeus to Darwin: Commentaries on the History of Biology and Geology, London: Society for the History of Natural History. Allen, D.E. (1986) The Botanists: A History of the Botanical Society of the British Isles through 150 Years, Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies. Allen, D.E. (2000) ‘Walking the swards: Medical education and the rise and spread of the botanical field class’, Archives of Natural History 27: 335–67. Allen, D.E. (2003) ‘Four centuries of local Flora-writing: Some milestones’, Watsonia 24: 271–80. Berman, M. (1974) ‘Hegemony and the amateur tradition in British science’, Journal of Social History 8: 30–50. Dandy, J.E. (1969) Watsonian Vice-Counties of Great Britain, London: Ray Society. Egerton, F.N. (2003) Hewett Cottrell Watson: Victorian Plant Ecologist and Evolutionist, London: Ashgate Publishing. Gunther, R.T. (1922) Early British Botanists and Their Gardens . . . , Oxford: printed for the author. Harvey, J. (1981) Medieval Gardens, London: Batsford. Kent, D.H. and Allen, D.E. (1984) British and Irish Herbaria, London: Botanical Society of the British Isles. Lousley, J.E. (1957) ‘The contribution of exchange clubs to knowledge of the British flora’, in Lousley, J.E. (ed.) Progress in the Study of the British Flora, London: Botanical Society of the British Isles. Miller, D.P. (1988) ‘ “My favourite studdys”: Lord Bute as naturalist’, in Schweitzer, K.W. (ed.) Lord Bute: Essays in Re-interpretation, Leicester: Leicester University Press. Perring, F.H. and Walters, S.M. (eds) (1962) Atlas of the British Flora, London and Edinburgh: Nelson. Rawcliffe, C. (1999) Medicine for the Soul, Stroud: Sutton Publishing. Secord, A. (1994) ‘Science in the pub: Artisan botanists in early nineteenthcentury Lancashire’, History of Science 32: 269–315. Secord, A. (1996) ‘Artisan botany’, in Jardine, N., Secord, J.A. and Spary, E.C. (eds) Cultures of Natural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shteir, A.B. (1984) ‘Linnaeus’s daughters: Women and British botany’, in Harris, B.J. and McNamara, J.K. (eds) Women and the Structure of Society, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

David E. Allen 49 Shteir, A.B. (1987) ‘Botany in the breakfast room: Women and early nineteenthcentury plant study’, in Abir-Am, P.G. and Outram, D. (eds) Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789–1979, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Shteir, A.B. (1996) Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

3 Scientific Inquiry and the Missionary Enterprise David N. Livingstone

The juxtaposition of the adjectives in my title may strike some readers as bizarre. The conception of science as a progressive enterprise does not sit easily with the received image of missionaries as backwardlooking, anti-intellectual, fundamentalist. It is precisely this supposition, when conjoined to modernist neuroses about the West’s colonial past and the sense that the only science that really counts is professional science, that has conspired to write missionary knowledge out of scientific history. As John Stenhouse (forthcoming) points out, historians of modern scientific disciplines have, like Malinowksi, ‘depicted the missionary as an arrogant, self-righteous destroyer of indigenous cultures, a benighted Other over against whom the enlightened, modern, secular, professional’ self-defines. Like all ‘othering’ devices, such a priori exclusionary tactics fall foul of historical particularity. If the achievements of missionary science run counter to our expectations that scientific history is the story of grand theorists and experimentalists, that scientific rationality is necessarily at odds with religious commitment (see Chapman, this book), or that scientific inquiry is divorced from the messiness of cultural politics, then it is time to revise our notion of what constitutes scientific knowledge.

Missionary spaces and located sciences To speak of scientific inquiry and the missionary enterprise is already to invite censure. Treating missionary space as a singularity is a basic mistake. Missionaries occupied a remarkably diverse array of sites in different physical environments, historical situations, and cultural conditions. Missionary space is inescapably pluriform. And failure to take 50

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this seriously has allowed caricature to triumph over history, not least concerning the relationship between colonial projects and missionary endeavours (Stanley 1990). No doubt Jean and John Comaroff (1991: 8) have good reason to stage Wesleyan missionaries to South Africa in the early nineteenth century as ‘agent, scribe and moral alibi’ of the ‘colonizing project’. But even if this is so, it is simply wrong to mistake the particular for the general. As John Peel (2003: 5) writes: ‘though the links between Christian mission and “civilization” were extremely powerful and consequential, they were historically contingent and subject to strains’. Andrew Porter (1999: 242) concurs, observing that missionaries ‘were frequently hostile to Empire and westernization, or sensed their irrelevance to the missionary task’. In educational venues, for example, missionaries might welcome government funds, yet resist colonial tampering with the curriculum. Besides, missionary training of local teachers prefigured their own redundancy; mission schools routinely indigenised within a few generations. Politically too, missionaries often sided with local peoples over against colonial settlers and mobilised a discourse of human equality in support of their stance. As Nicholas Thomas (1994: 141) reminds us: ‘Just as the Methodists in the Solomons were extraordinarily hostile to the white traders and labour recruiters, the Boers in South Africa saw the Moravians .. .and the London Missionary Society . . . as entirely subversive forces . . . that would deprive them of their labour force.’ In different places different conditions prevailed. Motive, strategy, and theology varied from missionary to missionary, from organisation to organisation, from denomination to denomination (Porter 1997). Yet multifarious as the locations of missionary engagement undoubtedly were, the scientific ventures which they pursued were intimately tied to the spaces they occupied. Of course this is not exceptional. The reciprocal connections between scientific endeavour and sites of inquiry have increasingly attracted scrutiny (Livingstone 2003). But these spatial formations of knowledge manifest themselves with particular clarity in the missionary case. Their scientific practices were constituted through their occupation of specific spaces, both physical and cultural. And it was this spatiality that delivered cognitive force. It was not so much who missionaries were that conveyed authority; it was where they were. The existential immediacy of their circumstances, and their long-term residential topophilia, conditioned their inquiries into the physical and cultural geography of the landscapes they inhabited, the languages and customs of the cultures with which they worked, and the ailments and remedies of the people among whom they settled (cf. Allen, this book).

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Of course the information that missionaries amassed at the ends of the earth required the legitimation of home-based authorities to pass into European circulation. Various tactics were employed. In some cases, as with Jesuit missions, administrative controls were established to ensure the reliability of missionary testimony and to manage ‘longdistance networks’ (Harris 1996). These institutional instruments enabled the Jesuit General in Rome to stabilise the activities of the Society’s foreign representatives and to facilitate global intellectual commerce. In other cases direct missionary correspondence with European savants and the assistance given to scientific travellers delivered cognitive dividends. Besides, missionaries practised science differently for different purposes. Some worked at the popular level, using natural history narratives to communicate to native people the power of Christianity to effect transformation (Sivasundaram 2001); others, including female missionaries, wrote geographically informed travel accounts of their experiences (McEwan 1995); others were the vehicles of scientific instruction and the medium by which European science and native knowledge were brought into contact; still others worked on the frontiers of science delivering significant empirical data and theoretical reflection. Yet whatever the nature of their enterprises, and whatever means they used to secure epistemic credit with European powers, missionaries engaged in scientific pursuits derived their authority from the places where they pursued their inquiries.

Sciences of earth and sky The located nature of missionary science manifests itself with special clarity in geographical and cartographic pursuits. Geography, of course, occupied a prominent place in the missionary psyche. Thus the Church Missionary Intelligencer presented its 1864 readers with an analysis of ‘Geographical Research: The Pioneer to Missionary Enterprise’. This apologia echoed the sentiments of Victorian Britain’s favourite missionary, David Livingstone (1857: 673), who viewed ‘the end of the geographical feat as the beginning of the missionary enterprise’. These endorsements further served to confirm the judgement of the Scottish educationalist, Thomas Dick, who expanded his considerations of ‘Geography’ in succeeding editions of The Christian Philosopher, in large part on the grounds that ‘an intimate knowledge of this subject’ was fundamental to directing ‘the movements of Missionary Societies’. It was thus ‘the duty of every Christian, to mark the progress .. . of the various geographical expeditions’ (Dick 1846: 216, 217). Happily, data were readily to hand.

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In 1840, John Campbell had brought out his Maritime Discovery and Christian Missions in which he charted the chronicle of exploration from the time of the Crusades to the two voyages of the Duff – the vessel which inaugurated the London Missionary Society’s (LMS) advancement into the South Seas during the late 1790s. In a detailed narrative of this venture, Campbell reported on the physical environment and cultural conditions of the South Sea islanders. Modes of dress and marriage customs, arts and amusements, cannibalistic feasts and priestly functions all fell under his scrutiny. And as if to underline the project’s geographical mission, Campbell supplemented his account with the engravings of G. Baxter, one of which, evoking the final moments before the establishment of the mission station on Tahiti in March 1797, depicted the landing party congregated around a chart. This image gave expression to a connection of long standing – that between missionaries and maps. Sixteenth-century Jesuits, for example, had played a key role in the mapping of China. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) was crucial here and his endeavours were part of a strategy to win over to Christianity ‘the intellectual elite by recourse to the achievements of European culture, in mathematics, astronomy, and cartography’ (Yee 1994: 170). Jesuit accomplishments in these fields – along with contributions to the calendrical knowledge of the Middle Kingdom – were remarkable even if they were ignored by the vast majority of Chinese map-makers. Still, Ricci’s own merging of Western and Chinese sources in several mappaemundi was a practice continued by his successors, notably Nicolo Longobardi, Manuel Diaz, and Ferdinand Verbiest. Later, in the decade after 1708, Jesuits undertook several comprehensive surveys of the empire which enabled them to furnish the Qing dynasty with a monumental atlas of the emperor’s imperial terrain using a trapezoidal projection and the Beijing meridian as prime. In related ways too, Jesuits used their scientific skills for earth-measuring purposes. In the early seventeenth century, the French magistrate, patron, humanist, and correspondent Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc recruited missionary priests to undertake observations in the Levant in the hope of determining a reliable method of establishing terrestrial longitude (Hatch 1998). Enterprises of this sort required competence in mathematics and astronomy, and a host of Jesuit-scholars capitalised on their missionary location to provide European natural philosophers with a range of celestial readings (Maggs 2000). In India, Father Anthony Monserrate’s journey from Surat to Fatehpur Sikri in 1580 culminated in a series of latitudinal observations; in the early 1700s

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Father Jean-Venaut Bouchet walked the Coromandel Coast to prepare manuscript charts which D’Anville later redacted for his celebrated map of India (Kochhar 1994). In Brazil, Valentin Stansel delivered two decades’ worth of astronomical readings, including observations of a 1668 comet which informed Newton’s Principia (Camenietzki 2003, Casanovas 1993). To be sure, in the wake of the Galileo affair, some aspects of astronomy fell under suspicion, but observational astronomy continued to flourish and in later centuries contributed to the global ‘civilising mission’ on which the Society of Jesus embarked (Needham 1996, Pyenson 1993). Missionary recording of climatic conditions also contributed to knowledge of distant environments. Several things merit consideration here. To begin with, the keeping of weather records is fundamentally a ‘practice of place’ in the sense that warrant is inherently site-based and authority derived from the presence of observers at particular locations. Thus a substantial proportion of the meteorological contributors to the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions during the eighteenth century were of provincial origin because love of locality, prolonged residence, and a sense of parochial duty delivered epistemic authority (Jankovic 2000). In missionary settings precisely such circumstances obtained. And their direct logging of meteorological conditions has provided such an enduring register that later researchers have turned to it to chart environmental history. The records of various mission stations across the Kalahari, for example, have been used to fix a climatic chronology for central southern Africa (Nash and Endfield 2002). Indeed such findings played a critical role in the development of a growing environmentalist discourse, with figures like David Livingstone, John Croumbie, Holloway Helmore, and Robert Moffat making major contributions towards the development of a new environmental consciousness (Grove 1989). In resorting to such data, of course, contemporary scholars have distanced themselves from the moral framework within which missionaries interpreted climate. Their tendency to associate heathen practices with environmental destruction, their moral opposition to native rainmakers, and their inclination to account for landscape degradation in the vocabulary of sin, all obtruded (Endfield and Nash 2002). Yet missionaries were hardly exceptional in their propensity to read climate through the lens of moral economy. Enlightenment philosophers, practitioners of tropical medicine, Victorian meteorologists, scientific travellers, artists and anthropologists were all inclined to pathologise certain global realms, particularly the tropical world, in sermonic language (Livingstone 1999, 2002).

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First-hand field experience of distant places was crucial to missionary acquisition of cultural credit. And nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the benediction the Royal Geographical Society bestowed on Livingstone whose 1857 expedition to Luanda was pronounced by the Society’s president, Sir Roderick Murchison, to be ‘the greatest triumph in geographical research which has been effected in our times’ (cited in Driver 1996: 129). The benefits were mutual. Livingstone basked in the praise lavished on him, including his receipt of the Society’s Gold Medal. Murchison relished the dedication page of Livingstone’s chronicle which expressed gratitude for his largesse and promised evidence to substantiate Murchison’s ‘striking’ hypothesis about the geological structure of Africa. It was Livingstone’s unsurpassed field experience which delivered precisely the cognitive authority that Murchison needed to substantiate his speculations about African stratigraphy and which he had orchestrated from the vantage point of metropolitan scientific power (Stafford 1989). If the knowledge that missionaries acquired about the mathematics of global positioning, the earth’s structure, and regional environmental conditions secured its authority from enterprises that were fundamentally ‘practices of place’, the same was true of their involvement in natural history projects. For medicinal and commercial reasons, imperial powers encouraged missionaries to collect botanical samples. The results were remarkable. William Carey, cobbler, founder of the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792, and self-taught botanist, used his situation at Serampore to establish the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India which became a node in the network of worldwide plant exchange. With an eye to agricultural improvement as a means of providing for India’s hungry, his pioneering catalogue of Indian flora won for him Membership of the Bengali Asiatic Society and Fellowship of the Linnaean Society (Mukherjee 1999). In the next generation, missionaries in Hawaii produced dozens of natural history publications, some of which appeared in major scientific journals (Kay 1997). Indeed on occasion missionary naturalists made significant contributions to biological theory. John T. Gulick – whose missionary career between 1862 and 1899 spanned both Japan and China – for example, was an early advocate of the role of geographical isolation in the emergence of new species. Gulick presented his initial reservations about natural selection in the 1873 issue of the Linnaean Society Journal and later, from his station in Japan, went on to develop his 1888 theory of ‘Divergent Evolution through Cumulative Segregation’ which attracted the support of George John Romanes (Amundson 1994, Gulick 1932).

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Missionaries also supplied metropolitan centres with much-wanted data. In the South Pacific, Rev. Charles Barff, stationed at Huahine, Society Islands, enlisted various assistants to assemble specimens for the shell collector Hugh Cuming. Later S.J. Whitmee of the LMS, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Encyclopaedia Britannica author, and acquaintance of Robert Louis Stevenson, shipped large consignments back to Kew Gardens. And the Methodist ‘specimen-hunter’ George Brown in Samoa delivered his collections into the hands of Wyville Thomson of the Challenger expedition who ‘never acknowledged their source in his report . . . and never gave public recognition to the missionary’s assistance’ (Gunson 1994: 299). Through a range of translation projects, missionaries further contributed to the movement of scientific ideas between East and West. The Polish Jesuit Michal Piotr Boym, for instance, in works on flora (1656) and medicine (1682), drew on Chinese herbals. Later, Frederick Porter Smith brought together materials from local sources for a major work on Chinese materia medica (1871) which reappeared in a myriad new editions. Translators of indigenous natural history texts, of course, experienced the trials of cross-cultural communication, and judgments about how to handle Chinese taxonomy led them to engage in textual practices that encouraged the separation of empirical facts from what they thought of as ‘the muddle-headed Chinese system of knowledge’ (Fan 2004: 111–12). At the same time, missionaries translated Western scientific works into Chinese. The nineteenth-century Chinese mathematician Li Shanlan worked with Alexander White of the LMS on a translation of Elias Loomis’s analytical geometry, and with Alexander Williamson and Joseph Edkins on John Lindley’s Botany. Concurrently the first Protestant medical missionary in China, Benjamin Hobson, who arrived in 1839, introduced Chinese readers to Western scientific concepts through his 1855 work on Natural Philosophy and Natural History (Bo Wu Xin Bian). Through located observation, field collecting, global networking, theoretical reflection, hands-on experience, linguistic expertise, and textual interrogation, missionaries made significant contributions to the natural sciences of earth and sky. Precisely the same was true for their engagement with the human sciences. Their ethnographic endeavours, their proficiency in philology and linguistics, and their role in the advancement of medical knowledge – all enterprises rooted in their encounters with local subjects – now command attention.

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Cultures, texts, and bodies Despite their usual lack of academic credentials, missionaries made major contributions to understanding the peoples among whom they worked. In consequence ethnology was enriched by the insights of missionaries as located witnesses. Their sustained field experience constituted an extended spatial practice to which few anthropologists could aspire. Indeed travelling ethnologists regularly relied on missionaries ‘for grammars, transportation, introductions, and in certain cases for a deeper translation of language and custom than can be acquired in a one- or two-year visit’ (Clifford 1997: 196). As Andrew Porter (1999: 241) remarks: ‘Residence, prolonged observation, knowledge of vernaculars, and close contacts gave missionary observations depths unmatched by early armchair ethnologists and most travellers.’ Thus James Prichard, Alfred C. Haddon and James G. Frazer all benefited from missionaries who had spent lengthy periods of time using vernacu lar (Stocking 1987). Of course it was not simply the case that missionaries delivered data into the hands of anthropological theorists. Their own researches raised profound questions about the nature of the human race which had implications for the reading of scripture, for understanding such cardinal doctrines as original sin, and for debates between monogenists and polygenists, progressivists and degenerationists (Sampson 2001). Missionary participation in anthropological science was diverse. On perhaps the simplest level, they were often avid collectors. Sometimes this was to enliven furlough addresses. The Church Missionary Society thus displayed various cultural artefacts at exhibitions with the aim of informing, and harvesting the support of, visitors (McKay 2004). Other relics found their way into the hands of academic anthropologists and museum curators. Certainly motivations varied and what was collected was often shaped by ideological outlook or personal experience. Livingstone, for example, gathered shackles and yokes that bore witness to the evils of African slavery, and Manyema spears which reminded him of the occasion when he narrowly escaped death at their hands (Cannizzo 1996). But missionary involvements with anthropology went well beyond the acquisitive impulse. Some attained distinguished reputations in their own right. Samuel Greatheed prepared island ethnographies of peoples to whom the LMS sent missionaries in the years around 1800; William Ellis, later a director of the Society, published the first two-volume edition of his influential Polynesian Researches in 1829; Lorimer Fison, who kept

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Lewis Henry Morgan supplied with data for his kinship schedules and corresponded with Tylor on social evolution, published works on Fijian burial customs, primitive promiscuity, and group marriage among the Kamilaroi (Stocking 1995). Small wonder that the members of the Ethnological Society of London dispatched detailed questionnaires to these field missionaries to obtain the data they sought (Gunson 1994). Reputations were made too on the western end of the Pacific in Melanesia where missionaries encountered more alien belief systems. Here, the Melanesian Mission founded by New Zealand’s first Anglican Bishop George Augustus Selwyn received the approbation of W.H.R. Rivers for its deployment of advanced anthropological methods. Two of its members – John Patteson and Robert Codrington – delivered major studies of Melanesian religion and language, and provided Max Müller with key concepts for his Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion. And given the expertise that Codrington displayed in The Melanesian Languages (1885), and The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folk-lore which appeared after he returned to England, it is not surprising that Tylor also entered into correspondence with him (Sohmer 1994). Their linguistic expertise earned missionaries credibility in the eyes of anthropological professionals. But the passion to secure a working knowledge of vernaculars was motivated less by the lure of ethnological scholarship than by a zeal to translate the Bible into mother-tongue languages. Yet that impulse to render oral speech into written form had consequences of remarkable proportions. The production of a print culture required sustained philological study and missionaries were often among the first to produce authoritative dictionaries and grammars of various indigenous languages. William Carey was the author of a remarkable sequence of reference works on Mahratta, Sanskrit, and Bengali between 1805 and 1812. The LMS missionary James Legge, who received three honorary degrees for his research on Chinese classics and in 1876 took up a specially created Chair of Chinese Language and Literature at Oxford, became one of the West’s foremost sinologists (Girardot 2002). Robert Morrison’s six-volume Chinese dictionary (1815–22) was just one further example of a suite of lexical studies by missionaries that covered Sanskrit, Hindi, Samoan, and many others. The vernacularisation of the Bible itself had massive consequences. First, the particularity of the conditions into which missionaries translated their message required cross-cultural sensitivity and linguistic finesse. Indeed, as Lamin Sanneh (1998: 3) insists, ‘Missionary adoption of the vernacular . . . was tantamount to adopting indigenous cultural

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criteria for the message, a piece of radical indigenization far greater than the standard portrayal of mission as Western cultural imperialism.’ Second, the missionary establishment of print culture in hitherto oral societies gave native peoples standardised modes of communication that cemented – in some cases created – senses of national identity. To translate a local language was often to construct it, and the decision about which vernacular to use gave that dialect privileged status. So while Christianity’s translating impulse resulted in a decrease in the number of vernaculars, it confirmed the identity and endurance of those that survived. In this way Christian missions ‘helped turn ethnicities into nations’ (Hastings 1997: 179). Third, the translation process was always an exercise in mutual transformation. John Peel’s study of missionary encounters with the Yoruba discloses something of how the performance of translation induced shifts in theological meaning. Because they had ‘to seek out vernacular expressions for its concepts’ translators among the Yoruba ‘often ended up using terms which Muslims had introduced’ (Peel 2003: 189). In an environment where Christian missionaries had to work between their own theological heritage, traditional Yoruba religion, and Islam, difficult linguistic choices had to be made. Whatever they opted for, there were consequences. And something of their scope can be inferred from the fact that the translator Samuel Ajayi Crowther chose a term meaning ‘Muslim cleric’ to translate ‘priest’ throughout the Bible, and to designate a Christian clergyman. Having acquired their linguistic skills, missionaries applied them to more general scholarly projects. William Ward’s 1811 Account of the Writings, Religion and Manners of the Hindoos published in Serampore did much to stimulate Western interests in Hinduism. In a later generation, James Legge’s books on Confucius (1867), Mencius (1875), and The Religions of China (1880) brought the riches of Chinese classical scholarship to Western eyes. In the early years of the twentieth century, John Nicol Farquhar wrote several works on Indian religion and heritage, while E.P. Rice authored A History of Manarese Literature in 1915. It is on account of contributions such as these, that Andrew Walls (1996), noting that several missionaries – Samuel Kidd, George Owen, and William Hopkyn Rees – took chairs at British universities, contends that missionaries in this period produced a new type of scholarship. Working with the languages, texts, and traditions of local peoples went hand-in-hand with the scientific contributions for which missionaries remain most popularly known – medicine. Indeed several dedicated medical missions came into being in the Victorian period. Concerned for

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the body no less than the soul, missionary medicine was the hybrid product of training at home and experience abroad. So when missionary doctors acquired scientific reputations, it was in fields like tropical medicine where geographical location was fundamental (Browne 1978). Thus Andrew Davidson, who took up a lectureship in oriental diseases at Edinburgh University after a stint as an LMS medical pioneer in Madagascar, was the author of Geographical Pathology (1892) and editor of Hygiene and Diseases of Warm Climates (1893). Others became experts in the treatment of conditions like leprosy and the therapies they advanced were intermingled with colonial development policies (Worboys 2000). Still others used their linguistic talents to work between their own and their host’s medical traditions. Benjamin Hobson translated the most up-to-date European medical knowledge into Chinese in a range of publications on anatomy, surgery, materia medica, and midwifery during the 1850s. Medical missions and their interventionist practices, of course, can be read in a variety of keys. Interpreters enamoured of a hermeneutics of suspicion, and with an eye to Foucaultian governmentality, readily discern in missionary anatomising the Western power of the surveillant gaze. Hence Alexander Butchart (1998), whose horizon closes in around European constructions of the African body, finds moral sanitation and the propensity to attribute illness to heathen sin at the heart of their methods during the 1840s and 1850s. In his telling, missionary care for the body was simply another means of tending to the soul. Read in this register missionary medicine constitutes a further chapter in the long colonial project of disciplining the flesh of the alien other, bringing it into normalising subjection to European regimes of power, and attenuating the authority of the traditional healer. Those whose interests congregate around the complex interplay between indigenous and European traditions have emphasised the diverse character of missionary medicine, and its selective espousal by host carers. Thus in China, traditional medicine proved to be far more resilient than triumphalist Western accounts suggest. So, while Hobson’s midwifery treatises were widely adopted as textbooks in Chinese mission schools, his writings on the medical management of childbirth, which sought to corrode its Chinese cosmological underpinnings and replace it with Paleyan natural theology, did not succeed in transferring the work of delivering babies from its traditional female province into the hands of male doctors (Wu 2002). The social economy of healing remained very largely intact. Interpreters whose vision is directed towards public health provision and the establishment of systems of medical service find a different quarry in the narrative of missionary doctoring. According to Charles Good (2004: 4),

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who has charted the rise and fall of the mostly English, high-church Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, ‘medical missions laid the essential foundations and “spearheaded” the future of biomedical services and public health’ in many African situations. Moreover, different missions adopted different stances on the propriety of native practices and local adaptations of Christian rites of divine healing (Ranger 1982). In these scenarios a more complicated picture of medical missions emerges than narratives of either imperial compulsion or self-sacrificing benevolence. Whether developing expertise on geographically circumscribed pathologies, engaging in the arts of medical translation, or establishing sometimes less than first-rate systems of public health provision, the physical and ideological spaces that missionary doctors inhabited shaped their contributions to medical knowledge.

Conclusion Every phase in their production of scientific knowledge was touched by the particularities of the spaces in which missionaries found themselves. Whether accumulating specimens, surveying terrain, circulating samples, translating texts, keeping records, or combating disease, missionary science was quintessentially a spatial practice. Through the work they carried out in locations far distant from the metropolitan power-houses of European culture, missionaries enriched scientific knowledge of earth and sky, language and culture, bodies and beliefs. Routinely operating outside the standard systems of scholarly patronage, state support, or university endowment, their contributions were sometimes silenced by those who put their data to their own use. But sometimes the quality of their work meant that they achieved considerable acclaim. Either way, the reciprocal connections between scientific endeavours and missionary enterprises constitute a significant chapter in the global story of modern science. Just how pivotal that chapter will turn out to be still remains to be determined. But one thing is clear. The erasure of missionary science from the history of scientific knowledge can only be sustained on a radically impoverished notion of the nature of science, one which privileges a priori stipulations over the messiness and richness of history.

Acknowledgements I am most grateful to John Stenhouse for allowing me access to his forthcoming work, and to Ruth Finnegan, Peter Haggett, Robert Mayhew, and Nicolaas Rupke for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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References Amundson, R. (1994) ‘John T. Gulick and the active organism: Adaptation, isolation, and the politics of evolution’, in MacLeod, R. and Rehbock, P.F. (eds) Darwin’s Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Browne, S.G. (1978) ‘The contribution of medical missionaries to tropical medicine’, Transactions of the Royal Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 72: 357–60. Butchart, A. (1998) The Anatomy of Power: European Constructions of the African Body, London: Zed Books. Camenietzki, C.Z. (2003) ‘The celestial pilgrimages of Valentin Stansel (1621–1705), Jesuit astronomer and missionary in Brazil’, in Finegold, M. (ed.) The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth-Century Perspectives, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Campbell, J. (1840) Maritime Discovery and Christian Missions, Considered in Their Mutual Relations, London: John Snow. Cannizzo, J. (1996) ‘Doctor Livingstone collects’, in MacKenzie, J.M. (ed.) David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa, London: National Portrait Gallery. Casanovas, J.K. (1993) ‘The observations of comets by Valentine Stansel, a seventeenth century missionary in Brazil’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 62: 319–30. Clifford, J. (1997) ‘Spatial practices: Fieldwork, travel, and the disciplining of anthropology’, in Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. (eds) Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, Berkeley: University of California Press. Comaroff, Jean and John (1991) Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dick, T. (1846) The Christian Philosopher; or, The Connection of Science and Philosophy with Religion, new edn, Glasgow: William Collins. Driver, F. (1996) ‘David Livingstone and the culture of exploration in Mid-Victorian Britain’, in MacKenzie, J.M. (ed.) David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa, London: National Portrait Gallery. Endfield, G.H. and Nash, D.J. (2002) ‘Missionaries and morals: Climatic discourse in nineteenth-century central Southern Africa’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92: 727–42. Fan, F.-T. (2004) British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Girardot, N.J. (2002) The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage, Berkeley: University of California Press. Good, C.M. Jr (2004) The Steamer Parish: The Rise and Fall of Missionary Medicine on an African Frontier, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grove, R.H. (1989) ‘Scottish missionaries, evangelical discourses and the origins of conservation thinking in Southern Africa, 1820–1900’, Journal of Southern African Studies 15: 163–87. Gulick, A. (1932) John Thomas Gulick: Evolutionist and Missionary, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

David N. Livingstone 63 Gunson, N. (1994) ‘British missionaries and their contribution to science in the Pacific Islands’, in MacLeod, R. and Rehbock, P.F. (eds) Darwin’s Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Harris, S.J. (1996) ‘Confession-building, long-distance networks, and the organization of Jesuit science’, Early Science and Medicine 1: 287–318. Hastings, A. (1997) The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hatch, R.A. (1998) ‘Peiresc as correspondent: The republic of letters and the geography of ideas’, in Dolan, B.P. (ed.) Science Unbound: Geography, Spaces and Discipline, Umeå: Umeå Universitet. Jankovic, V. (2000) Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kay, E.A. (1997) ‘Missionary contributions to Hawaiian natural history: What Darwin didn’t know’, The Hawaiian Journal of History 31: 27–52. Kochhar, R.K. (1994) ‘Secondary tools of empire: Jesuit men of science in India’, in de Souza, T.R. (ed.) Discoveries, Missionary Expansion and Asian Cultures, New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. Livingstone, D. (1857) Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, London: John Murray. Livingstone, D.N. (1999) ‘Tropical climate and moral hygiene: The anatomy of a Victorian debate’, British Journal for the History of Science 32: 93–110. Livingstone, D.N. (2002) ‘Race, space and moral climatology: Notes toward a genealogy’, Journal of Historical Geography 28: 159–80. Livingstone, D.N. (2003) Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maggs, B.W. (2000) ‘Science, mathematics and reason: The missionary methods of the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhose in seventeenth-century Vietnam’, Catholic Historical Review 86: 439–58. McEwan, C. (1995) ‘ “The mother of all peoples”: Geographical knowledge and the empowering of Mary Slessor’, in Bell, M., Butlin, R. and Heffernan, M. (eds) Geography and Imperialism, 1820–1940, Manchester: Manchester University Press. McKay, T.M. (2004) ‘Geography, empire and the missionary imperative: A contextual reading of popular CMS mission literature, c. 1850–1900’, PhD thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast. Mukherjee, S. (1999) William Carey’s Contribution to Science, Calcutta: Minerva Associates. Nash, D.J. and Endfield, G.H. (2002) ‘A 19th century climate chronology for the Kalahari Region of Central Southern Africa derived from missionary correspondence’, International Journal of Climatology 22: 821–41. Needham, J. (1996) [orig. 1958] ‘Chinese astronomy and the Jesuit mission: An encounter of cultures’, in Storey, W.K. (ed.) Scientific Aspects of European Expansion, London: Variorum. Peel, J.D.Y. (2003) Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Porter, A. (1997) ‘ “Cultural imperialism” and Protestant missionary enterprise, 1780–1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25: 367–91.

64 Looking Back Porter, A. (1999) ‘Religion, missionary enthusiasm, and empire’, in Porter, A. (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume 3: The Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pyenson, L. (1993) Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830–1940, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sampson, J. (2001) ‘Ethnology and theology: Nineteenth century mission dilemmas in the South Pacific’, in Stanley, B. (ed.) Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Sanneh, L. (1998) Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, Marynoll, NY: Orbis Books. Sivasundaram, S. (2001) ‘Natural history spiritualized: Civilizing islanders, cultivating breadfruit and collecting souls’, History of Science 39: 417–43. Smith, F.P. (1871) Contributions towards the Materia Medica and Natural History of China: For the Use of Medical Missionaries, London: American Presbyterian Mission Press. Sohmer, S. (1994) ‘The Melanesian Mission and Victorian anthropology: A study in symbiosis’, in MacLeod, R. and F. Rehbock, P.F. (eds) Darwin’s Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Stafford, R.A. (1989) Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stanley, B. (1990) The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Leicester: Apollos. Stenhouse, J. (forthcoming) ‘Missionary science’, in Livingstone, D.N. and Numbers, R.L. (eds) The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 8: Modern Science in National and International Context, New York: Cambridge University Press. Stocking, G.W. Jr (1987) Victorian Anthropology, New York: Free Press. Stocking, G.W. Jr (1995) After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Thomas, N. (1994) Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ranger, T. (1982) ‘Medical science and Pentecost: The dilemma of Anglicanism in Africa’, in Shiels, W. (ed.) The Church and Healing, Oxford: Blackwell. Walls, A.F. (1996) The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith, Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Worboys, M. (2000) ‘The colonial world as mission and mandate: Leprosy and empire, 1900–1940’, Osiris 15: 207–18. Wu, Y.-L. (2002) ‘God’s uterus: Benjamin Hobson and missionary “midwifery” in nineteenth-century China’, paper at conference on ‘The disunity of Chinese science’, University of Chicago, 10–11 May. Yee, C.D.K. (1994) ‘Traditional Chinese cartography and the myth of westernization’, in Harley, J.B. and Woodward, D. (eds) The History of Cartography. Volume Two, Book Two. Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

4 Listening and Learning? Audiences and Their Roles in Nineteenth-Century Britain Sophie Forgan

Lectures, wrote the Oxford don Mark Pattison in 1885, were commonly regarded as ‘a joke or a bore, contemned by the more advanced, shirked by the backward’, a view which was, and remains, a commonplace (Pattison 1885: 53). Generations of undergraduates continued to complain of the awful dullness of lectures, of whom Darwin was only the most famous (de Beer 1983: 25, 28). However, lectures were not just addressed to bored students. In the nineteenth century the public lecture was one of the most favoured means of reaching audiences, and formed a key element in the business of producing and disseminating knowledge. It was to be found in a huge variety of institutions, from elite learned societies to humble mechanics institutes. Much has been written about the role of lectures in the popularisation of science, but less about who formed the audiences, what they made of the experience of listening to lectures and what sorts of knowledge they took away with them. Were audiences participants in the knowledge society of their day? I would argue that lectures were a vital part of nineteenth-century scientific life, providing opportunities for access to knowledge for those, including scientific men, who were not part of recognised professional groups or established intellectual networks. However, the way those opportunities were constituted in itself helped to shape the roles and functions of the audience, and arguably had persisting effects. After a brief overview of the range and scope of lectures, the example of the Royal Institution in London will be used to examine the management of lectures, the attitudes of lecturers, the structuring of audience behaviour and ways of including or excluding particular groups, in particular women. This raises issues about the way 65

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people listened to oral performances, how lecturers believed they listened and how the idea of the audience was constructed in the minds of those who addressed them. First, however, a word on the problems of addressing questions about popularisation and audiences. Historically this has generally been envisaged as a one-way process: that knowledge was discovered by the scientist or professional worker, and then disseminated in well-recognised ways, first to other professionals and then to the broader public. Generally, such narratives of diffusion of knowledge centre on the producer or the discoverer, and imply a progressive simplification (and probably some distortion) as the knowledge circulates in wider and wider circles. A clear division between professional and popular, between elite and amateur is implicit in such an approach. Recent research has vastly modified this model, and tended to collapse the distinction between elite and popular, arguing that the circulation of knowledge needs to encompass all aspects of its production and reception (Cooter and Pumfrey 1994, Secord 2000). At the same time greater emphasis has been placed on the importance of visual culture in Victorian learning, and the way that images and looking at displays or exhibitions interacted with written material. Less attention however has been paid to the aural part of oral culture, to the ways in which people listened to set piece public lectures, let alone to sermons, dramatic readings, the theatre, to each other and other verbal forms of communication.1 In part this is because the evidence for listening and audience response is fragmentary and more difficult to access. Nonetheless, to focus on listening, as on reading – and the two cannot always be disentangled – is to put the focus squarely on reception. Performing in public, speaking to an audience, was a crucial part of doing science in the nineteenth century, essential both to scientific men who had to establish themselves and display their credentials, but also an integral part of scientific and wider literary culture. Lectures were extraordinarily popular and widespread at most levels of society, and therefore formed a means of learning and access to knowledge not previously easily obtainable. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, lectures might take place in rented halls, or sometimes even the home of the lecturer, as well as in the premises of societies.2 By the second quarter of the century there was an explosion of new athenaeums, literary and philosophical societies, learned societies, mechanics institutes and ‘steam intellect’ societies, polytechnic galleries and other institutions for the promotion of knowledge. As a result most lectures tended to move into institutional premises, though it remained

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common in provincial towns for the nearest or largest available hall to be hired. Institutions tended to rely on a network of local lecturers, enlivened by visits from itinerant lecturers or metropolitan professionals. Itinerant lecturing was a recognised career option, and remained one chosen by some scientific men throughout the century. In the case of London, the pool of available talent was of course large. Most institutions put on lectures, sometimes a seasonal programme of single lectures, and sometimes courses of lectures especially if the organisation was concerned with what was termed the ‘diffusion of useful knowledge’. Some were free but most charged a fee or some sort of subscription. Many were open to women, except the stuffier or more ancient learned societies which held out against female membership, such as the Royal or the Linnean Society. The subjects chosen ranged very widely but normally excluded politics and religion, at least in direct form. Science was of course infused with ideas of natural theology until the latter half of the century, and few speakers omitted some reference to the beneficence and wisdom of the Creator. For many institutions, the success or failure of their lectures was regarded as a key indicator of their public usefulness and institutional health. In effect, lectures performed a multiplicity of functions, and the Royal Institution in London is an example where these may be examined and the audiences analysed.

Lectures and audiences at the Royal Institution The Royal Institution, founded in 1799, was originally intended to promote knowledge of useful mechanical inventions and to teach through courses of lectures the application of science to the common purposes of life (Berman 1978, James 2002). It soon became known as a centre for scientific research because of the lustre of its resident scientists and the famous discoveries made there. It always had the reputation of being an elite institution patronised by the cream of London society, but as the century progressed, its membership was increasingly drawn from the upper-middling ranks of society. For many members the main reason for joining was the opportunity to attend lectures, to hear of the latest scientific discoveries, often from the lips of the discoverer himself. It became an important centre for people to come to listen to science, just as it was a venue for young scientists to make themselves more widely known.3 Its reputation for superb lectures made it a model to which many lecturers and other institutions aspired. The programme, with three different types of lecture, was designed for a variety of audiences. Courses of afternoon lectures provided a fairly

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thorough coverage of the topic concerned; these were aimed chiefly at students or serious enquirers after knowledge. The Juvenile lectures at Christmas put on a course of six lectures adapted to young people, who of course were accompanied by their parents or other relatives, and were viewed as a means of enlisting new recruits to science as well as filling a black hole in the normal school curriculum. And finally the Friday Evening Discourses every week from January to June were occasions where members and their guests could listen to the celebrities of the scientific world, or hear young men with exciting work to their name, or, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, listen to the ‘big guns’ of intellectual debate or recent exploration. Then numbers might rise to 1000 present, rather than the normal 3–400.4 The Institution was adroit in attracting people by putting on a programme of both newsworthy and up-to-date scientific subjects. They were also careful to avoid overt involvement in controversy, or at least to ensure that rival views had a platform, though critics who attacked the Institution’s professors not surprisingly no longer found themselves invited.5 It therefore managed the critical business of never being on the losing side in any of the numerous scientific wars, and thus avoided being marginalised as the home of knowledge which could no longer be considered ‘respectable’. What did the audiences think and how did they listen to these different forms of lecture? This may be examined from the viewpoint of the lecturer on the platform and the listener in the auditorium. Lecturers certainly had strong views, about both the audience and their contemporaries’ performances, and were frequently disparaging. This however needs to be weighed against the frequency with which they were ready to repeat the experience, together with the comparatively generous fees paid. Public lecturing was a welcome addition to income for many, especially for medical men and academics in poorly paid positions. It became for many almost a badge of scientific status to decry non-academic audiences. This reflects a fundamental confusion over the purpose of public lecturing, which was that it should anyway be regarded as seriously educational. Many scientists certainly felt that there was an inherent contradiction between the popular and the properly scientific, as Faraday said ‘Lectures which really teach will never be popular; lectures which are popular will never really teach’ (Bence Jones 1870, II: 222–3). By the end of the century, public lecturers were more balanced in their assessment, simply regarding the popular lecture as a means of teaching something to people in an attractive way (Wilson 1898: 87–97).

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Obviously an audience which was not homogenous was always going to be more difficult to address. The Royal Institution illustrates this in extreme form, and many acknowledged that because the audience contained their peers as well as non-scientific but highly literate men and women, it was a particularly ‘ticklish’ one. If the young tyro managed to impress such an audience, and T.H. Huxley acknowledged his terror before his first performance at the RI, then he felt he could cope with any audience (Desmond 1994: 179–80). It also meant that both the Institution and most lecturers took enormous trouble to structure their material appropriately, and to ensure that there were both visually exciting and reliable experiments. The demonstration-lecture became something of a tradition, and many colourful experiments added to the spectacle and excitement of the occasion. This may still be seen in the Christmas Juvenile lectures, going strong after 180 years and now regularly televised. Lecturers were always keen too to adopt the latest techniques and would wax lyrical about the beauties of the limelight or the magic lantern. However before levels of comprehension could be addressed, audiences needed to be controlled and reasonably well-behaved. Early nineteenthcentury audiences were often robustly responsive, to put it politely. During the middle years of the nineteenth century however audience behaviour gradually became more disciplined as institutions exerted greater control and authority. People still laughed heartily if amused, or went to sleep if the lecture was boring, and if they approved, they showed it noisily. A Discourse might be interrupted by constant applause and punctuated by ‘hear-hear’ and ‘loud and repeated cheers’, though perhaps less frequently than before (Bompas 1885: 257). Tickets were issued for lectures, which allowed for some basic exercise of control over who was allowed in, and there was something of an obsession with record keeping, so that even the weather or competing events might be recorded as a reason for falling attendance. A formalised pattern for lectures was developed in the Institution, with a chairman in charge, a procession of managers into the lecture theatre at a precise moment, and marked attention paid to time keeping.6 Any overrunning of the allotted hour was severely remarked upon, and members regularly attending lectures developed an acute sense of the proper forms. On one occasion in 1850 the Astronomer Royal Airy ‘forgot himself, and lectured an hour and three-quarters!’ which was severely remarked upon by several present as ‘Very bad management indeed!’ (Geikie 1895: 159, Curwen 1940: 251). Likewise the context of delivery, the famous theatre of the Institution, was always of concern. The

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managers worried about the comfort of the seats and tried to create adequate ventilation so that people did not go to sleep in the stuffy atmosphere. Well-behaved audiences and formalised proceedings reflected improving norms of polite behaviour in society generally (Forgan 1986: 102–3). The growth in lectures coincided of course with the self-improvement movement, the popularity of Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help (1859), and lecturers often commented about the attentive and intelligent demeanour of working men in lectures addressed to such audiences.7 It was the age of the autodidact, and lectures formed an important adjunct to reading not just for the working classes but for everyone. Lectures often preceded reading, and listening was translated into less ephemeral forms. Lectures were issued as pamphlets, reported in newspapers or periodicals, or incorporated into books, in the same way as numerous volumes of sermons were issued so that the listener could refresh his memory, or spirit, once the experience of listening was over (James 2004: 67–79). Two aspects here need comment. First, the ability of an audience to listen depended largely on their belief that they could understand what was being said, and this in turn may be related to the way speakers structured their material. Up to the middle of the century this tended to reflect the classical education that most men of science received. Such an education meant some familiarity with the great works of classical orators, with rhetorical structures and with ways of putting together an argument in clear language and a logical manner. Sometimes scientific men used the vocabulary of such an education when talking to each other. As the eminent geologist Charles Lyell wrote to the lawyer and natural philosopher W.R. Grove about the latter’s lecture on heating effects in electricity and magnetism in 1852: ‘It could not have been better or clearer, so far as the making an abstruse question comprehensible was concerned, and the exordium and peroration were beautiful’ (Lyell 1881, II: 176). For such men, the familiar structure of the lecture aided comprehension in fields where they were not necessarily expert. The audience were also critically appreciative of the merits of different lecturers and ranked them accordingly, as for example the jurist W.F. Pollock wrote: ‘Among all lecturers heard by me he [Faraday] was easily the first. Airy, Sedgwick, Owen, Tyndall, and Huxley belong to the highest order; but there was a peculiar charm and fascination about Faraday which placed him on an elevation too high for comparison’ (Pollock 1887, I: 247). On the other hand, Faraday was an example of someone without a classical education who had trained himself in the

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art of lecturing through careful observation and practice (Porter and Friday 1974). This was typical of later scientific lecturers and Faraday was regarded as a model by many. During the latter half of the century it was common to find lecturers using imaginative and descriptive devices to paint a picture for their listeners, to draw the audience into the subject before proposing their main argument. Thus did the young Huxley in his first Discourse to the Royal Institution open by conjuring up the image of a ship in a tropical breeze off the New Guinea coast, with towing net and jellyfish floating idly along, before attacking existing biological theories (Desmond 1994, I: 179–80). A polished performer might treat the lecture as a conversation, albeit one-sided, between him and the audience, a device which had the effect of making the listener feel a participant in the whole process (Wilson 1898: 62). The second feature of audience reception of lectures is how those present themselves recorded the experience. The audience might contain professional practitioners as well as non-experts, so there was naturally considerable variety. At one end of the spectrum were those who viewed it primarily as a pleasant sociable occasion, at the other end those for whom it was a quasi-religious experience. Memoirs of the period frequently record attendance at Royal Institution lectures, or at another of the London institutions, for members of London’s intelligentsia did not necessarily confine themselves to one site. Arthur Munby, poet and photographer of working class women, listened to several discourses, pronounced them excellent, but commented rather on the ‘crowded and brilliant’ nature of the audience, listing the most distinguished names (Hudson 1972: 296). W.F. Pollock spent much of his leisure indulging his taste for good lectures, making sure that he heard those given by his friends, and commenting generally whether it was ‘remarkable’ or not, sometimes writing to friends about it (Pollock 1887). Others admired the physical dexterity and brilliance of the demonstrations, some of which bordered on theatrical showmanship. A taste for dramatic shows had always been exploited in the capital, and sites such as the Royal Polytechnic Institution were past masters at creating such experiences. But for others, the lecture theatre could be the site for profound experience. It was after all an age when people believed that interchanges in society were disclosures of personality (Sennet 1977: 219). Public performances in the lecture theatre could thus be regarded as revelations of personality, especially so in the case of people who through their discoveries and esoteric knowledge were clearly far above the common run of men. Audiences reacted not simply to the exposition

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of ‘facts’, which they might be supposed to comprehend and absorb, but felt that they had participated in an experience which enlarged their spiritual vision and addressed a deeper self. One quotation from the professional journalist, Eliza Lynn Linton, suffices to show what is meant: Those Friday Evening Lectures at the Royal Institution, when Tyndall experimented or Huxley demonstrated . . . what evenings in the Court of Paradise those were! How I pitied the poor wretches who did not come to them! . . . I do not think there was one in the whole audience who drank in the wine of scientific thought with more avidity than I . . . It strengthened, warmed, exhilarated and almost intoxicated me. (Richards 1997: 124) It is reasonable to regard such lectures as a communal experience, where all attention was focused on the speaker and the audience reacted as one. A powerful performance could pack a strong charge, sending men and women away from the lecture theatre to tramp the streets at night in a state of inspiration. As Juliet Pollock, a frequent attender at Faraday’s lectures commented, ‘with some listeners the impression made was so deep as to lead them into the laborious paths of philosophy’ (Forgan 1985: 63). At the same time, many recognised that the ability of most people to listen and learn from lectures was limited. Although memory training (for example learning poetry or recording the main heads of sermons) was embedded in general educational practice, it was difficult to remember the detail of any moderately complex scientific exposition without back-up material or an appropriate level of prior knowledge. In case of courses of lectures, the printed prospectus sometimes provided enough detail to remind the listener of at least the main subject headings. Tyndall started providing his audience in the 1860s with printed notes to allow them to follow his lectures better, and later published them as books. Otherwise, as some contemporaries recognised, the impression left by even the most brilliant lecture was fleeting. On the other hand we should not be too surprised at this. If going to lectures was as much an opportunity for spiritual enlightenment as for sociable enjoyment, cultural affirmation, or any serious desire to learn, what mattered was that people felt that they had learned something, or believed that they had participated in an experience from which they had in some way benefited.

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Women, lectures and the scientific world Such an attitude seems to have cut across both sexes, though perhaps men were more likely to praise a speaker’s eloquence and clarity and women to comment on the nature of the experience. However, the presence of women at lectures raises a different question. Women were ipso facto defined as outsiders, but nevertheless attended all types of lecture, so it would seem that listening to lectures provided an entrée to the scientific world which might otherwise be denied. In some places ladies were seated in a separate gallery, in case they added a merely fashionable tone to the proceedings, but this was not the case for most London institutions. Certainly women were frequently mentioned in scientific memoirs (which were often written by men), generally in varying tones of contempt or irritation. However, there is room for reconsideration. Women in the audience did not just mean the odd enthusiast for science, or someone who was basically ignorant and went because lecture-going was somehow good for you, as hinted by Henry Becker when he talked about ‘inoculating the grand monde with a love of scientific investigation’ (Becker 1874: 52). For some women, the Royal Institution was an important venue, a place where they could hear up-to-date accounts of science, learn a great deal about a variety of scientific fields, in a way that was professionally useful to them. The first woman professional journalist, Eliza Linton, has already been mentioned. Geraldine Jewsbury, novelist and friend of Carlyle, was a devotee of RI Discourses. Female membership grew from a negligible 0.6 per cent in 1840 to 5.1 per cent in 1870, and included luminaries such as Anna Swanwick, the authoress and promoter of female education. A number of those present at lectures were wives or daughters of scientists, who were so often involved in their husband’s or father’s work, either as amanuensis, translator, or even as co-experimentalist.8 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson found lectures there to fill a gap in her solitary studies to acquire a medical education. Another group was women authors. Mary Somerville corresponded with Faraday, asked him to comment on proofs, and her husband William was a member, which also allowed access to the library. In the later nineteenth century, women writers were a marked feature of the publishing scene, and a considerable number chose scientific subjects. This provided an entrée to scientific circles which as women they were otherwise unable to achieve, especially before the establishment of institutions for higher education for women in the last quarter of the

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century. Generally speaking, women authors were extremely badly paid, and those who wrote on scientific subjects, whether in books or for the periodical market, needed to gain access to good libraries, up-to-date material and even if possible meet the scientists concerned. Two such authors known to attend lectures at the RI were Emma Caillard and Agnes Clerke (Gould 1998: Ch. 6). Emma Caillard (born 1852), a poet and essayist with a religious turn of mind, wrote scientific books primarily for children such as Electricity, The Science of the Nineteenth Century, A Sketch for General Readers, Etc. (1891).9 Agnes Clerke (1842–1907) was a serious writer on astronomy who wrote both for astronomers and for a literate public, though she did not undertake actual astronomical work herself. She produced many books and wrote numerous articles for the Edinburgh Review. The Institution provided lectures, friendship (with Sir James Dewar for example), financial support (she was awarded an endowed prize twice), and first-hand access to scientific work. In other venues women were not welcome, as Eliza Linton found when T.H. Huxley ruthlessly ensured that women were excluded from formal meetings of the Ethnological Society (Richards 1997: 126–8).

Constructing audiences Finally, I would like to turn to considering generally how the idea of the audience was constructed in the minds of those who addressed them. Lecturers frequently aired their views about particular audiences and there was a familiar repertoire of disaster stories about individual performances or occasions. Dr Andrew Wilson entitled one chapter of his reminiscences ‘About Audiences and some of their little ways’, which is typical of the tone of such writing (Wilson 1898: 54). In part this simply reflects the unquestioned sense of authority which scientific men felt and which they exercised from their position on the lecture platform. Moreover, at the same time they shared a confidently clear notion of who the ‘public’ was, that is the relevant ‘public’ as opposed to particular audiences or the popular masses. This goes back of course to the eighteenth century and earlier, when men of intelligence and culture thought it entirely normal to read the latest works across the arts and sciences. The great Victorian periodicals were addressed to such an audience, despite growing worries that the latest science was not easy to communicate. Professionalisation in science, the rise of the expert, together with the increasing division of the broad field of knowledge into separate disciplines meant that by mid-century many areas were becoming mutually less comprehensible. As the veteran geologist

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Sir Roderick Murchison complained to Adam Sedgwick in 1850, ‘The paper on the alkaline bases, by Dr. Hofmann, astonished me, and proved to me (an old pupil of Brande and Faraday) that I was incapable of understanding the elements and phraseology of the science as it is now carried on . . . It is another world of science’ (Geikie 1875, II: 106). It was nonetheless essential for scientists to continue to address the public as though they were capable of understanding the latest developments in science. Public support was necessary in order to underpin the expansion of the profession, raise the status of scientists, encourage patronage, and to enlist new recruits. There was no suggestion that the lecture platform should be abandoned as an important medium of communication. Looking forward for a moment, the idea of the public which scientists (and others) addressed mutated gently into the notion of the ‘informed’ or ‘intelligent layman’ in the twentieth century. The ‘common reader’ invoked by Virginia Woolf has much in common with the notion of the well-informed but non-expert person who could understand and be receptive to demanding modern ideas if they were presented in the right manner. By the Second World War period the ‘intelligent layman’ had well-defined if quasi-mythical characteristics and was the target of much broadcasting and print material. There was a watershed around 1960, a change in sensibility, which for good reason coincides with C.P. Snow’s attack on literary intellectual culture, and by extension on the very existence of the informed layman, in his still notorious The Two Cultures (Forgan 2003: 178–9).

Conclusion Lectures played a key role and provide vigorous evidence for the importance of oral and performance elements in the knowledge society of nineteenth-century Britain. Lectures were an essential way of communicating with a wider public, and were often key occasions in the lives of scientific men. They helped to shape the way that lecturers structured and delivered their material. In one sense listeners were active participants, even if the actual knowledge they took away with them was at best incomplete and in most cases ephemeral. How audiences listened, what audiences felt and what they believed, shows that the experience was one which might fill both practical and deeper needs. The walls of many institutions for the promotion of knowledge could be fairly permeable. However, the process of informing a wider audience about science meant that this audience, despite the evident

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usefulness of lectures for many people, was inevitably characterised as amateur and therefore outside the walls of the academy. The lecture platform served to reinforce the authoritative voice of the specialist and expert, who shared views about the characteristic general audience and how to address it. In a paradoxical way, the concern with the dissemination of knowledge and the ability to communicate complex subjects intelligibly to non-specialist audiences, in the end served to reinforce the existence of the divide between the professional and the amateur.

Notes 1. James A. Secord has however addressed the role of conversation in scientific culture in ‘How scientific conversation became shop talk’ (forthcoming). 2. For some scientific men there was little distinction between home and workplace, as at the Royal Institution. Early lecturers on phrenology lectured from their rooms or lodgings (information from John van Wyhe). 3. The importance of John Tyndall’s and T.H. Huxley’s first Friday Evening Discourses to their careers is well known. Another was the biologist Edward Forbes (Wilson and Geikie 1861: 364). 4. The best attended Discourses, apart from those given by Faraday, included those by Sir Roderick Murchison on geology (always a popular subject), by the astronomers George Airy, Rev. Baden Powell, William Huggins and Norman Lockyer on recent astronomical work, by Huxley on the pedigree of the horse (i.e. evolution by another name) and on the work of the Challenger expedition. Most popular Discourses by non-scientists included those by Ruskin, Cardinals Wiseman and Manning, the explorers Captain James Speke, Samuel Baker, Paul du Chaillu, and Henry Rawlinson (figures from Royal Institution MS, ‘Index to Lectures’ 1842–65, 1866–1939). 5. Richard Owen was not invited after Faraday retired in 1861; neither was Ruskin after his virulent attacks on Tyndall. 6. Formality was found in the humblest provincial setting, with seats reserved for the organising Committee and a vote of thanks proposed at the end. 7. The evening class movement aimed at working men started in the 1850s, as well as the famous series of lectures to working men at the Royal School of Mines, where Huxley averred that he preferred working men to any other audience (Desmond 1994: 231). 8. Royal Institution MS. ‘Subscribers to Lectures’, iii (1868–70) include the wives and/or offspring of C. Wheatstone, George Busk, Charles Brooke, J.H. Gladstone, Francis Galton, W. Bowman, among others. Many more accompanied their scientific spouses to Discourses. 9. Of particular use for Caillard’s 1891 volume might have been A.W. Rucker’s 1889–90 Juvenile lectures on ‘Electricity’. However, Caillard’s book and Rucker’s course follow somewhat different structures. She attended Oliver Lodge’s Discourse in March 1889, and acknowledged his 1889 text, Modern Views of Electricity, together with a number of others.

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References Becker, B.H. (1874) Scientific London, London: Henry S. King & Co. Bence Jones, Henry (1870) Life and Letters of Faraday, London: Longmans, Green & Co. Berman, M. (1978) Social Change and Scientific Organisation: The Royal Institution 1799–1844, London: Heinemann Educational Books. Bompas, G.C. (1885) The Life of Frank Buckland, London: Thomas Nelson & Sons. Cooter, Roger and Pumfrey, Stephen (1994) ‘Separate spheres and public places: Reflections on the history of science popularisation and science in popular culture’, History of Science 32: 237–67. Curwen, E. Cecil (ed.) (1940) The Journal of Gideon Mantell: Surgeon and Geologist, Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Beer, Gavin (ed.) (1983) Charles Darwin. Thomas Henry Huxley. Autobiographies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Desmond, Adrian (1994) Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple, London: Michael Joseph. Forgan, Sophie (1985) ‘Faraday – from servant to savant: The institutional context’, in Gooding, D. and James, Frank A.J.L. (eds) (1985) Faraday Rediscovered, London: Macmillan. Forgan, Sophie (1986) ‘Context, image and function’, British Journal for the History of Science 19: 102–3. Forgan, Sophie (2003) ‘Atoms in wonderland’, History and Technology 19, 3: 177–96. Geikie, A. (1875) The Life of Sir Roderick Murchison, London: John Murray. Geikie, A. (1895) Memoir of Sir Andrew Crombie Ramsay, London: Macmillan. Gould, P. (1998) ‘Physics and femininity’, PhD thesis, Cambridge. Hays, J.N. (1983) ‘The London lecturing empire, 1800–50’, in Inkster, Ian and Morrell, Jack (eds), Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850, London: Hutchinson. Hudson, D. (1972) Munby, Man of Two Worlds, London: John Murray. Inkster, Ian (ed.) (1985) The Steam Intellect Societies, Nottingham: Department of Adult Education University of Nottingham. James, Frank A.J.L. (ed.) (2002) ‘The Common Purposes of Life’: Science and Society at The Royal Institution of Great Britain, Aldershot: Ashgate. James, Frank A.J.L. (2004) ‘Reporting Royal Institution lectures, 1826–1867’, in Cantor, G. and Shuttleworth, S. (eds) Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Lodge, Oliver (1889) Modern Views of Electricity, London. Lyell, Katharine M. (ed.) (1881) The Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart, London: John Murray. Pattison, Mark (1885) Memoirs, London: Macmillan. Pollock, Sir Frederick (1887) Personal Remembrances, London: Macmillan. Porter, Sir George and Friday, James (eds) (1974) Advice to Lecturers: An Anthology taken from the Writings of Michael Faraday and Lawrence Bragg, London: Mansell. Richards, Evelleen (1997) ‘Redrawing the boundaries: Darwinian science and Victorian women intellectuals’, in Lightman, B. (ed.) Victorian Science in Context, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

78 Looking Back Secord, James A. (2000) Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sennet, R. (1977) The Fall of Public Man, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Andrew (1898) Some Reminiscences of a Lecturer, London: Jarrold & Sons. Wilson, G. and Geikie, A. (1861) Memoir of E. Forbes FRS, London: Macmillan.

5 Locating Industrial Research: Universities, Firms and the State, 1916–39 Keith Vernon

One of the main reasons for doing research is to promote economic growth. In an increasingly knowledge-based economy and society, research becomes ever more important for competitive advantage and national prosperity. There are numerous ways by which research can enhance economic development; here the focus will be on scientific investigations of a fundamental, laboratory-based character, but which are geared towards practical industrial problems. Industrial research of this type raises a number of issues. Since several constituencies have an interest in industrial research, there are questions as to its location. Obviously, industrial firms are concerned with research to enhance their own position. Governments have wider responsibilities for national well being, which relates to that of private firms, although in a rather general sense. Universities, too, have a broad commitment to the national good, which includes material prosperity, and which also embraces a more universal and abstract ethos. Where, then, is the proper location for industrial research? Furthermore, does the location influence the nature of the investigations conducted, and does this carry any implications for what qualifies as legitimate knowledge? This chapter focusses on the emergence of industrial research in Britain between the wars. Although there had been moves towards establishing such research from the end of the nineteenth century, the inter-war period saw the first really sustained effort to expand the resources and facilities available for industrially relevant research. The first department of state explicitly devoted to fostering industrial research was created in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), with significant funding. A wide range of firms 79

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invested much more seriously in research. Universities were a key source of expertise and equipment for scientific research, but it is clear that they made a relatively limited contribution to industrial research between the wars. We shall begin by reviewing the efforts made by the state to expand research, particularly through the DSIR. Although keenly interested in university development and academic values, most of the work sponsored by the DSIR was in fact located outside university walls. Much more significant in terms of financial commitment to research was that made by private firms. For this period, however, there is evidence of a general concession to broadly academic ideas of knowledge and its validation.

Research, industry and the state Industrial development has long drawn on new knowledge and understanding but, until the mid-nineteenth century, this was largely a workshop-based phenomenon based on practical experience and know-how. Through the second half of the century, however, a new kind of industry emerged that relied on fundamental laboratory scientific research (Matthias and Davis 1991). A new dyestuffs industry was founded on the synthesis of novel chemical substances achieved through the application of chemical principles. Other aspects of the organic chemical and the electrical engineering industries similarly depended on basic scientific knowledge. These new sectors were taken up most assiduously in Germany, where companies invested heavily in research facilities, assisted by the state, which poured large sums into universities and technical institutes (Alter 1987). In Britain, the state had contributed sums for scientific investigations through the nineteenth century (MacLeod 1996). As Germany began to pose an economic and increasingly a military threat, governments began to take the need for systematic scientific research much more seriously (Alter 1987). A National Physical Laboratory (NPL) was established with the aid of a Treasury grant in 1899 (Moseley 1978). During the Edwardian period, schemes of research were devised for medicine and for agricultural regeneration, and plans were laid for a comprehensive scheme of higher education and research geared to industry (Austoker and Bryder 1989, MacLeod and Andrews 1970, Vernon 1997). The essential importance of industrial research was brought home with a vengeance by the outbreak of war in 1914 (Vernon 1995). Within the first few months, Britain was found to be woefully deficient in chemicals, electrical equipment and other scientific products vital for

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the war effort, for which she had become reliant on her now mortal enemy. Alternative sources had to be found in short order and the government launched several initiatives to try to make good the shortages. One element was the formation of an advisory council, including scientists and representatives of industrial associations, which began to survey the facilities available for industrial research and to allocate modest grants for specific projects. The immediate priority was to meet the needs of the war effort, but it was apparent that a longer-term plan was required. Britain had been perilously exposed by its reliance on Germany for scientific and technical resources. It was imperative for national survival that a permanent scheme of scientific and industrial research be put in place; not only for military preparedness, but also to wage the more technically sophisticated economic battles that would surely ensue in the post-war world. In 1916, the advisory council was transformed into a full department of state under the Privy Council, the DSIR (MacLeod and Andrews 1970, Varcoe 1970, 1974). The purpose of the DSIR was the systematic organisation and expansion of industrial research, effectively to provide a strategic research resource, which it sought to achieve through various ways (DSIR 1917, 1920). A key element was to promote research within industry itself, through the formation of research associations. These were to be initiated by sectors of industry to undertake research on problems of common concern, which the DSIR would supervise and help to finance. It was also recognised that there were areas of an even more generic nature, such as fuel or food, which were properly the responsibility of the state, via the DSIR, to investigate directly using public funds. Under this heading, existing state-sponsored research institutions, such as the NPL, were transferred to the general auspices of the DSIR. It was also the role of the DSIR to help ensure a supply of trained experts. The initial task of the original advisory council had been to liaise with existing industrial associations, and a central activity of the DSIR was to continue this initiative on a more systematic basis through the research associations (Varcoe 1981). A fund of £1 million was made available by the state to help sustain them and, in the years following the war, some 30 associations were established in a range of areas, from music industries to iron manufacturers, cotton to cutlery. They enjoyed mixed fortunes, and the varying involvement of firms with them will be explored further in the next section. Although the associations offered information and consultancy services, their most important task was scientific research on problems relevant to the sector as a whole. The

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DSIR was firmly focussed on practical issues, but emphasised that it saw no real difference between pure and applied science, the latter was simply research towards a particular goal. Similarly, it was not interested in quick-fix solutions, but wanted to tackle some of the fundamental problems affecting industry (DSIR 1917). Furthermore, since the associations were sustained partly by public funding, they could not be seen to favour any one firm over any other. Thus, the work of the research associations was generic in nature and concentrated on basic issues, such as the properties of materials, common processes, quality control, and health and safety issues (Varcoe 1981). Similarly, there was considerable emphasis on publication of results. The DSIR, then, maintained a quite abstract, almost academic, perception of industrial research. Some of the smaller research associations referred problems to academics, or rented laboratory space in universities (DSIR 1922). Others, especially the larger ones, preferred to establish independent institutions, such as the Shirley Institute founded by the Cotton Research Association. Despite the emphasis on long-term, fundamental research into the basic science underlying industrial problems, the DSIR argued that it was not appropriate to locate industrial research substantially at the universities (DSIR 1917). To begin with, the universities, especially during the war and immediate post-war period, just did not have the facilities or staff to be able to undertake large-scale projects. Research of the kind envisaged by the DSIR also required specialist equipment and a long-term commitment to a problem. Academics had other demands on their time and should not be constrained in their research to meeting a specific goal. The proper role of the universities was undergraduate teaching and open-ended research into pure science, which it was not the responsibility of the DSIR to support, and post-graduate training, for which the DSIR did provide grants. It was acknowledged that universities had a role in consultancy and small-scale investigations for industry, and that some larger projects could be based at universities, such as glass technology at Sheffield (MacLeod and MacLeod 1975). For the most part, though, the DSIR did not fund research at the universities. The second key element of the research sponsored by the DSIR, then, on generic industrial issues and which was maintained entirely by public funding, was located primarily at independent research institutes. The NPL constituted a very important facility (Hutchinson 1969). When the DSIR decided to create an analogous Chemical Research Laboratory, it was located adjacent to the NPL (DSIR 1924). One of the

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first areas that the DSIR took direct responsibility for was fuel, which was of concern to the whole of manufacturing industry (DSIR 1917). A Fuel Research Station was erected at considerable cost with substantial annual grants for staffing and researches (DSIR 1919). An issue of even greater importance to the nation was that of food (DSIR 1920). Consequently, a Food Investigation Board was formed under the direction of W.B. Hardy. Hardy oversaw the erection of the Low Temperature Research Station (LTRS) for food research, in association with the biochemical and pathological laboratories of Cambridge University (Hutchinson 1972). In return for a site offered by the university, the DSIR assigned funds for a building, maintenance and staffing. There was some subsequent disagreement over who had control over the LTRS. Hardy wanted the staff to come under the university, but the DSIR insisted that they were employees of the department. Although the DSIR did have connections with the universities, comparatively little of the research it sponsored was conducted within university walls. Indeed, the DSIR was clear that it did not want to place industrial research at the universities. It is worth noting that the state agricultural and medical research agencies also tended to establish independent institutions (Austoker and Bryder 1989, Vernon 1997). To an extent, the DSIR was being protective of academic autonomy in maintaining for the universities the role of pure scientific research and education. Governments between the wars were keen to preserve the independence of the universities (Shinn 1986). Yet the universities were expected to work for the national good and much of the research was of such a fundamental nature that fears for academic integrity were perhaps exaggerated. It is also apparent, however, that the facilities and staff available for research at the universities in the 1920s were still quite limited and the primary purpose of the university was seen as undergraduate education (UGC 1930, 1936). The result was that the principal state funder of civil scientific research avoided the universities. On the other hand, the DSIR, through its own research and that of the research associations, maintained substantially an academic notion of what state-sponsored industrial research should be like.

Research and the firm Industrial research is clearly of most direct concern to private industry, and this section will review some of the relationships between research and the firm. There are several problems that need to be borne in mind with this aspect. Questions of definition are more complex. Routine

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analysis or quality control may involve a good deal of sophisticated scientific investigation, but may not be regarded as research as such. Similarly, minor refinements of processes or on the job tinkering may not really constitute research, but could also lead to worthwhile innovation. Firms may, or may not, make the distinctions between these activities and more fundamental laboratory-based research that publicly accountable bodies have to make. Thus, the boundaries between these activities are blurred, particularly for smaller organisations, and pose questions as to what is meant by research in an industrial context. As far as possible, the emphasis here will continue to be on basic scientific research and development. A related issue comes when assessing just how much research a firm carries out. The object of firm-based research is to gain some kind of commercial advantage over competitors. One might assume, therefore, that there will be a degree of secrecy surrounding what a firm does. This poses a practical problem for historians attempting to measure the extent of firm-based research. It also raises issues about how the results of firm research are validated. Although it is difficult to assess precisely how much research was being carried out within firms, it seems that firm-based research in Britain was expanding perceptibly during the first half of the twentieth century (Edgerton and Horrocks 1994, Sanderson 1972b). Industrial enterprises had often been founded on scientific or technical ingenuity but, as in Germany, those British firms that specialised in the new areas began to establish research facilities from the late nineteenth century. Thus, organic chemical companies, such as Nobel’s and Crosfields, Burroughs Wellcome in pharmaceuticals, and electrical and steel firms created research laboratories. One of the most important sectors to develop a significant research capacity was the armaments industry, although it did so in concert with state military research organisations (Trebilcock 1966). The Franco–Prussian war had amply demonstrated the value of the efficient mobilisation of superior technology. With the increasing technological sophistication of weaponry, such as dreadnoughts, high explosives and aircraft, governments were keen to ensure, not only that its own military agencies kept up to date, but that there was a knowledgeable sector of private industry able to keep up with, and contribute to, the latest developments, and which could be called upon to meet an increased scale of production during wartime. As discussed above, however, the war that broke out in 1914 proved to be of such a scale, duration and technical sophistication that the recognised armaments industry was unable to meet the demand. Although

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government and industry were found wanting in the early stages of the war, it is also apparent that, within a remarkably short space of time, the scientific demands of the war were in fact met (Vernon 1995). There were two aspects to this. On the one hand, inventive capacity had to be fostered to combat the enemy’s fiendishly ingenious weapons and to find some means of overcoming the technological stalemate of the western front. There was also a need to expand prodigiously the scale of highly technical equipment and material. For the first element, all arms of the forces and the Ministry of Munitions established or expanded their research and inventions departments, often incorporating academic scientists. Frequently, however, there were problems accommodating the academics and military experts and very little of practical import was delivered during the war period. The technical demands of the war in both respects, then, were largely met by British industry itself. Under the aegis of the Ministry of Munitions, private firms produced sophisticated scientific and technical products in hitherto inconceivably vast quantities. Novel weapons, such as the tank or the Stokes’ mortar, were developed primarily by private firms. Chemical companies devised new processes for producing fine organic chemicals such as phenol, toluol and acetone. Great efficiencies of fuel consumption and recovery of waste materials were achieved. Undoubtedly, universities and academic scientists played a crucial role during the Great War, although for the most part this was through training personnel, producing high specification instruments and supervising production in local firms. The scientific and technical demands of the war, however, were largely met by industry, suggesting a well of latent capacity. From the last stages of the war, and continuing throughout the interwar period, there is evidence of increasing attention to research by private firms (Edgerton and Horrocks 1994, Sanderson 1972b). For some, there was a clear lesson gained that research was a worthwhile undertaking that indeed led to profitable innovations or efficiencies. Obviously, the war interrupted the normal activity of a great many firms, which took the opportunity, or were forced, to develop in new directions that required a research capacity. In some cases, the establishment of a laboratory in Britain was necessary because connections with a parent company, perhaps in Germany, which had hitherto provided the research base, had been severed. State encouragement of research may also have prompted some firms to establish facilities, while work for the Ministry of Munitions may have helped establish the expertise to make it possible (Vernon 1994). Somewhat less reputably,

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research thus offered a socially and politically sanctioned means of soaking up excessive war profits (Sanderson 1972b). Undoubtedly, firms did look to the universities. There had been close relationships between the provincial university colleges and local firms from the late nineteenth century and these developed between the wars (Sanderson 1972a). To name but a few, Manchester University had close connections with Metro-Vickers and the Chloride Electrical Storage Company, Prof. Percy Hilditch of Liverpool University consulted extensively for the Merseyside refining industries, Leeds University continued its work for the woollen industries, ICI, Lever’s and Shell supported the Chemical Engineering Laboratory at University College London, Imperial College was central to aeronautical research. Major firms even began forwarding funding to Cambridge University for chemistry, physics and engineering. It is difficult to determine how much of this support was specifically for research. Often donations were to a department or laboratory, which provided general undergraduate education, specialist post-graduate training as well as problem-solving consultation and long-range research. Similarly, there may well have been an element of philanthropy in supporting the worthy cause of higher education and research, besides an interest in practical results. As discussed above, the DSIR hoped to encourage industrial research through the research associations, but they enjoyed variable success, mainly through lack of industrial support (Varcoe 1981). For small firms, it was difficult to find any surplus funds to donate to a research association, especially during the years of depression. There was also the basic problem that firms unable to sustain their own research were unlikely to be able to convert the still generalised results provided by a research association into something practically useful, although some associations made strenuous efforts to bridge the gap. Large concerns, which had their own research capacity, were more likely to want to keep their efforts in house. Some major firms did support research associations but, in cases such as Ilford’s, which virtually sustained the Photographic Research Association on its own, it was not long before it withdrew and devoted its attention to in-house research (Edgerton 1988). Those associations that proved successful tended to be in export-led sectors with an oligopoly of medium-sized, research-active firms that were prepared to co-operate on common problems (Varcoe 1981). The DSIR’s hope that research associations would become self-financing after five years was unfulfilled and the government had to continue to provide funds to sustain them. Even with state subsidies, the attrition rate was high, although those that kept going began producing useful

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results during the 1930s. The Cotton Research Association gradually demonstrated practically important findings on the basic properties of the cotton fibre. Most importantly, private firms devoted increasing attention to in-house research (Edgerton and Horrocks 1994, Sanderson 1972b). Activity was concentrated in certain sectors, particularly, and unsurprisingly, the organic chemical and pharmaceutical industry, and electrical engineering industry. Here, the nature of the industry necessitated a significant research capacity and research could acquire a self-perpetuating momentum as one innovation led to another. There could be a generational aspect as founding entrepreneurial scientists died or retired. Often, a process initiated by a pioneering discovery had reached such a state of complexity that a whole team of researchers was required to develop it further. Firm restructuring also created space for research, most noticeably the formation of ICI out of existing organic chemical manufacturers. Much larger and more horizontally rationalised firms allowed for more extensive and more generously funded central research facilities. Elsewhere, the glass, especially the optical glass, industry developed a thriving research culture. Food manufacturers were also conspicuous promoters of research. Issues of health and safety were an increasing concern for these sectors. Problems of pollution and efficiency in the use of raw materials and fuel were of general importance throughout firm research. Military research obviously received a considerable boost during the First World War. As noted, all branches of the armed forces established or enhanced their inventions departments, but the experience of engaging civilian scientists had not been very successful (Vernon 1995). Academics did not seem sufficiently concerned with practically useful results, although often their military counterparts were not very accommodating either. At the end of the war, research divisions were continued although incorporated within the armed forces. The RAF and the Air Ministry made a huge effort on the design and development of aircraft (Edgerton 1991). Some university departments offered centres of research and education, but the work was divided primarily between government establishments and a circle of approved firms, which ensured a range of design units. This familiar nexus of state and private industry also continued for other aspects of armaments and munitions development. Specific instances of firms engaged in research might be multiplied, but what do they amount to? As stated previously, limitations of available information make it impossible to do this in any absolute way, yet

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it is clear that a large number of firms invested significantly in industrial research. Certainly, there was not the absolute neglect that is often suggested (Edgerton 1996). There are some measures, however, that we might use to try to assess the importance of firm-based research. Comparison with the DSIR is particularly instructive for it is apparent that, even according to the limited evidence available, firms spent more money and employed more people on research than the principal state-sponsored research organisation (Edgerton and Horrocks 1994). Although firms did contribute to university-based research, again, the great majority of research for firms was conducted outside the university walls. By the 1930s, the leading centres for research in certain areas of science were located in firms. ICI was thought to furnish the chief research centre for organic chemistry in the country. The research department at Metropolitan Vickers was regarded as on a par with leading university physics laboratories. Most of the research on rubber and glass was done in firm laboratories rather than universities. Several research associations declined as firms gradually disengaged to develop their own resources or as they realised that their facilities were in advance of those provided under the auspices of the DSIR. When the Institute of Brewing opened its own research centre in 1936, it ceased its research programme based in academia (Vernon 1994). One final assessment of the importance of firm-based scientific expertise, if not actual research capacity, might be the performance of industry during the world wars. Both wars, of unprecedented scientific sophistication, did not in the end find British industry wanting. If one can make a quantitative evaluation in favour of private firms, does this affect our understanding of the research enterprise? Firms undertake research to gain some kind of commercial advantage, so one might assume that it is not in their interests to be too free with disseminating their results. How, then, is research conducted in a private and perhaps secretive environment to be validated? In some respects, this might be thought a false question. Presumably, for a firm seeking economic gain, if the fruits of research yield a recognisable financial benefit then that is validation enough. Nevertheless, it appears that there were established forums where industrial research was open to scrutiny (Edgerton and Horrocks 1994). In some cases, firm scientists did publish results in mainstream academic journals. There were also numerous trade journals where research was disseminated and discussed. Sharing of information was more common in some sectors than others. For the crucial chemical sector, the Society of Chemical Industry offered all the structures of an academic organisation. There

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were local branches, incorporating academic and industrial scientists, which met to hear papers and which visited industrial sites. A range of journals was issued by the society, which included the results of research. Informal communities of firm researchers, with or without academics, communicated with each other. Most remarkably, work in progress seems to have been circulated between interested firms. In some cases, a new process was worked on at several firms, the ultimate result of which benefited all. The food and electrical industries, which had stringent requirements for public safety and service, tended to co-operate more on issues of common concern.

Conclusion It is appropriate that industrial research should be found primarily in private firms. Although industry did support research in the universities, it is not unexpected that those firms that were interested in research should develop their own facilities. What is more noticeable here is the role of the DSIR. Even the principal state research organisation, even on problems of a quite fundamental scientific nature, tended to promote research outside universities. Of course, universities did undertake research of industrial relevance, to which the DSIR raised no objections; yet it is clear that the DSIR did not regard universities as the most appropriate, or best equipped, institutions in which to locate industrial research. Universities were for pure science, on which industrial research was ultimately based, and for educating and training the personnel required for an industrial society. Instead, the long-term, focussed research required to solve industrial problems was best pursued in dedicated institutes. It is difficult to calculate precisely but, given the resources devoted to research by both private firms and the DSIR, it seems highly likely that the majority of scientific research in Britain between the wars was conducted outside the university. In other respects, however, a broadly academic ethos surrounding research seems to have held sway. Certainly, the DSIR emphasised that its research be on fundamental problems with results openly published. There were also areas of firm-based research that were freely discussed and published. In the early stages of industrial research, or where there were problems of common concern, it was perhaps in the interest of firms to be open. However, it is difficult to know what, or how much, firms also kept to themselves. Ultimately, if a piece of research gave rise to commercially beneficial results, what further validation was required?

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References Alter, P. (1987) The Reluctant Patron: Science and the State in Britain 1850–1920, Oxford: Berg. Austoker, J. and Bryder, L. (1989) Historical Perspectives on the Role of the MRC, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Department of Scientific and Industrial Research Annual Report for 1916–17 [Cd. 8718], London: HMSO. Annual Report for 1918–19 [Cmd. 320], London: HMSO. Annual Report for 1919–20 [Cmd. 905], London: HMSO. Annual Report for 1921–22 [Cmd. 1735], London: HMSO. Annual Report for 1923–24 [Cmd. 2223], London: HMSO. Edgerton, D. (1988) ‘Industrial research in the British photographic industry, 1879–1939’, in Liebenau, J. (ed.) The Challenge of New Technology: Innovation in British Business since 1850, Aldershot: Gower. Edgerton, D. (1991) England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation, London: Macmillan. Edgerton, D. (1996) Science, Technology and the British Industrial ‘Decline’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edgerton, D. and Horrocks, S. (1994) ‘British industrial research and development before 1945’, Economic History Review 47: 213–38. Hutchinson, E. (1969) ‘Scientists and civil servants: The struggle over the National Physical Laboratory in 1918’, Minerva 7: 373–98. Hutchinson, E. (1972) ‘A fruitful co-operation between government and academic science: Food research in the United Kingdom’, Minerva 10: 19–50. MacLeod, R.M. and Andrews, E.K. (1970) ‘The origins of the D.S.I.R.: Reflections on ideas and men, 1915–1916’, Public Administration 48: 23–48. MacLeod, R.M. and MacLeod, K. (1975) ‘War and economic development: Government and the optical glass industry in Britain, 1914–18’, in Winter, J.M. (ed.) War and Economic Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacLeod, R. (1996) Public Science and Public Policy in Victorian England, Aldershot: Variorum. Matthias, P. and Davis, J.A. (eds) (1991) Innovation and Technology in Europe: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day, Oxford: Blackwell. Moseley, R. (1978) ‘The origins and early years of the National Physical Laboratory: A chapter in the pre-history of British science policy’, Minerva 16: 222–50. Sanderson, M. (1972a) The Universities and British Industry 1850–1870, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sanderson, M. (1972b) ‘Research and the firm in British Industry, 1919–39’, Science Studies 2: 107–51. Shinn, C.H. (1986) Paying the Piper: The Development of the University Grants Committee, 1919–46, London: Palmer Press. Trebilcock, R.C. (1966) ‘A “special relationship” – government, rearmament, and the cordite firms’, Economic History Review 19: 364–79. Varcoe, I. (1970) ‘Scientists, government and organised research in Great Britain 1914–16: The early history of the DSIR’, Minerva 8: 192–217. Varcoe, I. (1974) Organizing for Science in Britain: A Case Study, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keith Vernon 91 Varcoe, I. (1981) ‘Co-operative Research Associations in British industry, 1918–34’, Minerva 19: 433–63. Vernon, K. (1994) ‘Microbes at work. Micro-organisms, the D.S.I.R. and industry in Britain, 1900–1936’, Annals of Science 51: 593–613. Vernon, K. (1995) ‘Science and technology’, in Constantine, S., Kirby, M.W. and Rose, M. (eds) The First World War in British History, London: Edward Arnold. Vernon, K. (1997) ‘Science for the farmer? Agricultural research in England 1909–36’, Twentieth Century British History 8: 310–33. University Grants Committee (1930) Report for the Academic Year 1928–29, London: HMSO. University Grants Committee (1936) Report for the Period 1929/30–34/35, London: HMSO.

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Part II Outside and Across the Walls

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6 A Brief History of Field Archaeology in the UK: The Academy, the Profession and the Amateur Alexander J. Hunt

This chapter looks at the historical context of archaeological research within and outside the walls of the academy in the UK. Focusing on the gradual emergence of a scientific approach, and then the development of a conservation rationale for archaeological investigation – and associated ‘professionalisation’ – I examine the changing dynamics of the discipline. My focus is especially upon ‘field archaeology’ as practised in Britain – covering both excavation and field survey – examining the position and pursuit of research in the changing landscape of practitioners of archaeology who might variously describe themselves as academics, professionals, independents or amateurs.

In the beginning: The antiquarians The modern discipline of archaeology in Britain was born out of the curiosity of antiquarianism. Its origins can be traced back to at least 1533 with the appointment by Henry VIII of John Leland as the ‘King’s Antiquary’ to make search after England’s Antiquities, and to peruse the libraries of all cathedrals, abbies, priories, colleges [and also] . . . all places wherein records, writings and the secrets of antiquities were reposed. (seventeenth-century antiquarian Anthony Wood, cited in Simpson 2004: 2) 95

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Later that century William Camden undertook similar travels visiting and describing monuments and synthesising information from historic manuscripts. Building on Leland, Camden’s Britannia, published in 1582, provided a more detailed topographical synthesis of ancient remains in Britain. Around 1586 a College of Antiquaries, possibly a forerunner to the Society of Antiquaries, was founded as a debating society (Society of Antiquaries of London, n.d.) and though it was disbanded in 1614 it is believed that an informal society continued to meet through the seventeenth century until the Society of Antiquaries of London was created, with its first meeting on 5 December 1707, at the Bear Tavern in the Strand. The Society’s initial purpose was the study of antiquities, particularly as they related to the history of Great Britain. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries leading antiquaries such as John Aubrey (1626–97) and his successor William Stukeley (1687–1765) refined the topographical approach of the earliest antiquarians, preparing detailed plans and drawings of ancient sites (Bahn 1996). Others, like John Horsley (1684–1732), continued to compile gazetteers, such as his guide to Roman remains published in 1732 as Britannia Romana (Anon. 1994). Collecting artefacts also became increasingly fashionable, spurred on in the eighteenth century by the fashion for bringing back souvenirs from the ‘Grand Tour’. In 1770 the Society of Antiquaries began publication of an annual journal, Archaeologia, creating the first shared outlet for publication by the growing community of antiquarians (Society of Antiquaries of London, n.d.). The foundation of a Society of Antiquaries of Scotland followed in 1780. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the focus of antiquarian activity shifted from topography towards excavation. Regrettably the growth in popularity for digging up monuments – the goal largely being the recovery of objects – meant that many sites were lost without proper record. The modus operandi was often crude, with farm and estate workers employed to provide the labour for ‘opening’ monuments. Nevertheless a number of pioneers – including prominent excavators such as Bryan Faussett (1720–76), William Cunnington (1754–1810), Richard Colt Hoare (1758–1838), Samuel Lyson (1763–1819), Thomas Bateman (1821–1861), Canon William Greenwell (1820–1918), and J.R. Mortimer (1825–1911) – began to keep records of their explorations, laying the foundations for more considered, systematic and analytical approaches for the growing discipline (Bahn 1996, Daniel 1967; 1981, Marsden 1999). Antiquarianism from the middle of the nineteenth century rapidly grew as a pastime. National societies were established: the British

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Archaeological Association in 1843, the Royal Archaeological Institute in 1844 and in Wales the Cambrian Archaeological Association in 1847. At the same time a great many local archaeological and antiquarian societies began to be established, the first being the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1813. Other provincial societies followed, including those in Cambridge (1840), St Albans and Hertfordshire (1845), Sussex (1846), Dorset (1846), Norfolk and Norwich (1846), Somerset (1849), Surrey (1854), Worcestershire (1854), London and Middlesex (1855), and Yorkshire (1863). This early history of antiquarian investigation was thus shaped by individuals working mostly outside the walls of the ‘academy’, mostly men with free time and independent means to dedicate to the pursuit of their passion. Colt Hoare was a banker, Bateman a landowner and Mortimer and Cunnington merchants. Faussett, Horsley and Greenwell were churchmen. This demographic pattern was repeated in the membership of local antiquarian groups of the time. The Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society’s 1850 Annual Report commented that the 250 subscribing members included ‘a very good proportion of our principal landed proprietors and literary men’ and a breakdown of the membership for 1876 identified 3.6 per cent as titled persons, 2.9 per cent as doctors, 8.1 per cent from Army or Navy, and 20.3 per cent clergymen (cited Hudson 1981: 18).

The academy emerges Out of this age of antiquarianism the apparatus and ethics of a distinct academic discipline of archaeology slowly but surely emerged. The foundation of local and national antiquarian learned societies prompted and supported excavations as well as the publication of numerous journals and monographs, the amassing of libraries and collections, and the holding of symposia and meetings. Together these served to create an academic genius loci for antiquarian debate, underpinning an increasingly analytical and scientific approach to exploring and interpreting the physical remains of the past. Today many local society journals and symposia retain their importance as the places in which archaeological debate occurs, where knowledge becomes validated, and as a meeting ground for amateur, independent, professional and academic researchers, although the focus of the Research Assessment Exercise, arrival of commercially published journals, and increasing emphasis on academic peer review, may erode this. From the mid-nineteenth century the shift in status from pastime to academic discipline was marked by archaeology finding a foothold

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within a handful of academic institutions. In 1853 a Professorship in Archaeology was established by Charles Disney as an endowed chair of the University of Cambridge, followed in 1854 by the first Chair of Irish Archaeology and History at the new Catholic University in Dublin.

The birth of conservation archaeology During the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century investigations undertaken by those within and without academic institutions were largely ‘problem led’ (seeking to answer research questions) although there began to be greater recognition of the many ancient sites being destroyed, without record, by development or agriculture. The problem received official recognition in 1882 in the passing of the first Ancient Monuments Act which created a schedule of monuments identified by the state as worthy of being protected under law.1 The following year General Augustus Pitt-Rivers – now recognised as an important contributor to the discipline by merit of his meticulous approach – was appointed as the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments to monitor and protect monuments identified under the Act. In 1908 Royal Commissions were set up in England, Wales and Scotland, charged with making inventories of surviving ancient monuments and noting those most worthy of preservation. The emergence of such legislative mechanisms and governmentsponsored organisations to protect ancient monuments sowed the seeds for later changes in the character and make-up of the discipline in Britain.

The discipline in the early twentieth century During the first half of the twentieth century archaeology became recognised as a discrete academic discipline in a number of universities, for instance with the appointment in 1927 of V. Gordon Childe as the first Professor in Prehistoric Archaeology at Edinburgh, and the foundation of the Institute of Archaeology of University College, London in 1937. At Oxford archaeology did not properly emerge until 1946 with appointment of Christopher Hawkes as the first Professor of European Prehistory, soon followed by the appointment of Ian Richmond as Professor of Archaeology of the Roman Empire. The establishment of archaeology as a discipline within the academy though was slow and between the first and second world wars only a few individuals worked as ‘professionals’. The situation was well summed up by Dr J.N.L. Myres, reminiscing in 1975:

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When I was an undergraduate more than fifty years ago, persons who could be properly described as professional archaeologists were very rare birds indeed. A few posts in . . . the British Museum, one or two more in the National Museums of Scotland and Wales and in university museums, then almost confined to Oxford and Cambridge, two or perhaps three professorships, none of which with any departmental staff, and a minimal number of very badly paid posts in the Royal Commission and the Ancient Monuments Inspectorate of H.M. Office of Works. Finally of course, there was our late Fellow O.G.S. Crawford who had just forced himself as a more or less selfappointed Archaeology Officer upon a reluctant and somewhat resentful Ordnance Survey. That was about the lot, and even if one includes the more or less learned Secretaries of three or four learned Societies and the Directors of the British Schools in Athens and Rome, the total number of scholars who could be properly described as professional archaeologists at that time was probably no more than twenty-five or thirty at the outside’. (Myers 1975: 5) The very small number of professionals meant that archaeologists associated with local archaeological societies still represented the overwhelming majority within the discipline, playing a leading role in research. Characteristic of this period also was the emergence of a new breed of professional-led, but volunteer-staffed, excavation, beginning with Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s extensive and scientifically rigorous excavations at Maiden Castle from 1934–38 (Selkirk 1997).

Conservation archaeology comes of age The devastation wrought in the heart of many historic cities by the Second World War bombing brought the potential scale of loss of archaeological sites into stark relief. Conscious that much had been lost already, but also prescient of the scale of reconstruction to follow – and the potential archaeological impact this would have – a Council for British Archaeology was established. The Council, constituted in 1944 from the large number of local archaeological societies which had previously met as an Annual Congress of Archaeological Societies, had amongst its founding objectives the ‘safeguarding of all kinds of archaeological material and the strengthening of existing measures for the care of ancient and historic buildings, monuments, and antiquities’. Following the first meeting in March 1944, the Council established local excavation committees in a number of war-damaged towns to

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help record remains before they were lost in reconstruction (Council for British Archaeology 1999). In the immediate post-war years the response to the development threat was driven by local archaeological societies under the leadership of the newly established Council. The threat-led excavations during this period were on a voluntary basis (both in mandate and staffing) and only made possible through negotiation between local societies and the authorities charged with reconstruction. To help marshal research, the Council for British Archaeology published in 1948 a Survey and Policy of Field Research in the Archaeology of Great Britain. The task at hand was well described in the introduction: at no time has archaeology as a whole been more dependent upon the general public for its indispensable raw material. The very nature of archaeological evidence links it inseparably with the landscape and subsoil of Britain. Any disturbance of the surface of the countryside, any digging within the precincts of a town or city, may bring to light material which properly interpreted will lead to an important accession to our knowledge of British antiquity. These years following the war, as old structures are demolished and new projects for industrial or domestic purposes are set going, will bring just such disturbance of the buried traces of our earlier past, and call for the utmost vigilance on the part of all interested people on the spot. (Hawkes and Piggott 1948: 10) The editors for the policy were key figures from within the walls of academic archaeology – Professors Christopher Hawkes and Stuart Piggott – with many of the contributors (but by no means all) also drawn from that initially small band of archaeologists who had found positions in academic institutions. Importantly though, Hawkes and Piggott acknowledged in their introduction the central role that those outside the academy would have to play, stating that: It is perhaps characteristic of this country that the intelligence network which keeps the watch for such discoveries should be that engendered spontaneously in the last century by the county and local societies and museums. Their harmony of enterprise will then manifestly be to the common advantage now. (Hawkes and Piggott 1948: 10)

The rise of the profession The period from the 1950s to 1970s saw the growth of archaeology as a discipline within universities. It was also a period characterised by large

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scale investigations – prompted both by development and research – led by experts, but mostly staffed by volunteers. In Winchester, for example, Martin Biddle ran a series of excavations between 1961 and 1973 which at their peak used a workforce of 170 people, mostly volunteers (Hudson 1981, Selkirk 1997). Funding for such investigations was usually drawn from a mixed-bag of grants, public donations, and government money. In 1971 growing development pressure brought about the birth of Rescue, a campaigning organisation which sought funds to support ‘rescue excavations’ to prevent and mitigate the increasingly rapid losses of archaeological sites to development. This stimulated a growth in government funding for archaeology, which in turn aided the foundation of professional archaeological units in a number of towns and regions, most frequently established as charitable trusts or within local authorities. In the late 1970s and early 1980s funding and labour for archaeological units was helped from an unexpected quarter, the Manpower Services Commission. Funding also began to be sought directly from developers, an innovation pioneered by archaeologists in the Museum of London (Selkirk 1997), although there was nothing which made support mandatory. A radical change came in 1990. In England, the Department for the Environment published new guidance on the management of archaeology within the development process – Planning Policy Guidance 16: Archaeology and Planning. Equivalent guidance was adopted in Wales and Scotland. This made clear that not only was archaeology a material consideration in making planning decisions, but that it was also reasonable to expect developers to make adequate provision (in practice, foot the bill) for any investigations necessary. A new source of archaeological funding was born. The advent of PPG16 rapidly changed the structure of the discipline and at the same time the amount of archaeological work being undertaken (Darvill and Hunt 1999). Research by the Archaeological Investigations Project (AIP) identified that 89 per cent of all archaeological interventions in England between 1990 and 1999 were prompted by the planning process, and that by 1999 three times as many investigations as in 1990 took place per annum (Darvill and Russell 2002: 52). Today the annual number of investigations UK-wide can be measured in the small thousands. Another significant influence of PPG16 was the creation of distinct roles for professional archaeologists operating outside academia. Whilst, as noted above, professional archaeological organisations existed in various forms prior to PPG16, the new guidance created a clearer structural divide between ‘curators’ (archaeologists tasked with maintaining records about the archaeology of their area, setting requirements, and monitoring the standards of archaeological work)

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and ‘contractors’ (archaeologists providing archaeological services on a commercial basis to whoever wants to pay for them). In this system the ‘curators’ are largely employed by local authorities or government agencies, while the ‘contractors’ now routinely competitively tender for archaeological work from developers, their activities ‘policed’ by the curators. Since the inception of PPG16 there has also been a growth in other kinds of conservation-related activity, with significant amounts of archaeological research in the field being funded and undertaken by conservation bodies (such as the state heritage agencies and the National Trust). This has increasingly been undertaken as a conservation response to other areas of government policy or conservation imperatives, such as undertaking archaeological research to inform management decisions relating to farming. This change in the pattern of work has been underpinned by a shift in funding patterns. AIP (Darvill and Russell 1992: 62) identified the annual gross turnover for contract archaeology in England as in the region of £42 million pounds in 1999. Of this turnover the vast majority was paid by developers. The changing investment pattern has, unsurprisingly, been reflected in the discipline’s demography. An Institute of Field Archaeologists’ survey in 1999 (Aitchison 1999) estimated that about 4425 people were working as professional archaeologists in the UK (a marked change from Myers’ time). Of these, only 14.5 per cent worked in academic institutions, with the majority working for consultants or contractors (c.34 per cent) and local government or national heritage bodies (c.33.5 per cent). The remainder worked in national museums (3.5 per cent) or for other bodies such as societies, independent museums, charities and trusts (14.5 per cent). Whilst the growth of developer funding has marked a sharp increase in both archaeological fieldwork and the size of the profession, some feel it has cast shadows over the discipline. A number have questioned the standards of archaeological work undertaken in response to development, arguing that the pressure of tendering leads to work based on cost rather than quality. Other doubts have been expressed, such as: is research sufficiently integral to developer-funded archaeology? Is developer funding pushing archaeologists towards excavating sites which do not answer research questions rather than excavating sites which do? Is the volume of fieldwork (copiously recorded in a vast ‘grey’ literature of unpublished manuscripts), although extending the archaeological dataset available, really feeding back into the creation of archaeological knowledge? (Barrett 1995, Biddle 1994; 1995, Bishop 1994, Carver 1994; 1996, Morris 1997; 1998). Such problems were recently acknowledged in Power of Place (Anon. 2000), a government commissioned review on policies relating

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to the historic environment in England. This called for the heritage sector to ‘provide greater control over research, particularly the archaeological work commissioned by developers’. Concerns were likewise recognised in an All Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group report: There is a growing divide between ‘research’ and ‘rescue’ archaeology, with universities on the one hand becoming divorced from fieldwork and field units on the other hand suffering from a lack of research aims. An increase in the ‘research dividend’ of developer-funded archaeological work is needed, and a re-structuring of priorities so that more of the sites that can contribute to current research agenda are investigated rather than preserved. (APPAG 2003: 21) Further: Constant competition for every job . . . results in great inefficiencies . . . [Archaeological] monitoring on a job-by-job basis is expensive, and researchers or fieldworkers in competition for work do not readily exchange information or ideas. As units now compete across England, the local expertise of those who carry out archaeological work is decreasing. Competition on cost tends to drive down the quality of work, impair morale and career structure, and to remove costs that have long-term benefit such as training. In addition local communities are cut off from knowledge derived from archaeological activity. (APPAG 2003: 20) Clearly the challenge in the twenty-first century will be to better connect the work undertaken outside the walls by commercial archaeology with the research paradigms within the walls of the academy – and conversely for the academy to collaborate more closely with the commercial sector to harness the research opportunities, and not least the funding support, that this presents. There are signs that the discipline is looking for ways to achieve this, for example through the creation of regional research agendas, and other authors (e.g. Darvill and Russell 2002) have been more optimistic about the impacts which development-led archaeology has had on the discipline, and the potential to tackle shortcomings.

Impact of professionalisation on the independent sector It has sometimes been argued that the rise of the profession has been to the detriment of amateur archaeology, not least by causing an apparent

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decline in opportunities for excavation by local societies (Selkirk 1987, CIA 1993, Huggins 1995). AIP found that only 40 per cent of local societies responding to their study were actively undertaking fieldwork in the 1990s. Further, a 2003 survey by the Council for British Archaeology of 350 local archaeological groups in England identified a changing perceived role for local societies. The study found that 90 per cent rated lectures/seminars as the most important part of their activities followed by publication (80 per cent) and excursions (75 per cent). Somewhat surprising was that doing their own research (local history and documentary) and undertaking excavation were rated as an important part of the activities of only 65 and 52 per cent of respondents respectively (Hunt and Lambrick 2003). A study on public participation in archaeology by the Council for British Archaeology in 2003 also reinforced the sense of disenfranchisement with a strong perception that archaeologists employed within the commercial sector ‘are often reluctant or unwilling to engage . . . with those who have a strong interest and much experience in local archaeology’ (Farley 2003: para. 3.1). Examining the opportunities for volunteering on excavations, the study identified a mismatch between supply and high levels of demand with only limited opportunities being provided by local societies and conservation bodies, or via a small number of university-run research and training excavations. The study cautioned, however, that archaeological research opportunities were much broader than excavation, and as one respondent commented: Unfortunately, independents/amateurs have been steered away from non-destructive work by one or two influential voices insisting repeatedly that survey is boring and that excavation is the only type of archaeological fieldwork worth pursuing . . . In nearly 20 years of measuring and analysing earthworks and related features I have been hot, cold, wet, parched, irritable, confused and exhausted but never bored . . . [field survey] can make a real difference to the way that we view ‘sites’ within a landscape setting, and offer the discovery of new classes of monuments (e.g. cord rig) and radical re-interpretations of known classes (e.g. medieval gardens). (Bowden 2003) The ratification of the Valletta European Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage (revised) in September 2000 by the UK government has, if anything, increased concern amongst local societies. The convention of requirements for prior authorisation for archaeological

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excavations (Article 3) resulted in a significant number of local groups and individuals, under the leadership of the Council for Independent Archaeologists, launching a campaign against implementation of Valletta. Their greatest worry was that a literal translation of the Convention would introduce systems similar to those in European countries such as Germany, Portugal and Ireland (and, uniquely, within Northern Ireland2) for licensing archaeological investigation, which they feared would limit or end excavation opportunities for local groups. The Council for British Archaeology, highlighting that controls already existed for investigation on Scheduled Ancient Monuments and sites affected by development, argued that there were opportunities in implementation for ‘. . . any additional controls [to] be supportive and encouraging, not bureaucratic and inhibiting’ (CBA 2001). The government responded that they planned to take a liberal approach centred on subscription to a code of conduct (Blackstone 2001). At the heart of this debate lie questions about who has a right to undertake excavation, and whether there should be more governmental or quasi-official regulation. On the one hand contract archaeology has developed regulatory systems – albeit far from perfect – whilst academia and the voluntary sector have mostly been self-regulatory (except for research on protected archaeological sites where legislation mandates regulation). The underlying principle has been that the pursuit of research purely for the generation of knowledge should in itself be a spur towards achieving high standards. This is rooted in a feeling and philosophy that the discipline should be able to regulate itself, but with an acceptance that the profit motive – which inspires many metal detectorists (to sell objects or receive legitimate rewards under the Treasure Act 1996) or places pressure on those working in contractual situations – generates a need for controls to prevent the loss of archaeology needlessly, or without proper record. In practice, although the discipline is reluctant to point the finger, it is widely recognised that some below-par work has been undertaken in both regulated and self-regulated scenarios. However, the situation for researchers outside the walls has not been wholly bleak. Although reduced in number compared to days before the expansion of archaeology as a profession, a great many local societies and independents are continuing to successfully undertake archaeological research in the field. AIP statistics bear this out with approximately 400 investigations between 1990 and 1999 being attributed to local societies (Darvill and Russell 2002: 49). The Pontefract and District Archaeological Society is emblematic of what can be achieved with a ‘can-do’ spirit. Recent research by their

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members includes the Saint Aidan’s Project, survey of a riverbed section, excavating the wrecks of at least five vessels; excavation of a stretch of Roman road at Ackworth; and the Howden Geophysical which found the first evidence of pre-Minster buildings in the town (Pontefract and District Archaeological Society 2003). A great many further excellent examples could be cited from across the United Kingdom. There has also been an emergence of limited new streams of support for research outside, or in partnership with those inside, the walls such as the Local Heritage Initiative which brings together heritage-focused financial support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Countryside Agency and Nationwide Building Society. Such funding has helped cover the costs of bringing in professional and academic expertise to support and build capacity for community-based archaeological projects. In Bournemouth, for example, funds have been given to assist the Queen’s Park Improvement and Protection Society to complete a survey of features of the park predating the modern municipal golf course, working with archaeologists from Bournemouth University (Dr K Welham, pers. comm.). At Great Ayton in North Yorkshire, a community archaeology project supported by professional expertise has set about examining everything from evidence of Mesolithic and Neolithic occupation in the area through to examining a WW2 air crash site, as well as supporting archaeological skills training to help local researchers become self-sufficient (LHI 2003). A growth in community-centred research has also been fostered directly by local authorities, archaeological trusts, and conservation bodies. York Archaeological Trust for example has been running a project for volunteers investigating the Roman legionary fortress and the medieval St Leonard’s Hospital in York; in Hartlepool, the Headland Community Archaeology Project, supported by local regeneration funding, has been run by the local authority archaeology section with a focus on involving people resident or working in the area; whilst at Wittenham Clumps, Oxford Archaeology has begun a volunteer and community excavation investigating remains around Castle Hill spanning 6000 BC through to the medieval period (Oxford Archaeology 2003). When it comes to large-scale archaeological surveys there have been tremendous successes like the Defence of Britain project which ran between 1995 and 2002 under the auspices of the Council for British Archaeology. An army of volunteer recorders – over 600 in all – identified and recorded nearly 20,000 twentieth-century military sites in the United Kingdom revolutionising our understanding of the anti-invasion defences of the past century (Denison 2002). Meanwhile independent

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researchers have continued to make a significant contribution, especially where they have taken a broad survey (and not a solely excavation-centred) approach. An exemplar is the invaluable contribution to the study of prehistoric rock-art in Britain made by Stan Beckensall, formerly a school headmaster, who has worked tirelessly for decades identifying and recording rock-art sites and publishing the results in numerous books and articles. There have also been attempts to bridge the divide between metal detectorists and archaeologists, supported by the Council for British Archaeology and the National Council for Metal Detectorists – and now being assisted through a Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) in England and Wales – to bring their work, if not entirely into the archaeological fold, closer to the discipline. Whilst the activities of detectorists still raise hackles amongst many archaeologists (see Hunt 2003 for a brief overview of the debate) the establishment of the PAS shows signs of reaping research rewards. In the four pilot years of the scheme records rose from 13,783 objects recorded per annum to 37,783 in the fourth year (Bland 2004). Interpretation of systematic recording of chance metal-detected finds in Lincolnshire has, for example, begun to have a dramatic effect on the interpretation of Anglo-Saxon occupation in the region (Bland 2004: 282–3).

The future Whilst the discipline faces significant challenges in making best use of developer funding, it is apparent that new collaborative approaches to archaeological research are reconnecting the academic, professional and voluntary sectors. The discipline has also showed signs of reawakening to the fact that its vitality in the United Kingdom relies first upon the participation of the community of societies and individuals passionate about archaeology, and secondly upon engagement with the wider public in communicating to them about the discipline’s work. Assuming that necessary structural and behavioural changes continue to be made, there is good reason for optimism that archaeological research can continue to flourish both within and beyond the walls of the academy.

Notes 1. The 1882 Act initially protected 50 monuments. Today c.35,000 monuments are protected under subsequent monuments law. 2. In Northern Ireland, under the Historic Monuments and Archaeological Objects (NI) Order 1995 a licence is required to search for archaeological objects or

108 Outside and Across the Walls carry out excavation. Excavations must be under the direction of a qualified archaeologist, licensed by the Environment and Heritage Service.

References Aitchison, K. (1999) Profiling the Profession: A Survey of Archaeological Jobs in the UK. York, London and Reading: Council for British Archaeology, English Heritage and Institute of Field Archaeologists. APPAG (2003) The Current State of Archaeology in the United Kingdom: First Report of the All Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group. Anon. (2000) Power of Place: The Future of the Historic Environment. London: English Heritage. Anon. (1994) Rev John Horsley [online]. Newcastle: Hadrian’s Wall Tourism Partnership http://www.hadrians-wall.org/template.asp?ID= 544&parentID=571 &refID= 542&refParent= 571 Bahn, P.G. (ed.) (1996) The Cambridge Illustrated History of Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barrett, J.C. (1995) Some Challenges in Contemporary Archaeology: Archaeology in Britain Conference 1995 (Oxbow Lecture 2), Oxford: Oxbow Books. Biddle, M. (1994) ‘Challenging the normal presumption’, Brit Archaeol News 11: 9. Biddle, M. (1995) What Future for British Archaeology? Archaeology in Britain Conference 1994 (Oxbow Lecture 1), Oxford: Oxbow Books. Bishop, M. (1994) ‘Research – holy grail or sacred cow’, Field Archaeologist 21: 425–7. Blackstone, Rt Hon the Baroness. (2001) Transcript of Speech by Baroness Blackstone, Minister for Arts, to Historic Environment Forum Conference on Valletta Convention, Friday 26th October 2001 [online] http://www.britarch.ac.uk/valletta/ govt_valletta.html Bland, R. (2004) ‘The Treasure Act and the Portable Antiquities Scheme: A case study in developing public archaeology’, in Merriman, N. (ed.) Public Archaeology, New York and London: Routledge. Bowden, M. (2003) Response to CBA Working Party on Participating in the Past [online] http://www.britarch.ac.uk/participation/responses/Bowden.html Carver, M.O.H. (1994) ‘Putting research back in the driving seat’, British Archaeological News 13: 9. Carver, M.O.H. (1996) ‘On archaeological value’, Antiquity 70: 45–56. Council for British Archaeology (CBA) (1999) A Brief History of the CBA [online], York: Council for British Archaeology http://www.britarch.ac.uk/valletta/ valletta_final_cba_full.html Council for British Archaeology (CBA) (2001) The Valletta Convention: The CBA Position, York: Council for British Archaeology. Council for Independent Archaeology (CIA) (1993) The Role of Local Societies in PPG 16, Northampton: Council for Independent Archaeology. Daniel, G. (1967) The Origins and Growth of Archaeology, Hardmondsworth: Pelican. Daniel G. (ed.) (1981) Towards a History of Archaeology, London: Thames and Hudson. Darvill, T. and Hunt, A.J. (1999) ‘PPG16 has quickened pace of archaeological investigation’, Conservation Bulletin 35: 14–17.

Alexander J. Hunt 109 Darvill, T. and Russell, B. (2002) Archaeology after PPG16: Archaeological Investigations in England 1990–1999 (Bournemouth University School of Conservation Sciences Research, Report 10), Bournemouth and London: Bournemouth University in association with English Heritage. Denison, S. (2002) ‘Fortress Britain’, British Archaeology 65, June: 8–11. Farley, M. (ed.) (2003) Participating in the Past: The Results of an Investigation by a Council for British Archaeology Working Party [online], York: Council for British Archaeology http://www.britarch.ac.uk/participation/report.html Hawkes, C. and Piggott, S. (1948) Survey and Policy of Field Research in the Archaeology of Great Britain. London: Council for British Archaeology. Hudson, K. (1981) A Social History of Archaeology: The British Experience, London: Macmillan. Huggins, P. (1995) ‘Struggling amateurs, in need of support’, British Archaeology 3: 8. Hunt, A.J. (2003) Archaeology and Metal Detecting [online], London: British Broadcasting Corporation http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/archaeology/ treasure/metal_ detect_01.shtml Hunt, A.J. and Lambrick, G. (2003) Stakeholder Participation in Strategic Land-Use Planning for the Historic Environment [online], York: Council for British Archaeology http://www.britarch.ac.uk/conserve/planning/stakeholder.html Local Heritage Initiative (LHI) (2003) Great Ayton: A Case Study [online], http:// www.lhi.org.uk/projects_directory/projects_by_region/yorkshire_the_humber/ north_yorkshire/great_ayton_community_archaeology_group/great_ayton.html Marsden, B.M. (1999) The Early Barrow Diggers, Stroud: Tempus. Morris, R. (1997) ‘Right and wrong ways to do archaeology’, British Archaeology 29: 9. Morris, R. (1998) ‘Building roads to intellectual nowhere’, British Archaeology 36: 8. Myers, J.N.L. (1975) ‘Presidential Address to the Society of Antiquaries’, Antiquaries Journal LV, 1. Oxford Archaeology (2003) Interim Summary Report on Excavations at Castle Hill, Little Wittenham: Summer Season 13th July to 5th September 2003, Oxford: Oxford Archaeology. Pontefract and District Archaeological Society (2003) Response to CBA Working Party on Participating in the Past [online], http://www.britarch.ac.uk/participation/ responses/Pontefract%20&%20District%20Archaeological%20Society.html Selkirk, A (ed.) (1987) ‘Archaeology for all’, Current Archaeology 9, 10 (109): 297–9. Selkirk, A. (1997) Who Owns the Past? London: Adam Smith Institute. Simpson, J. (2004) The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2: 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Society of Antiquaries of London (n.d.) History of the Society of Antiquaries of London [online] London: Society of Antiquaries of London http:// www.sal.org.uk/history/

7 Inside-Out or Outside-In? The Case of Family and Local History Michael Drake

Introduction Within the walls of academia, practitioners of several aspects of family and local history can be found amongst historians of various hues, geographers, demographers, sociologists. They number in this country a hundred or two. Outside the walls there are tens of thousands, some without any affiliations, but many in family and local history societies and heritage organisations. Between these two sets of researchers there is little overt contact: given the disparity in the numbers this would in any case be unlikely. Many of the former regard the latter as mere collectors of ‘ill-digested fragments of information’ (Marshall 1995: 49), no more worthy of the title ‘researcher’, than stamp collectors or train spotters. As for the latter, there is some resentment and mistrust of the former but mostly there is a widespread ignorance about what they are engaged in. This is not, however, the whole story. Here, through three case studies, we shall reveal another picture. In the first we find a project that was initiated, designed, sponsored, financed and researched outside the walls, but which moved, at least in part, inside, taking on a somewhat different form as it did so. In the second we have two projects nurtured inside the walls, but which could not have been carried out without the research of several hundred ‘non-academics’. And in the third we shall see how, through a training programme, many thousand of researchers outside the walls have spanned the divide with publications that can be welcomed by the two sets of researchers we caricatured above. 110

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The Victoria County History of the Counties of England: A case of outside-in Although family and community history has been practised for centuries, here we will confine our attention to the last 150 years or so. We will begin by taking a look at The Victoria History of the Counties of England (hereafter VCH). It was launched in 1899 under the patronage of Queen Victoria, the aim being to provide ‘a national survey showing the condition of the country at the present day and tracing the domestic history of the English counties back to the earliest times’ (VCH 1900: vii). The prospectus (or ‘General Advertisement’ as it was called) promised that: The Victoria County History will trace, county by county, the story of England’s growth from its prehistoric condition, through the barbarous age, the settlement of alien peoples, and the gradual welding of many races into a nation which is now the greatest on the globe. (VCH 1900: vii) That the VCH took the county as its organising principle is an interesting feature in the historiography of family and local history. It had, like the parish, a long and significant history, with its role recently enhanced by the setting up of county councils in 1888. Although the county has attracted less attention than the parish or borough as a territorial unit of interest for recent historians, some believe its significance as a cultural focus in the past has not been given its due (Phythian-Adams 1993). What was expected of the VCH can, to a degree, be deduced from its sponsors, the 27 members of the Advisory Council. It was headed by His Grace, the Duke of Devonshire, who at the time was Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. There were three more dukes, a marquis, two earls, two barons, six knights, the Director of the British Museum, the Keeper of the Public Records, the Director of the National Portrait Gallery, the President of the Royal Geographical Society and the Director General of the Ordnance Survey. Titled people still adorn the list of offices of some county historical societies. There were only four members of the Advisory Council of the VCH with university posts: Lord Aston (Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge); Sir Frederick Pollock (Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford); F. York Powell (Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford) and Reginald L. Poole (University Lecturer in Diplomatic at Oxford).

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Given what we know of the academic interests of these men it would seem unlikely that either family or local history much occupied their waking hours. Nor is this surprising since there were no university posts in family and local history until the last half of the twentieth century when its principal practitioners were to be found in economic and social history. For example, Professor M.M. Postan, who held the chair of Economic and Social History in Cambridge University from 1935, not only carried out research in the local and family history of medieval England, but encouraged generations of graduate students to do so. Historical geographers were also prominent in both fields. The first chair in Local History was established at Leicester University College in 1952. And this was about the time when much research began to be carried out under the auspices of university extra-mural departments and the Workers’ Educational Association (Rogers 1995: 3). Returning to the VCH, it is not altogether surprising that so far as family history was concerned, the families in question were to be those with ‘manorial pedigrees and accounts of the noble and gentle families connected with the local history’ (VCH 1900: ix). It comes as no surprise either that the list of topics to be covered in the county histories should be topped by ‘all the phases of ecclesiastical history’ and tailed by ‘the development of arts, science, manufacture and industries’, with ‘the changes in land tenure; the records of local and historic families; the history of the social life and sports of the villages and towns’ sandwiched in between (VCH 1900: vii). Finally to underline the somewhat patrician focus of the VCH, amongst the ‘many thousands of subjects’ for which illustrations would be sought were ‘castles, cathedrals and churches, mansions and manor houses, most halls (sic) and market halls, family portraits etc’. No mention here of canals, railways, hospitals, schools, slums or other manifestations of that other side of local history. The Victoria History of the Counties of England is with us still, with 97 substantial volumes published to the end of 2004, all in the unmistakable red bound format that has characterised them since the outset. Its progress and current status can be found on its website (www.englandpast.net/about). So what, if anything has changed? The situation has been reviewed recently by Dr Carrie Smith, a full-time employee of the VCH, with a background in archives (Smith 2002). She imagines that the VCH was originally meant for educated members of the general public who might well themselves be researchers in family and local history. The archetypal subscriber, she surmises, would be the country parson, with private means, Oxbridge, of course, ‘keenly interested in

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the great and the good’, a ‘keen antiquarian’, known to ‘grub around in prehistoric or Roman sites’, a founder member of his local archaeological and natural history society to which he contributed the odd article, and disappointed when only two of the supplemental volumes of county pedigrees promised in the prospectus of 1899 were published (Smith 2002: 84). One wonders if this was a true picture (Smith admits it is something of a caricature) as the agricultural depression of the last 30 years of the nineteenth century had by 1900 taken its toll of clerical incomes. This may be why the clergy were much less prominent in, for example, the Architectural and Archaeological Society of the County of Buckingham than they had been half a century earlier. In 1858, when the society first began to publish its Records of Buckinghamshire, its President was the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Oxford and of the 31 officers of the Society, 17 were clergymen. They were also strongly represented amongst the ordinary members and were responsible for most of the published research (Records of Buckinghamshire 1858: unpaginated). By the time volume VIII was produced in 1904 – it covered the years 1898–1903 – there were (in 1899) only 5 clergy amongst the 29 officers and whilst still evident amongst the ordinary members, they figured much less prominently amongst the researchers (Records of Buckinghamshire 1904: 322). After the Second World War the VCH began to put somewhat more emphasis on economic and social history, reflecting the advance of that subject within universities and the growing interest outside them in a less elitist form of local and family history. The VCH was now, however, produced by professional historians working literally at a distance from the people whose histories they were writing and who retained in the volumes ‘the highly compressed and specialised terminology’ so many of their potential audience found ‘baffling’ (Smith 2002: 86). There are now plans to involve local people in the way the original sponsors envisaged (VCH 1900: vii, Smith 2002: 87). One publication resulting from this is Clacton at War 1939–45 produced by a local group (Clacton VCH Group 2003). Local authority funding has long taken over from that provided by private patrons but as it is plagued by short-termism, other sources are being sought, such as the Heritage Lottery Fund and the recently formed Friends of the VCH (www.englandpast.net/support). The VCH has also come within the walls of academia, in that it is based at the Institute of Historical Research, part of London University, and some of its editors hold university posts. Many others, however, have no university affiliation and so technically are ‘outside the walls’. They belong to a new breed of academics who work on short-term contracts

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and are similar in some ways to unbeneficed clergymen of past centuries (in some other some countries, Norway for instance, such people have full-time careers producing local histories with local authority funding). The VCH now promotes its wares to the many thousands of family historians who are less interested in ‘manorial pedigrees’ than in their family trees. The VCH also, through its parish-by-parish histories makes a direct pitch for those local historians who today are somewhat less interested in the ‘castles, cathedrals and churches, mansions and manor houses’ than in the institutions to which they can more closely relate and to the processes which brought them into being. We can see this in the pages of the bi-annual Family History News and Digest with its circulation of over 100,000 and The Local Historian.

The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure: A case of inside-out Another major academic body that, over the past 40 years, has operated in the fields of both family and local history by consciously making links across the walls is the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. This was founded by Tony Wrigley and Peter Laslett at the University of Cambridge, with a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation. Subsequently it has received government funding. The Group soon published a guide for historians of population and students of family and household structure in past time, a guide that was aimed at both university and independent researchers (Wrigley 1966a). There soon followed an ambitious project: to produce a history of England’s population from 1538 (when parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials were introduced on a national basis by Thomas Cromwell who served Henry VIII in a variety of posts) to 1837 (when the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths was introduced). The group invited local historians to enter, on specially prepared forms, monthly totals of baptisms, marriages and burials from one or more parish registers, the choice of register being left to them. Some 404 parishes were covered, the work of no less than 270 historians, almost all of whom were ‘outside the walls’. Their work became the main source for The Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Wrigley and Schofield 1981). The returns for each parish are now available on CD-ROM (Schofield 1998). So far as this chapter is concerned, the publication of The Population History of England raises a central issue, namely the relationship between

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local history and national history. On the one hand the individual parish returns on which the book is based provide an invaluable source, not only for historians of the 404 parishes employed, but also as a template for other parishes whose registers have been preserved and which can, when marshalled appropriately and analysed with suitable tools, provide a sound foundation for any parish history (Drake 1974, 1982a,b). On the other hand, Wrigley and Schofield had a more ambitious project in mind. They wanted to use the data from the 404 parishes to produce a history of England’s population: a venture that was not only well outside the interest of local historians ‘outside the walls’, but also beyond their capability, involving, as it did, huge and complex computer manipulations. The problem was that in the period Wrigley and Schofield wished to cover there were some 10,000 parishes in England and they had information from only 404. If the latter had been a representative sample of these, their way would have been comparatively clear. But this was highly unlikely as the location of the 404 parishes had been determined by the whims of the local researchers who had responded to the invitation of the Cambridge Group. To get over this problem, Wrigley and Schofield drew a random (and, therefore, representative) sample of the 10,000 parishes and then compared their non-random sample of 404 parishes with it in terms of size, location, occupational structure and so on. One of the major differences was that 65 per cent of the parishes in the random sample had populations of less than 400 at the census of 1811, whereas only 16 per cent of the Cambridge Group sample did. To get over this, Wrigley and Schofield carried out a re-weighting exercise so as to increase the number of births, marriages and burials in their small parishes and to reduce the numbers in their large parishes. This, and other, exercises carried out by Wrigley and Schofield has brought forth both admiration and scepticism (Drake 1982a, Razzell 1994: 82–149, 175–7). Most local historians outside the wall of academia would never dream of replicating such an exercise. There are, however, others within the walls who regard such an approach as a legitimate aim of local history. For another example of how the local and the national have been brought together fruitfully we can turn to the work of Pooley and Turnbull at the University of Lancaster. As with the Wrigley and Schofield volume, their book Migration and Mobility since the 18th Century (Pooley and Turnbull 1998) was a collaborative effort between the two academics and a large number of family historians who drew on their own family trees and associated information to create a national picture of migration and social mobility.

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The contrast between the work of those independent researchers who collected the basic data, in both the Wrigley and Schofield and the Pooley and Turnbull projects, on the one hand, and those responsible for synthesising and publishing the final outcomes on the other, is very stark (a similar division is apparent in other areas – see Greenwood, this book). One could uncharitably regard the former as intellectual hod carriers, the latter as the architects, developers and creators of the final structure. In both these projects, however, the pleasures of collaboration and the very considerable lengths the university academics involved went towards explaining how the data was being used, did much to quell any mistrust and feelings of being ‘used’. This issue of ‘them and us’ was addressed, although not explicitly, in a second publication of the Cambridge Group. This was English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 (Wrigley et al. 1997). Although family reconstitution can be traced back to the early years of the last century (see Wrigley et al 1997: 3), its current form and diffusion is credited to the French historian, Louis Henry. The appearance of a local history – La population de Crulai: paroisse normande – marked the beginning of the current interest (Gautier and Henry 1958). This was a highly successful exemplar of the method and was followed by a manual that is now in its third edition (Fleury and Henry 1965). In 1966, Wrigley adapted Henry’s method to the somewhat different circumstances of English parish registers (Wrigley 1966a: 96–159) and in the same year produced a worked example using the registers of the Devonshire parish of Colyton (Wrigley 1966b: 82–109). Family reconstitution is simple in concept, but complex and extremely time-consuming in practice. Nevertheless it has been mastered successfully by researchers operating both inside and outside the walls of academia. For instance, half the researchers, who reconstituted the 26 parishes that form the basis of English Population History from Family Reconstitution, had no university affiliation. In essence the family reconstitution method is close to that used by the family historian when producing his or her family tree; the same source (parish registers) and the same painstaking attention involved in linking one vital event to another. Instead, however, of attention being confined to a single family, the life and death experiences of all the families in a parish – or at least all that can be reconstituted within the bounds of that parish (as many as 80 per cent are usually lost through out-migration or some other factor) – are collated over time. This enables the researcher to follow the demographic experience of individual cohorts and from this to make sophisticated calculations of fertility, nuptiality and mortality.

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Some of the techniques used to create a national picture from local sources are far from easy to understand. And this is one area where the association of university and non-university historians frequently breaks down, where mistrust develops and where parallel ‘knowledge societies’ are created. In neither publication is there any problem with the sources, nor with the outcomes which provide a useful comparator with the local experience. Totting up monthly totals of baptisms, marriages and burials, or reconstituting families along genealogical lines leads to no rift either. The two part company, however, when the local and the familial are left behind in the march towards a national outcome and where the concepts and techniques involved prove too demanding. The work of the Cambridge Group was especially high profile both for its inherent importance and because it came out of Cambridge. But much work, similar in nature, came from other universities, especially via their extra-mural departments. Rogers talks of ‘quite a remarkable episode, a partnership between the academic and the amateur for several years (say late 50s to late 70s)’ which stemmed from the learning-by-doing approach adopted at the time with classes run as research groups rather than lecture series (Rogers 1995: 3). The numbers were impressive. At one point in the late 1970s the University of Nottingham had 144 local history classes, with 80 part-time and 5 full-time tutors involved (Rogers 1995: 4). Involvement in research was at the heart of these classes and led to a considerable number of publications. Rogers argues that the marriage ended because professional historians wanted ‘for professional reasons’ to ‘develop local history as a more pure academic discipline’, moved away from the wholly local, espoused concepts and techniques that were difficult for amateurs to grasp, and withdrew their support from local groups (Rogers 1995: 4–5). This issue is by no means new (see Forgan, this book). Although the initiatives of the Open University (see next section) bucked this trend to some degree, anecdotal evidence suggests that it has been exacerbated in recent years by the demands of the British Research Assessment Exercise which have, it is said, discouraged academics from editing journals, sitting on editorial boards, contributing to local publications or interacting with amateurs.

Inside-out and outside-in: An Open University synthesis If the VCH can be characterised as an endeavour which, to some extent, has moved into academia from its origins outside the walls; and the

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early activities of the Cambridge Group represent a reaching out, in a series of collaborative projects, by those within the walls to those outside; then certain activities at the Open University between 1974 and 2001 may be described as a synthesis of the two approaches. The activities in question consisted of a series of courses at the final year undergraduate level. Although the content of these courses was changed somewhat, the overall format did not (D301 1974–, D301 1982–, DA301 1994–), with each course repeated over several years for successive cohorts of students. Thus, students were trained during the first half of the course and spent the second half demonstrating what they had learned by completing a dissertation under fairly strict guidelines but on a topic and with sources of their own choosing. There are a number of features of this collection of courses that have quite wide implications. First, as many as 6000 students successfully completed one or other of these courses, a sizeable number in the context of family and local history. They came, like all Open University students, from throughout the UK and latterly from the Republic of Ireland and continental Europe. Like most Open University students they came from varied backgrounds and age-groups. Some, especially amongst the retired, were not dissimilar in educational attainment from those the VCH sought to interest and engage in research. Given the number of students involved, few local record offices or local studies libraries were left unscathed. Indeed, as early as 1974, the Registrar General of England and Wales fearing that the likely pressure on the offices of local registrars of births, marriages and deaths would be so great as to be unsustainable decided to close the civil registers to all researchers. This measure, which was of doubtful legality (the Scottish registers remain open), was an unfortunate by-product of the course. Second, apart from the number of students, the influence of these courses was enhanced by the publication of much of their content. This was especially true of the last course in the series which was co-published by the Open University and the Cambridge University Press (Drake and Finnegan 1994, Finnegan and Drake 1994, Golby 1994, Pryce 1994). One result of this was that the course could be used in other situations as could the Reader accompanying the course which was also co-published, this time with Blackwell (Drake 1994). In addition, the dissertations of successful students of the course were published annually on CD-ROM (Faulkner and Finnegan 1996–2001), amounting to nearly 2000 in all. Furthermore a number of students went on to add to their qualifications by studying for research degrees.

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Others have continued to research and publish ‘outside the walls’ (including through the Family and Community Historical Research Society (FACHRS), see below, also McKay, this book). A third feature of the Open University courses was the attempt to spread ways of exploring family and local history that were little used by many researching outside (and, indeed, some inside!) the walls of academia. For instance, one of the strands that ran through all three courses was the collection and manipulation of quantitative data including, in DA301, by means of computers (John 1997: 213–20, Schürer 1997: 203–12, Yates 1997: 294–8). The level of sophistication was by no means high, ranging from descriptive statistics to sampling, correlation, significance testing and a number of special measures such as an index of residential segregation, but this did provide an incentive for at least some student researchers to use such methods in their work. Earlier courses were somewhat more adventurous with attempts to incorporate both the theories and techniques of demographers, sociologists and political scientists.

Communication and validation Questions of communication and validation have already been touched upon. For example, the Cambridge Group, in engaging independent scholars from outside the walls of the University of Cambridge, not only communicated its aims and objectives to them, but also validated their work. The Group was also involved, in 1967, in the setting up of Local Population Studies, a journal consciously aimed at researchers both inside and outside universities. It did so not only by drawing contributions from both, but also by providing a powerful and conscientious advisory service so that work could be brought up to an academic level. Initially, not only did the contributors reveal a ‘pro-am’ split (a characteristic of the journal to this day), so too did the editors. Now, however, all the editors have posts in academic institutions. Another journal, now in its eighth year of publication, came from the same stable as DA301. Family and Community History is peer reviewed and has an international editorial board. Like Local Population Studies it draws contributions from both professional and non-professional historians. Its editors have always held university posts. The main purpose of the journal is to serve the interests of the FACHRS. This society initially drew almost all of its members from ex-students and staff of the DA301 Open University course, it being their joint initiative. Today, the society is almost entirely run by independent researchers. One interesting

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feature of the society is that each year it runs an annual research project, with a professional historian as a mentor. One such project involved 42 members of the society, the aim being to measure the extent of rural protest in the 1830s, a protest that came to be known as the Swing Riots. The most startling findings were that whereas Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé in their classic study of the riots logged 1475 incidents, mostly in the south of England, the FACHRS project discovered 3144 in 45 counties and a handful in Wales and Scotland, thus dramatically redrawing the map of Swing (Hobsbawm and Rudé 1969, Holland 2003; 2005). Other projects have explored the replacement of Roman by Hindu–Arabic numerals – ‘The Arithmeticke project’ – through probate inventories; ‘The pauper emigrant, 1834–71’; and ‘The allotment movement in England, 1793–1873’ (Wardley and White 2003, Cooper 2004, Fowler 2004).

Conclusion There have been many changes in the fields of family and local history over the past 150 years and especially so over the last 50. Interest in ‘manorial pedigrees’ and ‘noble and gentle families connected with the local history’ (VCH 1900: ix) has waned. In its place has come a thriving community of independent researchers who, as individuals, are primarily interested in their family trees, a very demanding task but one with intrinsically little intellectual content. By that is meant that although a great deal of information is collected (names and dates of birth, marriage and death) and that information put into a structure (the family tree), it is information for its own sake: it is not, as the philosopher A.C. Grayling has put it, in another context, ‘knowledge which gives rise to insight and understanding’ (Grayling 2004: 48). Such ‘insight and understanding’ can only come through placing the individual family into a wider spatial, social and temporal context, involving concepts (fertility, nuptiality, mortality, social mobility) and theory, such as that of Malthus linking resources and population. Individually, by adding a twig to a family tree, like the nineteenth-century amateur botanist adding a plant to his or her herbarium (Allen, this book), the family historian generated little insight. Collectively, however, the community of ‘family tree’ historians have created innumerable societies, newsletters and journals, embraced computing and performed an inestimable service in locating, transcribing and digitalising sources, most notably all the census enumerators’ books of the 1881 British census with information on over 26 million people

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(Church of Latter Day Saints 1996). To that degree they must be counted as members of the ‘knowledge society’ and through this and their collaboration with professional historians they contributed a great deal to it. Local history too has changed. There are still local historians who pursue the initial agenda of the VCH, but today there is much more attention paid to the experiences of the general population, individually or collectively. If elites are studied they are less likely to be made up of ‘noble and gentle families’ than of men and women with economic and political muscle. There has developed too an element of specialisation, as evidenced in, say, the Local Population Studies Society or the FACHRS. There are now many umbrella organisations such as the British Association for Local History (it publishes The Local Historian and an equally valuable newsletter); the Birmingham and District Local History Association (it publishes The Birmingham Historian); and the Federation of Family History Societies with its hugely successful biannual Family History News and Digest. The knowledge society has grown both in numbers and expertise so far as family and community history is concerned. Also it has become more homogeneous as collaboration in societies, journals and projects has brought all participants closer together.

References Church of Latter Day Saints (1996) 1881 British Census and National Index, CD-ROM, Salt Lake City: Church of Latter Day Saints. Clacton VCH Group (2003) Clacton at War, 1939–45, Clacton: Clacton VCH Group. Cooper, J. (2004) ‘Allotments’, Family and Community Historical Research Society Newsletter 5, 2: 9. D301 (1974–) Historical Data and the Social Sciences, Milton Keynes: The Open University Press. D301 (1982–) Historical Sources and the Social Scientist, Milton Keynes: The Open University Press. DA301 (1994–) Studying Family and Community History: 19th and 20th Centuries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the Open University. Drake, M. (1974) Historical Demography: Problems and Projects, Milton Keynes: The Open University Press. Drake, M. (1982a) An Introduction to Parish Register Demography, Milton Keynes: The Open University Press. Drake, M. (ed.) (1982b) Population Studies from Parish Registers: A Selection of Readings from Local Population Studies, Matlock: Local Population Studies. Drake, M. (ed.) (1994) Time, Family and Community, Oxford: Blackwell in association with the Open University.

122 Outside and Across the Walls Drake, M. and Finnegan, R. (eds) (1994; revised edn 1997) Sources and Methods for Family and Community Historians, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the Open University. Faulkner, L. and Finnegan, R. (eds) (1996–2001) Project Reports on Family and Community History, CD-ROM annual series (1996: CDR008; 1997: CDR0015; 1998: CDR0057; 1999: CDR0094; 2000: CDR0133; 2001: CDR0232) Milton Keynes: Open University (available from CD-ROM orders, Faculty Office, Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA). Finnegan, R. and Drake, M. (eds) (1994) From Family Tree to Family History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the Open University. Fleury, M. and Henry, L. (1965; 3rd edn 1985) Nouveau manuel de depouillement et d’exploitation de l’etat civil ancient, Paris: Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques. Fowler, Simon (2004) ‘Emigration’, Family and Community Historical Research Society Newsletter 5, 2: 9. Gautier, E. and Henry, L. (1958) La population de Crulai: paroisse normande, Paris: Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques. Golby, J. (ed.) (1994) Families and Communities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the Open University. Grayling, A.C. (2004) Review of Blom, P. Encyclopédie: The Triumph of Reason in an Unreasonable Age, London: Fourth Estate. Hobsbawm, E.J. and Rudé, G. (1969) Captain Swing, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Holland, M. (2003) ‘The Swing project’, Family and Community History 6, 2: 155. Holland, M. (ed.) (2005) Swing Unmasked: The Agricultural Riots of 1830 to 1832 and Their Wider Implications (with CD-ROM), FACHRS Publications. John, M. (1997) ‘Using databases’, in Drake and Finnegan (eds) (1994; revised edn 1997). Marshall, J.D. (1995) ‘The antiquarian heresy’, The Journal of Regional and Local Studies 15, 2: 49–54. Marshall, J.D. (1997) The Tyranny of the Discrete: A Discussion of the Problems of Local History in England, Aldershot: Scolar Press. Pooley, C.G. and Turnbull, J. (1998) Migration and Mobility in Britain since the 18th Century, London: UCL Press. Pryce, W.T.R. (ed.) (1994) From Family History to Community History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the Open University. Phythian-Adams, C. (ed.) (1993) Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580–1850: Cultural Provinces and English Local History, London: Leicester University Press. Razzell, P.E. (1994) Essays in Population History, London: Caliban Books. Records of Buckinghamshire I (1858) Aylesbury. Records of Buckinghamshire VIII (1904) Aylesbury. Rogers, A. (1995) ‘Participatory research in local history’, The Journal of Regional and Local Studies 15, 1: 1–14. Schofield, R. (1998) Parish Register Aggregate Analyses: The Population History of England Database and Introductory Guide, including a CD-ROM, Colchester: Local Population Studies. Schürer, K. (1997) ‘Computing opportunities in family and community history’, in Drake and Finnegan (eds) (1994; revised edn 1997). Smith, C. (2002) ‘Continuity and change: The future of the Victoria History of the Counties of England’, Local Historian 32, 2: 84–89.

Michael Drake 123 VCH (1900; reprinted 1973), A History of Hampshire and the Isle of White, London: Archibald Constable. Wardley, Peter and White, Pauline (2003) ‘The arithmeticke project: A collaborative research study of the diffusion of Hindu-Arabic numerals’, Family and Community History 6, 1: 5–17. Wrigley, E.A. (ed.) (1966a) An Introduction to English Historical Demography from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Wrigley, E.A. (1966b) ‘Family limitation in pre-industrial England’, Economic History Review 2nd ser. 19: 82–109. Wrigley E.A. and Schofield, R.S. (1981) The Population of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction, London: Edward Arnold. Wrigley, E.A., Davies, R.S., Oeppen, J.E. and Schofield, R.S. (1997) English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yates, S. (1997) ‘Computer accessible data’, in Drake and Finnegan (1994; revised edn 1997).

8 Community Historians and Their Work Around the Millennium John H. McKay

It is relatively well-known that many people are engaged in family and/or community history outside the universities (see Drake, this book). Less is known however about who they are, how they work, what motivates them and the outcomes of their research. This chapter fills out the picture a little through a study of some 200 projects in community history being carried on in Britain around the turn of the millennium. It is based on responses, mostly in writing or by phone, to requests for information from those involved in these projects, covering in all about 350 individuals throughout Britain, from the north of Scotland to the south of England, who in 1998–2002 were engaged individually or in groups in the pursuit of community history.1 This was not a formally representative sample – the extent of such work, invisible in more formal assessments, remains uncounted – and was probably only a small fraction of the whole. However, together with a more intensive study of four projects conducted through informal interviews, written documentation and observation, it does throw some light on the commitment among a substantial number of people to community history and the extensive and time-consuming researches being conducted by these independent historians outside the walls.2

Who were the researchers and what motivated them? The four cases studied in more depth – to begin with those – were located in and around Edinburgh (where I lived) and were all already on-going when I first made contact. The first was research on working life in a factory in Bathgate, a small town twenty miles west of Edinburgh. 124

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The Plessey factory had had a largely female workforce of several thousands, and its closure in 1983 after nearly 40 years had had considerable publicity because of a ‘sit-in’ organised by the women to resist the closure. The history project was organised by a former worker at the factory who had retrained as a community education worker after the eventual closure. It involved reminiscence sessions with a number of former employees, recorded on video tape and by a shorthand recorder. The second was a piece of ongoing research by Diane McNicol, a freelance professional genealogist. Her aim was to produce a book describing in as much detail as possible each of the nearly 400 households of the rural parish of Prestonkirk in East Lothian in 1851. It was based on the 1851 census enumerators’ books but also linked to subsequent census years up to 1891, and to other contemporary records. ’East Lothian at war’, third, was run by an Irishman who had served in the RAF in East Lothian during the 1939–45 war, then settled there. He had for many years been a member of the local Camera Club and in 1996 produced a profusely illustrated book, East Lothian at War, by 2002 in its second printing after the first 1000 copies sold out. His current object, working with other local experts, was to record videotaped interviews with local people about their memories of the Second World War; one edited version was screened to over 400 people at the Millennium Haddington Festival with a further instalment in preparation. A second illustrated volume on East Lothian at War was published at the same time and a website constructed with over 700 hits by mid-2002. Fourth was the Local History Society in Colinton, a leafy suburb of Edinburgh, which had commenced research in 1996 on the ‘life and conditions of living in Colinton in the middle of the nineteenth century’. The project drew mainly on an analysis of the 1841, 1851 and 1861 census enumerators’ books (CEBs) and documents such as kirk session minutes, newspapers and personal letters. It was organised by a retired inspector of schools and a retired senior civil servant with the assistance of a group of society members, all retired. Out of a society membership of 120 the project started with 22 researchers in 1996 and by 2002 totalled 32; apart from departures through serious illness or death the original researchers stayed with it, partly perhaps because of the team-based engagement in many of the (sometimes rather tedious) tasks. The end product was a series of talks to the society in the years from 1996 to 2002, and a 70,000 word report, a limited edition of which was printed in January 2003 for distribution to society members.

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The information gathered in depth from these four cases supplemented by the returns from other researchers elsewhere gave the opportunity to reach some understanding of the characteristics of such researchers and their mode of organisation.3 Of the 201 projects on which I had information 105 were carried on by individual researchers, 8 by husband and wife teams and 82 by groups. Six were classes run by education professionals but also involved non-professionals as researchers, mostly adult students at further education classes, but in one case secondary school pupils. People of all ages were involved. Of the individual researchers the youngest was a teenage student engaged in a school project, the oldest in his late eighties. There was, however, a bias towards the middle and later years of life with a decided preponderance of retired over those still at work. It is possible that some of the researchers had been engaged in this kind of work for many years. One 66-year-old man for example had been researching the history of his family’s involvement in a community for over 30 years. Conversely, an 89-year-old had only become interested after retirement, and some did indicate that historical research was a relatively new pursuit. On gender there was not always sufficient information to warrant definite conclusions but, where a detailed breakdown of membership was given, there was a slight preponderance of men in the group projects. Two thirds of the individual researchers however were women. The researchers were, it seems, concentrated in occupations requiring some intellectual skills, ranging from relatively simple clerical positions to those demanding more complex abilities and training often at a high level. In all 120 different jobs were mentioned and, bearing in mind the relatively small numbers, this indicates a very wide range of occupations. They could be arranged in 19 groups, Administration (23), Management (13), Engineering (18), Information Technology (5), Finance (9), Sales (3), Construction (8), Agriculture, Land etc. (9), Crafts (6), Journalism (7), Law (6), Education (68), Science (7), Health (15), Public Service (53), Heritage (5), Church (2), Home Duties (4) and Miscellaneous (8). There was a roughly 60:40 division between jobs in public and private sectors; the two commonest categories, Education and Public Service, were both in the public sector. Information about education and skills was harder to come by, but there seemed to be a substantial level of academic skill among the researchers in the sense that four had ‘O’ Levels; two ‘A’ Levels; four various diplomas; one CA; two BScs; one first in anthropology; 22 BAs (13 of them Open University); 30 described simply as ‘graduates’; two

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MAs and three PhDs. They had mostly gained these early in their careers but a few as mature students and/or after retirement, like the local government officer who acquired diplomas in archaeology and history after retiring and a former maths teacher, a local-history MA. With only a few exceptions most qualifications were in disciplines other than history. The Colinton project involved men and women from a wide range of disciplines and the project leaders made strenuous efforts to utilise the particular skills available. For example, a former head of the geography department at a teachers’ training college was invaluable in the search for and analysis of maps and plans. The co-ordinator of another group similarly indicated that this contained 11 people whose different interests and skills were very relevant for allocating research tasks. Since few of the researchers had a professional or university background in history, this was not what initially led them into community history. Only 28 individuals acknowledged some background in history and just nine of the groups said they included a member or members with that experience. The librarian of a small town had a PhD in Urban History and had produced two excellent booklets about the town, while members of 4 groups and 10 individuals had been students of an Open University course on family and community history – further examples, as perhaps with the extra-mural classes mentioned earlier, of links between academia and the world outside. Researchers were asked what had started them off. They seemed often to connect this with some event, locality or experience which was personal to themselves. Of the four more intensively studied projects, the members of the factory-based group, including the community education worker responsible for the project, were moved by memories of their part in what for all those involved was a very important part of their lives. It culminated in an event, the factory ‘sit-in’ which brought national fame to this small town. The prime mover in ‘East Lothian at war’ had a long-standing interest in photography, especially of buildings of historical interest, and also a particular interest in the place and topic because of having been stationed there in the war. He was particularly keen on communicating the results to others and created a number of audio-visual presentations which were in demand at meetings of many local groups, with the Haddington Festival a major focus for this for some 30 years. The researchers in the Colinton project seemed to be motivated by a desire for knowledge of the past life of their community, apparently linked to a commitment to the community at the present time. Many of the Colinton History Society members were also members

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of other local groups like the Literary Society, Amenity Association and Garden Club, while the two leading researchers were elders of the parish church. Of the less closely observed researchers, 23 groups, 7 husband and wife teams and 51 individuals provided some indication of why they had embarked upon research. Six of the groups were ad hoc organisations resulting from parish council initiatives for the celebration of the millennium. Other unnamed groups resulted from private initiatives. In one case, five people with an interest in local history were recruited through the local church magazine. Four were well-established local history societies and it must be presumed that their members were interested in the history of their communities. One of these societies was inspired by a series of Cambridge extra-mural lectures to engage in research resulting in a publication on the history of the village in the Victorian age. Another was started because the son of one of the founder members had written a history of the village church while looking for work after graduating in history; this inspired members of the community to identify other topics worthy of exploration. A church group was initiated by someone who had disagreed with her 93-year-old father on the name and situation of a cottage; efforts to resolve this in local record offices aroused such an interest that she proposed a research project for the church’s celebration of the millennium. Another project had its origins in discontent over the arrangements for the celebration of 100 years of parish councils in a particular parish. One small group was drawn together by a common interest in railways and canals which broadened out into industrial history, two more came about through a common interest in family and local history. A thriving genealogy society widened its interests to include community history and found it had collected so much material that a second volume was needed (Helm and Davies 1999, 2001) while a recently (1997) formed heritage group was stimulated by an exhibition on the village heritage sponsored by the parish council. Two of the husband–wife teams and ten of the individual researchers indicated that their interest in community history developed from family history. For one, a frustration with ‘dead ends’ in family history led to community history, another’s family-tree interests developed into curiosity about where and how the various generations had lived, and three individual researchers were former students of an Open University course in family and community history. Some had been stimulated by their present or former employment. A husband and wife, both architects, found that work on historic buildings generated

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an interest in the history of the communities in which they were situated. For another, conveyancing and probate work in a solicitor’s office set up an abiding interest in the history revealed by such sources. Some got interested because of being brought up in the locality being researched; others because of affection for a new community, especially when an ‘incomer’ had been made welcome. A husband and wife team set out to photograph and research all the houses in their village because they had seen a similar project carried out elsewhere on the occasion of the Silver Jubilee in 1977 and a retired nurse’s project on a river flood was inspired by seeing a slide in a leisure class of the plaque marking the height of flood water in a local church. There were some idiosyncratic cases. One researcher’s interest in history and research arose from reading and writing diaries during long periods of illness as a child, another from reading romantic historical novels as a teenager. The male member of one husband and wife team was tracing his ancestors and the communities they lived in because he had a rare congenital blood disorder peculiar to Mediterranean countries: perhaps his Scottish ancestors intermarried with Spanish Armada castaways? On a more general note there was some evidence that community history research was carried out by people involved in the community in other ways. The main function of one group was to help members of its community by acting as ‘good neighbours’. Four groups included members of their parish council and one organiser of an ad hoc group had been a Justice of the Peace ( JP) and prison visitor as well as member of a parole board, marriage guidance council, Citizens’ Advice Bureau and adventure playground association. Another researcher had been a playgroup helper, parent–teachers’ association committee member, school governor, village hall chairman, parish councillor and fuel charity trustee. Three had been county or district councillors, and two others parish council chairman or clerk. One group consisted of four retired teachers who had known each other for many years and, although none were natives, were interested in the community (this strand of community involvement is also apparent among the people engaged in the Mass-Observation project (Sheridan, this book)). Running through this was also, it seemed, some desire to do something of one’s own that was both personal and worthwhile. It was partly the enjoyment of the chase, something mentioned several times. But it was also apparently the value attached not only to a serious pursuit whose outcome might be useful to others but also one through which the researchers could gain a greater sense of their involvement in

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the past and of their own belonging. Here is the message to the researchers from one of the organisers of the Colinton project: At the end of our six-year project two things stand out. First of all those taking part had enjoyed the experience of trying to feel the pulse of a past age through the study of census statistics and of contemporary documents. It had been a rewarding experience. Secondly we all came to realise that what appealed most was not the statistics as such but the glimpses of the real people and characters behind them. This appeal was increased by the realisation that these people had lived and worked in the same parish we now lived in. In his poem ‘A Lowden Sabbath Morn’, Robert Louis Stevenson tells of parishioners gathering in the churchyard ahead of the Sunday service. His poem could well have been at least partly based on Colinton Kirk where his maternal grandfather was minister. Stevenson tells how the parishioners spend time reading the gravestones until the church bell rings bidding them enter the church to worship. He tells how the reading concentrates their minds on eternal things. Thus on the day o’ solemn things, The bell that in the steeple swings To fauld a scattered fam’ly rings Its welcome screed An’ just a wee thing nearer brings The quick and deid. We felt that our census project ‘just a wee thing nearer’ brought the ‘quick’ of our generation with the ‘deid’ of the middle of the nineteenth century. Researchers were obviously motivated in many different ways, but it can be said that among the groups many were, like the Colinton Society, inspired by a desire to acquire some knowledge of the history of their community from many different kinds of sources. More importantly, as discussed below, there was also a desire to communicate this knowledge within their community.

What counts as research? A considerable majority of the researchers were not by either training or occupation professional historians; this makes it necessary to ask, ‘what

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counts as research?’. G.R. Elton once described the difference between the amateur and the professional historian as ‘the distinction between those who think that research means reading a lot of books and those who have grasped that research means assimilating into oneself the various and often very tiresome relics of the past’ (1987: 29). No doubt there has been a great deal of such amateur research in areas where there is a substantial body of published work. However, in the cases here these predominantly amateur researchers had in most cases no books to read about their communities. They were compelled to interest themselves in the ‘relics of the past’, the sources – which leads on to the question of how these amateurs carried out their research. The extent and variety of the largely primary sources that they drew on was impressive. The Colinton History Society for example made full use of the resources available in Edinburgh – the Edinburgh Room of the City’s Central Library, the National Library of Scotland and the National Archives of Scotland. Records used included census enumerators’ books; valuation rolls; minute books of kirk sessions, heritors, parochial boards and commissioners of supply; statute labour accounts; old parochial registers; prison registers. Contemporary newspapers and magazines were also consulted, so were inscriptions in the parish churchyard, army records (by a retired Brigadier), and the chapters on Colinton in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish Statistical Accounts. A similar broad spectrum of sources was used by other researchers. Most were in such repositories as the Public Record Office, General Register Office, County/City Record Offices, British Library, Colindale newspaper library and local council libraries. Local history and local studies libraries and their librarians played a particularly important role in the support of the researchers. Such collections have grown considerably in recent years and are often the first point of contact for researchers, providing information about other archives. There has also been a growing interest among local authorities in their records, with the creation of archive centres. In all, some 80 or so different kinds of written sources were mentioned by researchers (full list in McKay 2002). The most common were the census (especially the census enumerators’ books), maps, newspapers, directories, wills and church records. Personal sources such as diaries, letters, scrapbooks and, especially, photographs were also consulted. Oral sources were mentioned by nearly 80 researchers, paralleling the development in academic history. Thirty-six years ago Kitson Clark could claim that ‘except for a certain amount of archaeological material, the use of which has its own rules, most of the raw material for historical

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work is to be found in some sort of document’ (1968: 62); now oral sources are regarded as an essential element in the study of twentiethcentury history. Overall, the kinds of sources used by our ‘amateur’ historians were very much the same as those utilised by professionals. Indeed it could even be suggested that in some areas, especially the use of oral and of personal sources to explore the lives and locales of ordinary people, it has been the amateur historians who have sometimes taken the lead: they have certainly not been content with ‘reading a lot of books’. It is also of interest to consider what emerged from the sources, the end products of their research. Pat Hudson has suggested that the hallmark of ‘micro history’ is ‘the use of small scale research to ask, and to answer, big questions’ (1999: 5). It cannot be said that much of the work carried out by the researchers studied here was deliberately directed this way; their focus seems to have been mainly on the interest of the near-to-home aspects. But many of the projects did deal with local dimensions of national and even international events and developments. An obvious example was war. As well as ‘East Lothian at war’, a number of respondents were engaged in writing about their own and other people’s memories of the 1939–45 conflict, including an interesting account of life in a London council estate (Tutton 1998). The group studying the Plessey factory were looking at the local consequences of government policies on the relocation of industry in the decades after the Second World War and also illuminating how women’s lives changed in the same period. The study of Colinton in the mid-nineteenth century was, in part, focused on two larger issues: the demographic effects of the industrialisation of the valley and the suburbanisation of the parish due to its proximity to the City of Edinburgh. A study of the development of a council estate in Sheffield was similarly linked to the big issue of government housing policy in the inter-war years. This kind of relationship was a common feature of much of the work undertaken by these researchers. A number of individuals produced work based on their own recollections of a long life. Some groups accumulated reminiscences of larger numbers through more or less formal sessions. Memories: Yesteryear in and around Haddington (Haddington Remembered Group 1991) is a good example. It is full of anecdotes of life in Haddington, of interest, obviously, to local people. There is a temptation to regard this kind of work as not being ‘history’ but the recollections of, say, local school life can contribute to the history of the developments in education in the twentieth century.

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I was sent completed works by 88 individuals and groups in my study (114 items in all), together with further works from the four main case studies. The majority of researchers produced outputs in printed or manuscript form, sometimes in more than one volume, including 46 published books, 23 published booklets, 5 articles in newsletters and journals, a transport history map and two CD-ROMs. There were also 7 unpublished books, 6 booklets and 16 papers, together with information about exhibitions, plays, maps, audiotapes, videos, history trails, talks, a ‘chronolog’ (historical sundial with booklet), essay competition and web page, with further planned outputs still in process. In a few instances the published work provided detailed references to sources and so on but in many cases the authors felt that the intended audience, fellow members of their community, would have little interest in this and simply described the sources used in a bibliography, preface, appendix, and so on. As evidenced by its quantity and by the successful completion of the time-consuming and often difficult and costly task of writing up and publishing, the publication and communication of their work seems to have been among the main aims of many of the researchers and what in one way kept them going. It was not just about having personal fun but also producing a useful end product. In a way this public communication provided the visible validation of their work. It often circulated and sold in large numbers within their own localities and sometimes beyond. Several of the publications sold most or all of their initial print runs of 1000 or more, while some researchers found it necessary to produce additional volumes or reprints in response to local demand. In several cases an initial low-key output was followed a few years later by a more formally published work. Further confidence in its value came from the way publication was often financially supported from sources other than the individual or group. These included the Heritage Lottery Fund, parish councils and local library services, who often underwrote the whole costs of production; in some communities residents responded to requests to subscribe in advance of publication. There was little indication of any formal evaluation of the finished work in the sense of the formal ‘peer review’ of academic journals or grant-givers. Some groups mentioned discussion between members of the research teams which could amount to a certain level of internal evaluation. I also became aware of county and national associations of local-history societies and organisations such as the Oral History Society, which published journals and/or newsletters and accepted (and in the process assessed) articles from ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’

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alike. A good example is Scottish Local History, published by the Scottish Local History Forum three times per annum and containing work by academic and non-academic researchers (like similar regional journals elsewhere in the United Kingdom, another excellent indicator of links between academe and outside). Some publications have also been reviewed in national journals (for example Cooper (2000) and Deveson (1998) in Family and Community History). To many of the researchers involved, their publications, like their research, were also justified as being about their own area, locality or community, the background for making their results accessible both to their own community (often the primary target) and to a wider public. The fact that they were doing something of their own – for themselves individually or for their own families, localities, communities – provided one important rationale. But in addition, even if unaware of this when they first started, they also found themselves in contact with networks of other researchers; with shared expectations about the range of sources and how to deal with them; with local libraries and archives together with their often very helpful librarians and support services like published and unpublished guides or self-help packs; with group projects (probably a common feature given that around 40 per cent of the projects here were group ones); and sometimes with organised local history, record and similar societies or with local classes or interactions with university activities. Though certainly not amounting to formal training or evaluation this flourishing sector of research activity within the UK seems to have developed established networks and methods of doing things: informal but widespread patterns into which researchers are (to varying degrees) socialised. The work of the Family and Community Historical Research Society in academic monitored research projects (Drake, this book) similarly makes use of the skills of many non-academic historians in much the same manner as that made of those of amateur botanists, archaeologists and ornithologists (Allen, Hunt, Greenwood, this book).

Conclusion The work produced by these researchers is clearly of interest to the individuals and communities involved. Much of it will also be of value to academic historians, especially those interested in the local and grassroots dimensions of national and international events. Additionally the study of community history, particularly by groups, has led to the identification and preservation of source material useful for both amateur

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and professional historians. Examples are the very extensive archive in a local library created by the Colinton Local History Society, and the work of 200 plus volunteers for the Dunfermline Library to produce a public access computer catalogue of some 40,000 local history items, CDs of audio and video interviews with elderly residents, and 77 volumes of notes and photocopies from newspapers etc covering 34 topics – stepping stones in the further research endeavour. The experiences of these researchers were not all rosy. Like researchers everywhere they both encountered difficulties and doubtless attained only varying degrees of rigour or insight. But as for many comparable localised or specialist research projects ‘within-the-walls’, these smallscale micro studies can build into and qualify, even challenge, other more abstract, generalised or ‘top-down’ histories through their illumination of local and personal experiences. It seems clear that, in community history, what is going on outside the walls must be of interest to those inside.

Acknowledgements Thanks are due to the Open University Research Committee and the Pavis Centre, Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University, for financing the study (1998–2002), and to the community historians who made it possible. My thanks are also due to Ruth Finnegan for her help in the writing of this chapter and particularly for the help and support she provided so generously during the conduct of the project on which it is based.

Notes 1. In common with a number of others (e.g. the journal Family and Community History where the issue is regularly discussed) I use ‘community history’ here in a broad and not very strictly demarcated sense which covers small-scale studies of both geographically defined areas and communities of interest such as a club, school or factory (also discussed in McKay 2002). 2. The study originated from a small leaflet (‘Histories for the Millennium’) prepared by the Open Studies in Family and Community History Research Group at the Open University and distributed in 1997–98 through organisations such as local libraries, local history societies, community education workers and so on, also mentioned in several local history (and similar) journals and magazines. I was able to make contact with some 350 individuals (mostly already involved in community history research) who had requested leaflets plus 80 or so others who approached me directly (contact details were given in the leaflet). It became clear that this was only a very small sample of

136 Outside and Across the Walls the work going on in community history and as the study developed I learnt of a considerable number of projects unconnected with the leaflet. My final report, the end products submitted by individual and group researchers, and files of the correspondence and other contacts with them have been deposited in the Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex Library. 3. My research, together with some minor financial support, doubtless had some effect on these four projects but the fact that these were already on-going together with information from other community historians suggests that this was not critical and that they were not untypical of similar projects elsewhere.

References General Elton, G.R. (1987) The Practice of History, London: Fontana. Hudson, P. (1999) ‘Industrialisation in Britain: The challenge of micro-history’, Family and Community History 2: 5–16. Kitson-Clark, G. (1968) The Critical Historian, London: Heinemann and the History Book Club. McKay, John (2002) ‘Histories for the Millennium’. An Analysis of Local Community Historians and Their Work at the Turn of the Millennium: Final Report, unpublished (available in Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex Library).

Publications by community historians A selection from the end products completed by community historians in my study, now deposited in Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex Library (ISBN indicates formal publication). Arbuthnott Community Association Reminiscence Group (2001) The Annals of Arbuthnott, Arbuthnott Community Association [2 vols 146pp., 118pp., ISBN]. Beenham History Group Members (1999) Beenham: A History, History of Beenham Group [216pp., ISBN]. Cassidy, Fay (2001) ‘TCC/Plessey’, in Hendrie, William F. and Mackie, Allister (eds) The Bathgate Book: A History of Bathgate, Bathgate: Bathgate 2000 Trust [x, 269pp., ill., ISBN; full unedited report by Cassidy also available in three locations in Bathgate]. Cooper, Jacqueline (2000) The Well-Ordered Town: A Story of Saffron Walden, Essex, 1792–1862, Cooper Publications [288pp., ISBN]. Davidson, Alistair (2002) A Midlothian Parish: Glimpses into the Life and Times of Mid-Nineteenth Century Colinton, Colinton: Colinton Local History Society [181pp.]. Deveson, Alison M. (1998) Overton and Its National School, The Author [32pp., ISBN]. Flinn, Sybil (ed.) (1999) Kintbury: A Century Remembered, Kintbury Volunteer Group [112pp., ISBN]. Gamlin, Brenda, Herbert, Alicia and Mitchell, Liz (eds) (2000) In Our Own Words: One Hundred Years in the Life of East Bergholt, The East Bergholt Society [64pp.].

John H. McKay 137 Haddington Remembered Group (1991) Memories: Yesteryear in and around Haddington, Haddington Remembered Group [38pp.]. Haddington Remembered Group (2000) Weaving the Story: West Mills Memories, East Lothian Library Service [78pp., ISBN]. Helm, Judy and Davies, Sue (1999) A Mouthful of Memories: An Oral History of Avonmouth, Avonmouth Genealogy Group [135pp.]. Helm, Judy and Davies, Sue (2001) Another Mouthful of Memories: An Oral History of Avonmouth, Avonmouth Genealogy Group [152pp.]. Hopkins, Peter (1998) A History of Lord Nelson’s Merton Place, Merton Historical Society [48pp.]. Lane, Celia and White, Pauline (1999) Warminster in the Twentieth Century, Warminster History Society [448pp., ISBN]. Leiper, J.G. (ed.) (2000) A Millennium Account of Drymen and District, Drymen and District Local History Society [156pp., ISBN]. Luffingham, John (ed.) (2000) Boxgrove: History of a Sussex Village, Boxgrove History Group [144pp., ISBN]. McNicol, Diane D. (1999) Prestonkirk: The People of 1851, Braeheads: Scottish Families Researched [240pp., ISBN]. Nelson, Ian (ed.) (2001) Hurstpierpoint – Kind and Charitable, Burgess Hill: Ditchling Press for Hurst History Study Group [395pp., ISBN]. Poppleton History Society (2000) Poppleton Past and Present, Poppleton History Society, CD-ROM. Roebuck, Neville (1998) A History of Penistone Competitive Music Festival Association [22pp.] Unpublished. Rowe, Peter (1999) Guarding the City: A History of the City of London Police [307pp.] Unpublished. Slatter, Bernard (1993) The Bracknell of Jonathan Gwynn, Carrier from 1822 to 1851, Bracknell and District Historical Society [12pp., ISBN]. Timbrell, Ruth (ed.) (2000) The Winkfield Chronicles: A New History of Winkfield, Winkfield History Project Group [195pp.]. Tully-Jackson, Jack and Brown, Ian (1996, 2001) East Lothian at War, 2 vols, Haddington: East Lothian Library Service [72pp., 88pp., ill., ISBN]. Tutton, Audrey A. (1998) Run Rabbit Run: Life on a Council Estate in North-West London During World War Two [12pp.] Unpublished. Warner, A.G. (ed.) (2000) The Changing Face of Almondsbury, The Almondsbury Local History Society [90pp.] Unpublished. Wilby, Thelma (2000) The Coming of the Railway and the Creation of a Community: Doods Road, Reigate [43pp.]. Zielonko, Helen (ed.) (2001) A History of Derby Mackworth Townswomens’ Guild, Mackworth TG [36pp.].

9 Researching Ourselves? The Mass-Observation Project Dorothy Sheridan

In 1937, a new social research organisation – Mass-Observation – called for volunteers to take part in a project to document everyday life in Britain. Two of the founders of Mass-Observation, the poet and journalist, Charles Madge, and the film documentary-maker, Humphrey Jennings, were based in London; the third, Tom Harrisson, a selftaught anthropologist, was temporarily based in Bolton in Lancashire. By combining regular reports from amateur (or at any rate unpaid) social commentators from all over the country with reports produced by full-time trained investigators, the Mass-Observers aimed to produce a new kind of popular and participatory social science which they called ‘anthropology at home’ (Madge 1937). A few months after the project was launched, Jennings and Madge described their initiative as follows: Early in 1937, fifty people in different parts of the country agreed to co-operate in making observations on how they and other people spend their daily lives. These fifty Observers were the vanguard of a developing movement, aiming to apply the methods of science to the complexity of modern culture . . . They are in the industrial centres, in rural and urban areas, in county towns, suburbs and villages. They include coal miners, factory hands, shopkeepers, sales-men, housewives, hospital nurses, bank clerks, business men, doctors and school masters, scientists and technicians. A large proportion of them have already shown themselves able to write really useful reports. Prof. Julian Huxley has written of some of these that they ‘would put many orthodox scientists to shame in their simplicity, clearness and objectivity’. (Jennings and Madge 1937: iii) 138

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This chapter is concerned with the use of a volunteer panel by MassObservation between 1937 and the mid-1950s and with the revival of the panel in a new phase of Mass-Observation which began in 1981 and continues to the present day.

From the abdication of 1936 into the Second World War: Britain observed It was significant for the development of Mass-Observation that Harrisson had been a bird watcher from a young age and was heavily influenced by his friendship with the eminent environmentalist and ornithologist, Max Nicholson (Heimann 1997: 17). Five years before the launch of Mass-Observation, Nicholson had established the British Trust for Ornithology which involved a nation-wide panel of observers of bird life (see Greenwood this book). At least four other members of Mass-Observation’s core team were also ornithologists and, as Harrisson himself claimed, they imported some of their techniques of observation and interpretation from natural history. Years later, Harrisson attributed his transition from studying birds to studying people to the time he was living on an island in the New Hebrides: I forgot about birds and devoted myself to these extraordinary New Hebrideans. . . . Birds and bats were clearly not enough. It was impossible to be satisfied with anything else than the stuff which made humans tick. I moved away from parrots and mice to men who could also explain themselves away and refute while being studied. (Harrisson 1959: 157) Harrisson returned to England in 1936 and his linking up with Madge and Jennings to found Mass-Observation took place in the wake of the extraordinary political and constitutional crisis over the abdication of Edward VIII. The questions raised by a national event invoking the meaning and relations of church, monarchy and state provided the raw material on which the Mass-Observers felt they should start work. Through word-of-mouth and through the widespread press attention which surrounded its launch, Mass-Observation succeeded in recruiting a panel of Observers in time to record George VI’s coronation on 12 May 1937. Extracts from the reports were published the same year in a 440 page book by Faber, May 12th: Mass-Observation Day Surveys (Jennings and Madge 1937).

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The Mass-Observation panel grew rapidly during 1937. By the end of the year, 592 people were taking part. When Britain entered the Second World War in September 1939, Mass-Observation was receiving two kinds of contributions through the post from members of its panel: full daily diaries in monthly instalments and, also on a monthly basis, replies to open-ended questionnaires known as ‘directives’. Those who opted to keep diaries received no specific instructions. As a result the diaries varied considerably in length, tone and content, ranging from factual daily reports with an emphasis on documenting life in wartime (evacuation, food rationing, the blackout, air raids, conscription and reactions to the news) to more reflective journals which combined an account of day-to-day activities with more personal comments and feelings. The panel replies to directives, as might be deduced from the term ‘directive’, were more focused and resembled short essays or newspaper reports or even, in some cases, opinion poll responses. In a BBC radio programme broadcast in 1939, Charles Madge claimed that using the panel immediately puts us in touch with a section of people in the population who were at one and the same time ordinary, hardworking folk and also intelligent and interesting enough to want to help us. We did not regard these people as being themselves scientists studying the mass, nor did we consider them as being a random sample of public opinion. Their position was something different. They were observers, untrained but shrewd, placed at vantage points for seeing and describing in their own simple language what life looks like in the various environments which go to make up England. (Madge 1939: 3) Over 500 people sent Mass-Observation their diaries between 1939 and 1945, and over 3000 people responded to directives at some time during the same period. Many stopped and started as their circumstances changed and the war progressed. Some, like Nella Last, a housewife from Barrow-in-Furness, kept sending in their diaries long after Mass-Observation had ceased to use them in its books and research reports (Broad and Fleming 1981, Garfield 2004, Sheridan 1990). The composition of the panel in those years never quite achieved the mix of middle- and working-class writers that Mass-Observation would have liked (and sometimes claimed to have). The geographic spread was quite good although more people were recruited from urban areas than from rural areas; participation by men and women was mostly balanced although by the end of the war more women were keeping diaries than

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men possibly because more men had been sent abroad and could no longer correspond with Mass-Observation. In one of their early books, First Year’s Work: 1937–1938, the Mass-Observers analysed the composition of the panel by class, by geographical distribution and by occupation (Madge and Harrisson 1938: 63). Their analysis showed that what they called the ‘middle middle’ and ‘lower middle’ classes predominated in 1938. With some significant exceptions, panel members continued to be drawn from the less affluent layers of the middle classes: teachers, librarians, secretaries and clerks, shopkeepers, students and housewives. Similar demographic features of the panel have emerged again in the contemporary revival of the panel. What motivated so many people to take part in Mass-Observation? No payment was offered and no real names were used in anything which was published so there was no direct credit or personal glory to be gained by being a member of the panel. It is clear that the majority of people who joined shared Mass-Observation’s own manifesto: [Mass-Observation] does not set out in quest of truth or facts for their own sake or for the sake of an intellectual minority but aims at exposing them in simple terms to all observers so that their environment may be understood and thus constantly transformed. Whatever the political methods called upon to effect the transformation, the knowledge of what has to be transformed is indispensable. The foisting on the mass of ideals or ideas developed by men apart from it, irrespective of its capacities causes mass misery, intellectual despair and an international shambles. (Harrisson et al. 1937) The emphasis by both the full-time Mass-Observers and the panel members was always on ‘objective’ or scientific recording by as many people as possible in order to provide information which would facilitate social progress – though this was never very tightly defined. There was also an emphasis on making the results of the research as widely available as possible by publishing in popular newspapers and cheaply available books and by using straightforward, non-academic language. Just before Britain declared war on Germany, Mass-Observation published a Penguin Special, Britain by Mass-Observation, which sold over 100,000 copies and addressed itself to the ‘Man and Woman in the Street’ in opposition to the ‘Intellectual Few’ (Harrisson and Madge 1939: 13): ‘life is short and if we are at all interested in this world . . . we had better hurry up and learn where we stand. We must have

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knowledge, at least sufficient for us to come to personal decisions’ (Harrisson and Madge 1939: 8). A nurse’s explanation of her interest is typical of the views expressed by many of the panel members who responded to a question about why they took part: ‘. . . I have always been interested in people and have often wondered how certain habits have developed and through which channels it is possible to sway the general public sufficiently to get something done’. She added ‘Historians and other writers of the future should be grateful (but will they be?) for detailed accounts of ordinary doings of ordinary people’ (Madge and Harrisson 1938: 76). What is also evident from their replies is the sense that they belonged to a larger community of people like themselves whose reports would be, cumulatively, more significant than the contribution of any single individual. It was enjoyed as a collective enterprise even though the Observers never met either each other or the organisers face to face. This collective identity seems to have provided at least part of the reward for taking part: a sense of belonging to something which was seen to have a social value, together with more immediate personal rewards which several of them cited, including honing their observational skills and improving their writing abilities. In so far as the panel members were preponderantly young, politically to the left and without access to more public channels of communication, it could be argued that they were a relatively ‘voice-less’ group in pre-war and wartime Britain. The enthusiasm with which women of all ages participated is another indication that Mass-Observation achieved some success in offering a form of expression which significantly combined the private and the public in ways which were especially attractive to women. Mass-Observation always claimed to be entirely independent and certainly in the first two years, it struggled to survive with small amounts of funding. Victor Gollancz subsidised the production of three books (although he only ever received one finished manuscript, The Pub and the People, which he published in 1943). Two Northern industrialists supported the studies carried out in Bolton and Blackpool. Despite its critiques of contemporary social research (Harrisson and Madge 1939: 12), Liz Stanley has identified several points of connection between Mass-Observation and young ethnographers and sociologists working in university departments during the pre-war period (Stanley 1990). However, the links tended to be on a personal basis and did not involve funding or formal collaboration. The outbreak of war precipitated a shift in this respect. By then Jennings had left to pursue his career in making documentary films; Madge was also preparing to move on, first

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to work with J. Maynard Keynes, then to the National Council for Social and Economic Research and later to take up the post of professor of sociology at the University of Birmingham. Left in sole charge, Harrisson was determined to persuade the government that MassObservation could offer a unique listening post on the state of the nation’s morale in wartime. Through his friendship with Mary Adams, Head of Home Intelligence at the Ministry of Information between 1939 and 1940, he succeeded in setting up an arrangement whereby Mass-Observation submitted regular reports to Home Intelligence and was paid accordingly. This relationship continued until the government set up its own investigative unit, the Wartime Social Survey, in April 1940. There is no evidence that the panel members were aware of the particular contribution they were making to the war effort through Mass-Observation. If they had known, some might have objected. Charles Madge, who of course did know about the work for Home Intelligence, was uncomfortable with working closely with the government. Writing after Harrisson’s death in 1976, he referred to it as ‘homefront espionage’ (Madge 1976: 1395). Others, however, would have approved – on the basis that the more those in power knew about what was going on at grass roots, the better they could mobilise the resources of the country and the greater the chances of defeating Hitler. Very little use was made of the panel after the late 1940s and the numbers taking part declined. The only exception was in 1953 when it was briefly re-convened with new and old members to record the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, some of which was published in Long to Reign over Us (Harris 1966). Mass-Observation moved away from social questions for which it had employed mainly qualitative methods. The reliance on a network of amateurs was regarded as part and parcel of this approach. With the growth of large scale market research, Mass-Observation was increasingly keen to be part of the commercial world. This drove it towards a more quantitative approach and a reliance on statistically representative samples within which the panel had no place. The need to ‘prove’ assertions in a statistical way was at odds with Mass-Observation’s earlier, more creative, methods of interpretation. The panel dwindled in size; those who had stubbornly continued with their diaries after 1945 gradually abandoned their task once they ceased receiving regular encouragement from staff at Mass-Observation’s headquarters. The material generated by the panel, the amateur Observers, had stopped counting as research. It was not until the late 1960s, in a new political and cultural atmosphere, that the results of the work undertaken by Mass-Observation

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could be seriously re-evaluated. The archive of papers was rescued from an office basement in London and given a new home as a public resource at the University of Sussex. The thirst for new kinds of history, fed by the new wave of feminism, black activism and the enthusiasm for uncovering working class histories produced new kinds of researchers for whom the Mass-Observation Archive provided a previously untapped resource not only about ordinary people’s lives but in the words of people who had not until then been included in traditional archives. Social historians and some sociologists were soon cautiously re-examining the accumulated writing by members of the panel. Angus Calder, for example, argued that despite the statistically unrepresentative nature of the panel, it was capable of providing a remarkably prescient indicator of social change (Calder 1985). The prediction of Churchill’s defeat in the postwar general election, based on an analysis of the panel responses at a time when ‘most people in politics and the press would have found the idea unbelievable’ was perhaps Mass-Observation’s ‘finest hour’ (Calder 1985: 180). In documenting the impact of war on children, Janet Finch suggested that the use of ‘imaginative techniques’ produced much richer data than that produced by quantitative methods and that this enabled MassObservation to ‘challenge the blandness of official rhetoric’ (Finch 1986: 94). Stanley also argued that while the panel was in no way a representative sample of the population, it nevertheless provided a ‘thickness’ of data which other forms of social research struggled to provide (Stanley 1981: 149). So the status of Mass-Observation as a valid historical resource was well established by the end of the 1980s. Could the kind of self-selected panel used by Mass-Observation have much to offer contemporary social research? Is its usefulness restricted to the specific historical conditions of the late 1930s and the 1940s? Certainly British sociologists writing since the war period have dismissed Mass-Observation methodologically as a historical oddity (Stanley 1990). Nick Stanley was probably the first of more recent commentators on Mass-Observation to contemplate the resurrection of the panel. I think it is important to distinguish between making a case for the reintroduction of some of the concerns of M-O and arguing for a resurrection of the organisation. Here only the first is suggested as a possibility for sociology – namely the exploration of an ‘amateur sociology’, taking the example of the national panel in different directions. The notion of a self-reflective observer offers a genuinely

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interesting possibility for a hermeneutically informed account. (Stanley 1981: 272)

Mass-Observation re-launched In 1981, D.F. Pocock, Professor of Social Anthropology, and Dorothy Sheridan, archivist, re-launched a new panel using the Archive at the University of Sussex as the institutional base. The aim was relatively modest and short-term: to augment and promote the existing Archive and to provide future historians with information about life in Britain in the 1980s which would be roughly comparable to the autobiographical documentation of the earlier period. In practice, the project was to survive, under Sheridan’s direction and supported by whatever funds it could obtain, until the present day. Being a member of the panel today differs slightly from the original activity: agreements over copyright and privacy are more formal; confidentiality is assured through the use of personal numbers rather than names. Letters, self-portraits, photographs and other identifiable contributions are temporarily withheld from public access to protect the identity of the writer. Three times a year the members of the panel are sent ‘prompts’ which are still called ‘directives’. All responses are acknowledged regularly, sometimes with a personal letter, and the writers are kept informed about the ways in which their material is being used. The present-day directives are longer, more discursive and reveal more about the directive-author than the wartime directives. The relationship can be understood as a dialogue by correspondence; some panel members have said that this is part of what attracts them to the project. The directives contain news and information, guidance on taking part and suggestions for writing on two or three very different themes. These themes can be personal (e.g. family life, health, work) or they can relate to wider public issues and national and international events (from the Malvinas/Falklands War in 1982, through the ‘Thatcher years’ of the 1980s, the General Election of 1997 to the war in Iraq in 2004). Topics for the directives are chosen or approved by Sheridan who composes the final text but the ideas also come from the writers themselves. In choosing the themes, care is taken to be inclusive and to provide a wide range of subjects and approaches so that all panel members feel they can find something to say in response. A good example of what Stanley called ‘the self reflective observer’ (Stanley 1981: 272) is Mr R, a heavy-goods vehicle driver, active as a

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shop steward in the T&GWU, married with children, who responded to the first invitation to join in 1981 when he saw a letter calling for volunteers to help Mass-Observation in the Daily Mirror. He is now widowed but in his retirement, he has bought himself a computer, learned to write web pages and corresponds very regularly, sometimes offering special reports, often commenting on the contemporary scene, sometimes asking for advice about his many retirement projects. Word processing and access to email greatly facilitate his involvement. Mr R certainly considers himself to be both a researcher and someone who is researched and he would share the views below expressed by other Mass-Observers, answering a directive in Spring 1991 about their involvement: To me, there is something important about being one in a 1000 plus contributors writing regularly about the same topic all over the country. It feels like a mass movement . . . (H2359, 36 year old woman, social worker from Newcastle) As the material for a full and broad social history, it clearly has an important role to play. It must be like us today finding hundreds of the equivalent of Pepys diary or Pastor Woodforde or boxes of Paston letters. (S2047, a female hospital worker from Birmingham) Or, put rather eloquently by an Observer from Lancashire: My own belief or hope is that M-O may help form the basis of a counter-history some day . . . we always need more clues, more worm’s-eye ideograms. M-O has a record of commitment to something more than formal scholarship or record-keeping. I remember that the faintly opprobrious label ‘history from below’ was placed on the kind of work Sussex was instrumental in making happen. Fucking right on, I say. I’d rather have that sort of history than history written by eminent ass-lickers, honours-junkies and apologists for state crimes. (R1671, formerly a mature student at Sussex, then a media studies lecturer, Lancaster) Since 1981, over 3000 people have at some time been part of the new Mass-Observation panel; many of them over a considerable number of years. Recruitment was carried out, as in the original enterprise, through the media and via word of mouth. The total number of people active at any one time reached nearly 1000 at the end of the 1980s but

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then fell away gradually until only 350 people were writing by 2003. In 2004, as a result of a new three-year development plan for the project, we appointed a development officer, Sandra Koa Wing. She has been charged with the task of exploring ways of appealing to younger people and to people who have been less well represented in the membership. A new recruitment drive launched via the media in October 2004 successfully met the target of creating a 500-strong panel of writers from demographically more diverse backgrounds. We are continuing to look at increasing the ways in which people may take part electronically, perhaps using different media and Internet resources. Already about 20 per cent of the panel members correspond by email and a much higher number word-process their contributions. Nevertheless it may be important to accept that in terms of recruitment, there will always be limits to a project which defines itself as a writing project. The preponderance of white, older, female, middle- and lower middle-class panel members over writers from other demographic categories is striking and this homogeneity increases when no active recruitment is taking place and everyone who volunteers is accepted. The composition of the panel, and the kinds of writing which the Mass-Observers produce are always related to notions of what it means to be a writer, and specifically the kind of writer who would be prepared to take part in an autobiographical writing project. Patterns of participation and the relationship with the cultures of literacy have been discussed elsewhere and continue to inform the ways in which the project can move forward (Sheridan, Street and Bloome 2000). Oral history, which has developed over the same period as the Mass-Observation Archive has become better known, is a parallel methodology to Mass-Observation, and it also straddles the boundaries between the university and the wider community. What the MassObservation panel offers the researchers is access to a large pool of people, communicating over a long periods of time. Oral history produces life review; Mass-Observation provides a layering of life stories in the here and now, multi-themed, identities continuously in construction, a bricolage of feeling and experience (Sheridan 1993, 1996). There is also still (though perhaps less explicit than in the early Mass-Observation) a stronger sense of social testimony: not only telling one’s own story (that is autobiography) but also acting as a social witness (documenting the world we live in). What also makes the present-day project very different from its historic counterpart is the fact that the material comes directly into an archive and is available immediately to be read by many different kinds

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of people for many different kinds of purposes. Also in contrast to early Mass-Observation, the involvement of researchers external to the Archive has been encouraged. Since 1990, at least half of the directives sent out are the product of collaboration between Sheridan and social researchers, most of them academic. The collaborative directives solicit replies which will provide the raw material for specific research projects. Use of the post-1981 material, whether commissioned or not, has been substantial and diverse (see Bytheway 2003; Dickens 1998; Harrison and McGhee 2003; Kushner 1995; Langhamer 2000; Mace 1998; Shaw 1994; Thane 2000; Thomas 2002) and the material has also proved to be an excellent resource for students on the Masters degree programme in Life History Research at the University of Sussex. Several researchers have been able to obtain funds to use the Archive from academic bodies (AHRB, ESRC, Leverhulme, Nuffield) which confirms that the accumulated writings by amateurs is recognised as an acceptable resource for scholarly analysis and interpretation. So is Mass-Observation ‘beyond the university walls’? Are the members of the panel, the present-day Observers, by their regular contributions, participating in the knowledge society? Can they be called ‘researchers’ too? Most of the writers do not visit the Archive. Most of them do not carry out analysis on their own and other people’s directive replies or publish scholarly books or journal articles. In that sense, they do not behave as academic researchers. But if a wider definition of ‘research’ is understood, they can be considered as disseminating information, communicating ideas and integrating their work for Mass-Observation with other kinds of knowledge production: some publish articles and books for non-academic audiences; some are political campaigners; some talk about their involvement on television and radio or to groups and clubs to which they belong; some participate in the various kinds of activities made possible by the Internet; some contribute to exhibitions and public debates; some are involved in community or family history projects; some are engaged in formal education – from school, through colleges and universities to continuing education. They are purposely participating in the creation of an enormous archive over which they have, as an abstract community, a tremendous influence. The way they respond (or refuse to respond) can shape the nature of the research that is undertaken. Most of them are indeed reflective, self-critical as well as critical of the way the project works, thoughtful and insightful; as they write, they themselves theorise their own lives, and comment on the nature of the experience.1

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It goes without saying that the academy retains the power: it has the resources, the expertise, the cultural capital and the investment to dominate the knowledge society. The Archive itself, and the contemporary project could not have survived without the support of the University of Sussex. The space it fills, the staff, the skills, the materials and even most of the ‘users’ are all part of the academic world. Nevertheless, there are two ways in which the Mass-Observation project challenges the hegemony of traditional academic research: first by providing the incentive and the opportunity for people ‘outside the walls’ to record their lives thus creating practical opportunities for them to be involved in the history-making process; second, by providing academic researchers with the kind of social knowledge which questions their presuppositions and subverts their theories, it can help to produce a richer and more genuinely collaborative form of knowledge production. What those of us running the project now need to address is whether the same forms of communication which worked in the 1980s (and in the 1930s and 1940s) continue to be relevant in the twenty-first century. In the light of advancing Internet technologies, people are already developing new virtual networks and communities. Will these meet the needs that Mass-Observation once met? We may have to contemplate a multiplicity of Mass-Observations, drawing on repertoires of evolving social practices made possible by electronic communication (see Brady, this book, on blogging; and Anderson, also this book, on everyday uses of the Internet). These will inevitably blur the boundaries of the physical Archive but they may, in new ways, fulfill the original Mass-Observation desire to involve ‘amateur Observers’ in the anthropology of ourselves.

Note 1. At the time of writing the Archive is receiving replies to the Autumn 2004 Directive on both aspects of research – carrying out research on the one hand and being the subject of research on the other. The material will be available for consultation in late spring 2005.

References Broad, R. and Fleming, S. (eds) (1981) Nella Last’s Diary, Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Bytheway, B. (2003) Many Happy returns? Birthdays and Lived through Experiences in Later Life, Centre for Ageing and Biographical Studies Report, Milton Keynes: Open University School of Health and Social Welfare.

150 Outside and Across the Walls Calder, A. (1985) ‘Mass-Observation’, in Bulmer, M. (ed.) Essays in the History of British Sociological Research, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dickens, P. (1988) One Nation? Social Change and the Politics of Locality, London: Pluto. Finch, J. (1986) Research and Policy: The Uses of Qualitative Methods in Social and Educational Research, Falmer: Falmer Press. Garfield, S. (ed.) (2004) Our Hidden Lives: The Everyday Diaries of a Forgotten Britain 1945–1948, London: Ebury. Harris, L.M. (1966) Long to Reign over Us, London: William Kimber. Harrison, K. and McGhee, D. (2003) ‘Reading and writing family secrets: Reflections on mass-observation’, Auto/Biography 11: 1/2: 25–36. Harrisson, T.H., Jennings, H. and Madge, C.M. (1937) ‘Anthropology at home’, letter to editor, New Statesman and Nation, 30 January. Harrisson, T.H. and Madge, C.M. (1939) Britain by Mass-Observation, London: Penguin Books. Harrisson, T.H. (1959) World Within: A Borneo Story, London: The Cresset Press. Heimann, J.M. (1997) The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Jennings, H. and Madge, C.M. (1937) May 12th: Mass-Observation Day Surveys 1937, London: Faber. Kushner, T. (1995) Observing the ‘Other’: Mass-Observation and ‘Race’, MassObservation Archive Occasional Paper No. 2, Brighton: University of Sussex. Langhamer, C. (2000) Women’s Leisure in England, 1920–60, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mace, J. (1998) Playing with Time: Mothers and the Meaning of Literacy, London: University College, London Press. Madge, C.M. (1937) ‘Letter to the Editor’, New Statesman and Nation, 2 January. Madge, C.M. (1939) BBC Radio script: ‘They speak for themselves’, broadcast 1 June; text in Mass-Observation Archive, File Report A26. Madge, C.M. (1976) ‘The birth of Mass-Observation’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 November. Madge, C.M. and Harrisson, T.H. (eds) (1938) First Year’s Work 1937–38 by MassObservation, London: Lindsay Drummond. Shaw, J. (1994) ‘Transference and countertransference in the MassObservation Archive; an under-exploited resource’, Human Relations 47, 11: 1295–1432. Sheridan, D. (ed.) (1990) Wartime Women: A Mass-Observation Anthology, London: Heinemann. Sheridan, D. (1993) ‘Writing to the archive: Mass-Observation as autobiography’, Sociology 27, 1: 27–40. Sheridan, D. (1996) Damned Anecdotes and Dangerous Confabulations: MassObservation as Life History, Mass-Observation Archive Occasional Paper No. 7, Brighton: University of Sussex. Sheridan, D., Street, B.V. and Bloome, D. (2000) Writing Ourselves: MassObservation and Literacy Practices, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Stanley, L. (1990) The Archaeology of a 1930s Mass-Observation Project, Occasional Paper 27, Manchester: University of Manchester Department of Sociology.

Dorothy Sheridan 151 Stanley, N.S. (1981) ‘The extra dimension: a study and assessment of the methods employed by Mass-Observation in its first period 1937–40’, PhD thesis (CNAA). Thane, P. (2000) Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, J. (2002) Diana’s Mourning: A People’s History, Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

10 Science With a Team of Thousands: The British Trust for Ornithology Jeremy J.D. Greenwood

There is a long tradition of natural history study in Britain (Allen 1976 and this book), with ornithology as one of its components. In Victorian times, much of the interest was manifested by the collection of specimens (as ‘stuffed birds’), equivalent in many ways to today’s ‘twitching’, in which people’s focus is on extending the list of species that they have seen. Enthusiasts began to produce county avifaunas (listed by Ballance 2000, 2002), which largely concentrated on describing the abundance and distribution of species in the county and the seasonal patterns brought about by migration. Paralleling the work of H.C. Watson for plants (Allen, this book), A.G. More used a correspondence network to draw together distributional information for England and Wales but the result was incomplete (More 1865) and it was studies of migration that led to the first large-scale collaboration in British ornithology. This was the work of the British Association for the Advancement of Science bird migration committee, beginning in 1880, which used questionnaires to gather observations on bird movements from about 100 lighthouses and lightships (Clarke 1912, Pashby 1985). The tide was turning from museum- and specimen-based ornithology to the observation of living birds in the wild, fuelled in part by the development of binoculars (Wood 2003). In 1907, the publisher Harry Witherby began to produce the monthly journal British Birds. One of his aims was: to make organized enquiries into such questions as the extension or diminution of the breeding range of certain species, the exact status and distribution of some birds, the effects of protection in certain areas and on different species, the nature of the food of particular birds, and many kindred subjects. (Witherby and Pycraft 1907) 152

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Witherby could announce that ‘Already over a hundred ornithologists in various parts of the country have promised their co-operation when such an enquiry is set on foot, so that we look forward to be able shortly, with the help of other readers, to prove the plan.’ Almost all of his collaborators were amateurs, as he was himself. In 1909, Witherby launched a scheme for ringing birds – placing small, uniquely numbered metal rings on birds’ legs such that they could be individually identified if subsequently recaptured or found dead. Like Witherby’s monthly journal, the scheme still flourishes and has provided immense amounts of information on birds’ migrations and life histories (Paradis et al. 1999, Wernham et al. 2002). It is perhaps the most amateur-based of all bird research, for most ‘recoveries’ are of birds found dead by members of the public. Although Witherby’s ringing scheme survived the First World War, his other collaborative inquiries did not. Nor did the work of the British Association committee on bird migration, despite having been taken over by the British Ornithologists’ Club before the war. However, seeds had been sown and their subsequent germination and growth into a major research enterprise is covered in this chapter.

Early days of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) In 1926, a young journalist, Max Nicholson, went up to Oxford. Although his passion was ornithology he read history, because, as he once told me, Oxford zoology in those days was ‘necrology rather than biology’. However, he became deeply involved in local collaborative projects for censusing and ringing birds, studies that had no formal connection with the university. Convinced of the potential power of large-scale collaboration in field ornithology by Witherby’s vision, he ran a British Birds survey of the national breeding population of Herons Ardea cinerea in 1928. He chose that species because it is easy to recognise, it nests mostly in large colonies (which are easy to find), and it refurbishes its nests so early in the year that they can be counted before the leafing of deciduous trees. The survey succeeded and has been run every year since, latterly being extended to Scotland (Marchant et al. 2004). More significantly, it proved what was possible. After preliminary meetings in 1932, Nicholson and a group of fellow enthusiasts founded the BTO in 1933. Their aim was to draw together the efforts of the hundreds of ornithologists in Britain, to build a national centre of ornithological knowledge. The chief activity, from then until now, has been to organise surveys

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and research projects in which all or most of the fieldwork was carried out by amateurs; indeed, for many years, most of the organisation, analysis and publication of the work was also the responsibility of volunteers rather than of paid professionals. The work of its first 50 years has been the subject of a history (Hickling 1983; see also Wood 2003) and those aspects of its development that have been reflected in the pages of its scientific journal Bird Study during its first 50 years of publication have also been reviewed (Bibby 2003). It has been set in the broader birdwatching context by Wallace (2004). It is worth noting that Nicholson had a belief in the importance of gathering evidence and using it as a basis for the rational formulation of public policy that went well beyond his interest in applied ornithology and nature conservation (Greenwood 2003a). He was a founder of the first think-tank, Political and Economic Planning, and his career as a journalist, civil servant and conservationist was marked by a contempt for ill-informed authority. He had advised on the Great Crested Grebe Enquiry of 1931, which Tom Harrisson (then an undergraduate) and P.A.D. Hollom (a 19-year-old office-boy) ran, with the support of British Birds; the involvement of Harrisson and other ornithologists with Mass-Observation shows that this connection between ornithology and public affairs was not just a personal quirk of Nicholson (Sheridan, this book). The BTO conducted nearly 20 specific inquiries during the 1930s. Some were into the distribution and numbers of individual species, others into the bird communities of particular habitats. The inquiries into tameness in wild birds and into the periods of the year when birds sing are examples of the variety of topics covered. The inquiry into the food of the Little Owl Athene noctua, addressing the issue of whether this species was a pest or beneficial to human interests, was an early example of the Trust’s concern with applied matters, today expressed largely in terms of nature conservation. Most of these inquiries were short-lived, but the heronries census was only the first of various long-term projects. The BTO took over the bird-ringing scheme in 1937. Sixty-five years later, over three quarters of a million birds were being ringed annually, the aggregate total having surpassed 31 million (Clark et al. 2003). A comprehensive review of the resultant knowledge of British and Irish birds resulted in a volume of almost 900 pages (Wernham et al. 2002). The Nest Records Scheme was launched in 1939. It entails observers filling in cards (or, nowadays, submitting data via the Internet) in respect of birds’ nests they have found, thus providing information on nest sites and habitats, on the

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seasonal time of breeding, on the length of the intervals between egg-laying, hatching and the departure of the young from the nest, on the success of breeding attempts and on the causes of failure. Some 30,000 nest records are now submitted each year, the one-millionth card being received in 1995. Dozens of analyses of the data have been published (Crick et al. 2003). All of this established three key characteristics of BTO work. First, the huge volume of detailed information that could be obtained through the collaborative efforts of large numbers of observers, allowing both comprehensive description and the discovery and analysis of fine details (such as how the number of eggs laid per clutch varies seasonally during the course of a single year and in different parts of the country). Second, the value of nation-wide surveys: a single observer, or even a small team, can rarely cover more than a few locations (and generally only one), so it is difficult to know the extent to which their results may be generalised. Third, long-term data are valuable, not only in showing how things have changed with time but, through correlation with changes in the environment, an indication of what the causes of the changes may be. The earlier breeding of many species, apparently in response to climate change, is a well-known example (Crick and Sparks 1999).

Consolidation The growth in BTO activities was interrupted in the Second World War but afterwards it resumed with fresh vigour. The amount of ringing and nest recording increased and a programme of short-term surveys was re-established. Indeed, some individual species eventually became the subject of repeat surveys at intervals of ten or more years, so that changes in their numbers and distribution could be assessed. Thus a survey of Peregrine Falcons Falco peregrinus in 1961 showed that its numbers were much lower than the available evidence indicated for the pre-war period, with the species extinct in much of its former British range; subsequent decennial surveys have documented the subsequent recovery in both numbers and range (Banks et al. 2003). The post-war collapse in Peregrine numbers fuelled the growing concern about the environmental impacts of organochlorine pesticides. There was other scattered evidence that the use of these compounds in agriculture was responsible for deaths of birds and other wildlife. Unfortunately, there were no comprehensive data on bird numbers, so whether these deaths were having more than local effects on populations

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could not be clearly established. To ensure that such data were available in future and that similar problems would be more readily detectable, the BTO established a census scheme from 1961 onwards, the Common Birds Census (CBC). This involved observers visiting about 200 study plots on about 10 occasions each year and carefully plotting on maps all the birds they observed; subsequent analysis interpreted the observations in terms of the territories of each species, changes in the number of which, summed across all 200 plots, provided an index of changes in the numbers of some 75 species (Marchant et al. 1990). One of the problems with the gathering of long-term data is maintaining comparability as methods improve. In the case of the CBC, the methods were rigidly standardised after the first few years. Although we recognised the need to change the methods, we did not do so until pilot work had been done to test the new methods and we then ran the CBC and the improved scheme (the Breeding Bird Survey) in parallel for seven years, sufficient to allow the data from the two schemes to be analysed together to provide seamless patterns of long-term changes in numbers (Freeman et al. 2003, Noble et al. 2004). The 1960s also saw the first truly systematic study of the geographical distribution of birds in Britain and Ireland, with the presence or absence of every species being recorded in every 10 × 10 km square of the Ordnance Survey grid, following the example of the botanists. There have now been two such surveys conducted in the breeding season and one in winter. The next, a combined breeding and winter survey, will begin in 2007. The ‘atlases’ produced from these surveys (Gibbons et al. 1993, Lack 1986, Sharrock 1976) did not just record distributions of the species but also provided estimates of their total population sizes, something that surveys limited to sample study plots (such as the CBC) cannot alone provide. They have thus contributed to building a comprehensive set of types of information on our birds. The Register of Ornithological Sites filled the last major remaining gap in the set – systematic information about habitat use by British birds (Fuller 1982).

From data to science Science is, of course, more than the heaping up of data. Indeed there is a view that all data-gathering takes place against the background of some sort of hypothesis (Medawar 1963). While it is true that the hypotheses lying behind the major and long-term BTO schemes have generally been inexplicit, vague and general, the data themselves

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have proved fruitful for drawing out generalisations, stimulating ideas and testing hypotheses. Macroecology, the study of the patterns of abundance and distribution at large spatial and temporal scales (Gaston and Blackburn 2000), provides a wealth of examples. It requires comprehensive, large-scale data-sets and is therefore disproportionately dependent on ornithology, because the popularity of birds (particularly among the large armies of volunteers) means that such data-sets have been gathered in many countries, though nowhere more so than in Britain. One simple macroecological pattern is the latitudinal gradient in species richness: in most groups of animals and plants, there is a decline in species richness from the tropics to the poles. The gradient is manifest even within a country as small as Britain and the detailed British bird data have been used extensively to try to determine which of several competing hypotheses provide the explanation for it. As is not uncommon in natural history, the answer may be that there is more than one contributory factor. The question then is not ‘What is the cause?’ but ‘What is the relative importance of different causes of the pattern?’ – and even ‘How does the relative importance of different causes vary according to circumstances?’. Macroecologists are still groping for the answers to those questions, with the avian data-sets providing much of the material for their analyses. Macroecological patterns often arise because of the relationships between birds and their habitats. BTO data have been used to address various questions concerning such relationships. For example, as a species’ total numbers in an area vary, do they change in parallel in the different habitats that the species uses or does the species tend to concentrate in preferred habitats when its overall numbers are low and only expand into other habitats when its numbers are high? A number of analyses of BTO data have been made (Chamberlain and Fuller 1999) indicating that, while such ‘density-dependent habitat selection’ occurs, its extent is much influenced by habitat availability and by competition from other species in some habitats; furthermore, we need to be able to measure habitat quality on a fine scale if we are to understand habitat preferences. Population change itself has been the subject of one of the enduring controversies in ecology. On occasions numbers may be reduced far below the normal carrying capacity of the environment by adverse conditions such as droughts and harsh winters. Some ecologists maintain that most populations are thus reduced for most of the time, others

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that most populations are close to carrying capacity for most of the time (with numbers determined by things such as competition for food or the impact of disease, which cause birth-rates to be reduced or deathrates to be increased when numbers are high). The resolution of this controversy can only be through the accumulation of large numbers of case studies. Common Birds Census data have allowed an analysis for 39 species of songbirds resident in Britain, which shows that both weather and density-dependent processes are important (Greenwood and Baillie 1991). While this conclusion was perhaps surprising only to those who had previously displayed a commitment to one of the two extreme positions, this was the first time that a study covering so many species had been undertaken: most researchers ‘within the walls’ study only one or a few species at a time.

From science to conservation By 1990, it was clear from BTO censuses and atlases that bird species living on farmland had generally declined during the previous two decades, by a median of 8 per cent in distribution and 25 per cent in abundance (Fuller et al. 1995, Fuller 2000). There was no such general change for woodland species, suggesting that broad factors (such as atmospheric pollution) were unlikely to have caused the declines; the causes were more likely to be associated specifically with farmland. A detailed analysis of the long-term census data showed that the declines followed closely on the period of most rapid intensification of British farming (1970–89) (Chamberlain et al. 2000). Analyses of longterm changes in reproductive output (from the nest record scheme) and in survival rates (from ringing) showed that the causes of the declines were associated with reduced survival rather than with reduced breeding success in most (though not all) species (Siriwardena et al. 2000, Siriwardena and Robinson 2002). Such broad analyses have guided more intensive studies of particular issues, involving fresh fieldwork by volunteers, sometimes in fairly small groups working closely with professionals. For example, we have looked at the value for birds of both organic farming (Chamberlain et al. 1999) and set-aside (Henderson et al. 2000a,b). From such work, it is possible to identify management options that are likely to assist the recovery of farmland birds, which is a government policy target (Vickery et al. 2004). Because of its ability to gather such comprehensive sets of data about birds, the BTO has had a leading role in developing wildlife monitoring

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methods. By ‘monitoring’, I do not just mean surveillance. True monitoring includes not just assessing the performance of a population but judging that performance against a target (asking whether the population is smaller or larger than considered desirable) and, if the target is not attained, seeking to understand why not (Baillie 2001; Furness et al. 1993; Greenwood 2000, 2003b). We need such understanding to enable us to discriminate between problems resulting from human actions and natural changes, to decide on practical action to deal with unwelcome changes, and (where there is still too little understanding) to guide further research. As some of the work on farmland birds shows, the understanding of the likely causes of population changes is enhanced because we can build population models that incorporate the core demographic variables (numbers, reproduction and survival), the data all coming from the long-term programmes (Chamberlain 2002, Siriwardena and Robinson 2002). Britain is the only country where all of these types of information are gathered by a single organisation, which facilitates their integrated analysis. Many of the results of BTO monitoring are reported in the annuallyupdated web-based report Breeding Birds of the Wider Countryside (http:// www.bto.org/birdtrends/). This allows the information to be assessed not only by decision-makers, conservationists, scientists and our own volunteers but also by the general public. To make the broad information even more accessible, BTO and RSPB produce a Wild Bird Indicator, a compound index analogous to the Retail Price Index. This is used by government as one of its Quality of Life indicators (http://www.sustainabledevelopment.gov.uk/text-only/indicators/headline/h13.htm). The Wild Bird Indicator is a broad brush; the BBWC report presents fine detail. Between these is the system of categorising each species’ conservation status as green, amber, or red, using criteria relating to such things as medium-term population declines and the proportion the species’ European population that occurs in Britain (Gregory et al. 2002). Other things being equal, conservationists attend most to those on the red list. Because the rate of population decline is one of the chief criteria for this and similar assessments, we have devoted much effort to improving the statistical methods for estimating medium-term change (http://www.bto.org/birdtrends/, Fewster et al. 2000, Besbeas et al. 2002, 2005, Brooks et al. 2004). For waterbirds, which occupy a limited number of sites that have been counted individually for many years, red and amber alerts are issued for individual sites; the past data are so extensive for those species that it is possible to apply a biological filter such that alerts are not triggered for species with a history of marked

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fluctuations in numbers unless the recent decline has been especially great (Austin et al. 2004).

The volunteer army Amateur ornithologists are at the core of the BTO. It is not just that they conduct most of the fieldwork that underpins BTO research, amounting to some 1,500,000 man-hours per year (Greenwood and Carter 2003). Prior to 1948, when the first full-time paid executive secretary was appointed, volunteers administered the Trust’s affairs. For many years the majority of its surveys were set up, organised and the results published by volunteers. A network of voluntary Regional Representatives (RRs, now numbering 126) was established in 1948 to organise coverage at the local level, which is more effective than attempting to do so through some faceless central office. It is true that, as in ornithology generally (Bibby 2003), the professionals play a much greater role now than formerly. Most BTO surveys are now organised by staff, who are also responsible for curating the data and analysing the results. There are several reasons for this: funding to pay staff is now more readily available; funders demand that projects are carried through to the conclusion of publication, which cannot be guaranteed if the organisers are unpaid; surveys are expected to conform to the established principles of statistical design, which makes their organization more demanding; and few amateurs are familiar with modern statistical methods, which are essential if the data are to be used effectively and efficiently to produce meaningful conclusions. However, it remains true that ‘The co-operation between British amateur and professional ornithologists is remarkable’ (J.C. Coulson in Walters 2003) and the role of the amateur in leading some of the work has not disappeared. Amateurs’ individual projects may demonstrate the potential of new approaches that are later taken up by the Trust: the Constant Effort Sites scheme, in which ringers operate to strict protocols at some 140 sites across the country every year and thus provide important data for demographic monitoring (Peach et al. 1996, 1998) grew out of such initiatives. Two retired schoolmasters recently used one of the Trust’s networks of observers to conduct a survey of the numbers of birds nesting in gardens, discovering them to be surprisingly large (Bland et al. 2004). And amateurs still publish analyses of BTO data, especially that derived from ringing (e.g. Main 2002). Most fundamentally, BTO members have ownership of the Trust because it is governed by a Council that they elect. Unlike many charities,

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in which Council members are drawn from the ‘great and the good’, who may have little involvement with the organisation at the grass-roots level, much effort goes into securing Council members for the BTO who are actively involved at that level. The Trust also works hard to promote direct contact between volunteers and staff by organising national and regional conferences and workshops, evening lectures and so on, so that members can directly express their views about the Trust’s work. New developments are often subject to prior consultation, either with individual members with special expertise or through a formal committee. An important element in maintaining enthusiasm is feedback of the results to the volunteers. Volunteers thus see how their individual endeavours (out in all weathers, often week after week and year after year, and even more often at ‘anti-social hours’, before returning home to fill in the requisite paperwork) fit into the big collaborative picture and contribute to conservation. As well as publishing its work in the scientific literature (the BTO itself publishes two ornithological journals, Bird Study and Ringing & Migration), the Trust summarises the results of its surveys in the members’ bi-monthly newsletter and it produces special newsletters and reports for participants in particular schemes. Its website is increasingly used to disseminate detailed results (http://www.bto.org). Much effort is devoted to getting stories based on BTO work into both the broadsheet and the tabloid press, so that the information reaches a wide audience. BTO surveys vary in the expertise required, the difficulty of the work and the demand on the participants’ time. This is a deliberate strategy, to cater for a wide range of birdwatchers and to draw people into more demanding work through simpler surveys. During the springs of 2002–2004, people have been encouraged to submit their ordinary birdwatching records via the Internet, as a means by which we can study the timing of migration (http://www.bto.org/migwatch/) and in August 2004, with RSPB, we launched a year-round version of that project (http://www.birdtrack.net). The input to such surveys is subject to quality control through the questioning by staff or RRs of unexpected records and through their accumulated knowledge of the reliability of individual observers. The fact that an individual may have no professional qualification is irrelevant: field skills come through years of experience rather than a university degree, though we are starting to supplement individual experience with training courses and a ringing permit can be acquired only after substantial training and assessment.

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The volunteers provide not only their time but also financial support. To organise its work, the BTO currently employs some 90 staff (including a small number of temporary staff undertaking fieldwork inappropriate for volunteers). The whole enterprise costs some £3.6 million per annum. The 12,500 members and 17,500 Garden Birdwatch participants pay 10 per cent and 5 per cent of that respectively in their subscriptions; another 10 per cent comes from sales, largely of equipment that people need to participate in BTO projects; and some 15 per cent through legacies and donations, mainly from members. But, extraordinary as is the generosity of members, it is not enough to cover the full costs of running the projects to which the volunteers give so much of their time. Some 55 per cent of our income is through contracts with a variety of governmental and non-governmental bodies, won mainly through competitive tendering, to carry out ornithological research. Such funding does not take away the Trust’s independence, which we jealously guard, because we only undertake work that we regard as contributing to the Trust’s mission and because we ourselves contribute to the costs of doing many of these projects, being enabled to do so because of members’ generosity. Who are these extraordinary people? White, middle-class males? Not entirely: they come from all social backgrounds and always have done; there are more females than there used to be but still not enough; but almost all are, indeed, white. It is not obvious why there are so few naturalists in Britain from the ethnic minorities: the sociology of natural history has been sadly neglected. In one sense, the BTO and its members have been fortunate in that the national interest in the environment and the demand for evidence on which to base and assess policy have led to funds becoming available. However, that interest and that demand result in no small part from the Trust’s own work, which has established so clearly some of the impacts that man is having on British and Irish wildlife. Without the long-sustained efforts of tens of thousands of amateur ornithologists who have produced the relevant scientific information, the nation and its research endeavour would be the poorer.

References Allen, D.E. (1976) The Naturalist in Britain, London: Allen Lane. Austin, G.E., Jackson, S.S.F. and Mellan, H.J. (2004) WeBS Alerts 2000/2001: Changes in Numbers of Wintering Waterbirds in the United Kingdom, Its Constituent Countries, Special Protection Areas (SPAs) and Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), BTO Research Report 349, Thetford: BTO.

Jeremy J.D. Greenwood 163 Baillie, S.R. (2001) ‘The contribution of ringing to the conservation and management of bird population: A review’, Ardea 89: 167–84. Ballance, D.K. (2000) Birds in Counties, London: Imperial College Press. Ballance, D.K. (2002) Birds in Counties, First Supplement, Falmouth: Isabelline Books. Banks, A.N., Coombes, R.H. and Crick, H.Q.P. (2003) The Peregrine Falcon Breeding Population of the UK and Isle of Man in 2002, BTO Research Report 330, Thetford: BTO. Besbeas, P., Freeman, S.N., and Morgan, B.J.T. and Catchpole, E.A. (2002) ‘Integrating mark-recapture-recovery and census data to estimate animal abundance and demographic parameters’, Biometrics 58, 3: 540–547. Besbeas, P., Freeman, S.N., Morgan, B.J.T. (2005) ‘The potential of Integrated Population Modelling’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics 47, 1: 35–48. Bibby, C.J. (2003) ‘Fifty years of Bird Study’, Bird Study 50: 194–210. Bland, R.L., Tully, J. and Greenwood, J.J.D. (2004) ‘Birds breeding in British gardens: An underestimated population?’, Bird Study 51: 97–106. Brooks, S.P., King, R. and Morgan, B.J.T. (2004) ‘A Bayesian approach to combining animal abundance and demographic data’, Animal Biodiversity and Conservation 27, 1: 515–529. Chamberlain, D.E. and Fuller, R.J. (1999) ‘Density-dependent habitat distribution in birds: Issues of scale, habitat definition and habitat availability’, Journal of Avian Biology 30: 427–36. Chamberlain, D.E., Wilson, J.D. and Fuller, R.J. (1999) ‘A comparison of bird populations on organic and conventional farm systems in southern Britain’, Biological Conservation 88: 307–20. Chamberlain, D.E. (2002) ‘Effects of agricultural intensification on birds: Evidence from monitoring data’, Aspects of Applied Biology: Birds in Agriculture 67: 1–10. Chamberlain, D.E., Fuller, R.J., Bunce, G.H., Duckworth, J.C. and Shrubb, M. (2000) ‘Changes in the abundance of farmland birds in relation to the timing of agricultural intensification in England and Wales’, J. Appl. Ecol. 37: 771–88. Clark, J.A., Robinson, R.A., Balmer, D.E., Blackburn, J.R., Griffin, B.M., Adams, S.Y., Collier, M.P. and Grantham, M.J. (2003) ‘Bird ringing in Britain and Ireland in 2002’, Ringing & Migration 21: 234–67. Clarke, W.E. (1912) Studies in Bird Migration, London: Gurney & Jackson. Crick, H.Q.P. and Sparks, T.H. (1999) ‘Climate change related to egg-laying trends’, Nature 399: 423–4. Crick, H.Q.P., Baillie, S.R. and Leech, D.I. (2003) ‘The UK Nest Record Scheme: Its value for science and conservation’, Bird Study 50: 254–70. Fewster, R.M., Buckland, S.T., Siriwardena, G.M., Baillie, S.R. and Wilson J.D. (2000) ‘Analysis of population trends for farmland birds using generalised additive models’, Ecology 81: 1970–84. Freeman, S.N., Noble, D.G., Newson, S.E. and Baillie, S.R. (2003) Modelling Bird Population Changes using Data from the Common Birds Census and the Breeding Bird Survey, BTO Research Report 303, British Trust for Ornithology, Thetford. Fuller, R.J. (1982) Bird Habitats in Britain, Calton: T&AD Poyser. Fuller, R.J. (2000) ‘Relationship between recent changes in lowland British agriculture and farmland bird populations: An overview’, in Aebischer, N.J., Evans, A.D., Grice, P.V. and Vickery, J.A. (eds) Ecology and Conservation of Lowland Farmland Birds, Tring: BTO.

164 Outside and Across the Walls Fuller, R.J., Gregory, R.D., Gibbons, D.W., Marchant, J.H., Wilson, J.D., Baillie, S.R. and Carter, S. (1995) ‘Population declines and range contractions among lowland farmland birds in Britain’, Conservation Biology, 1425–1441. Furness, R.W., Greenwood, J.J.D. and Jarvis, P.J. (1993) ‘Can birds be used to monitor the environment?’, in Furness, R.W. and Greenwood, J.J.D. (eds) Birds as Monitors of Environmental Change, London: Chapman and Hall. Gaston, K.J. and Blackburn, T.M. (2000) Pattern and Process in Macroecology, Oxford: Blackwell Science. Gibbons, D.W., Reid, J.B. and Chapman, R.A. (1993) The New Atlas of Breeding Birds in Britain and Ireland: 1988–1991, London: Poyser. Greenwood, J.J.D. and Baillie, S.R. (1991) ‘Effects of density-dependence and weather on population changes of English passerines using a non-experimental paradigm’, Ibis 133: 121–33. Greenwood, J.J.D. (2000) ‘How BTO’s monitoring of birds contributes to conservation’, Schriftenreihe f ür Landschaftspflege und Naturschutz 62: 105–17. Greenwood, J.J.D and Carter, N. (2003) ‘Organisation eines nationalen Vogelmonitorings durch den British Trust for Ornithology – Erfahrungsbericht aus Groβbritannien. (Organising a national bird monitoring by the BTO – Experiences from Britain)’, Berichte des Landesamtes für umweltschutz Sachsen-Anhalt. Sonderheft 1/2003: 14–26. Greenwood, J.J.D. (2003a) ‘Max Nicholson – the founder of the BTO’, BTO News 247: 6. Greenwood, J.J.D. (2003b) ‘The monitoring of British breeding birds: A success story for conservation science?’, The Science of the Total Environment 310: 221–30. Gregory, R.D., Wilkinson N.I., Noble. D.G., Robinson, J.A., Brown, A.F., Hughes, J., Proctor, D.A., Gibbons, D.W. and Galbraith, C.A. (2002) ‘The population status of birds in the United Kingdom, Channel Islands and Isle of Man: An analysis of conservation concern 2002–2007’, British Birds 95: 410–50. Henderson, I.G., Cooper, J., Fuller, R.J. and Vickery, J.A. (2000a) ‘The relative abundance of birds on set-aside and neighbouring fields in summer’, J. Appl. Ecol. 37: 335–47. Henderson, I.G., Vickery, J.A. and Fuller, R.J. (2000b) ‘Summer bird abundance and distribution on set-aside fields on intensive arable farms in England’, Ecography 23: 50–59. Hickling, Ronald (ed.) (1983) Enjoying Ornithology: A Celebration of Fifty Years of the British Trust for Ornithology 1933–1983, Calton: T&AD Poyser. Lack, P.C. (1986) The Atlas of Wintering Birds in Britain and Ireland, Calton: T&AD Poyser. Main, I.G. (2002) ‘Seasonal movements of Fennoscandian Blackbirds Turdus merula’, Ringing & Migration 21: 65–74. Marchant, J.H., Freeman, S.N., Crick, H.Q.P. and Beaven, L.P. (2004) ‘The BTO Heronries Census of England and Wales 1928–2000: New indices and a comparison of analytical methods’, Ibis 146: 323–34. Marchant, J.H., Hudson, R., Carter, S.P. and Whittington, P. (1990) Population Trends in British Breeding Birds, Tring: BTO. Medawar, P. (1963) ‘Hypothesis and imagination’, Times Literary Supplement 25 October 1963 (reprinted in expanded form in Medawar, P. (1967) The Art of the Soluble, London: Methuen).

Jeremy J.D. Greenwood 165 More, A.G. (1865) ‘On the distribution of birds in Great Britain during the nesting season’, Ibis, New Series, 1: 1–27, 119–42, 425–58. Noble, D.G., Newson, S.E. and Joys, A.C. (2004) Investigation of Methods for Producing Joint CBC-BBS Trends, BTO Research Report 377, British Trust for Ornithology, Thetford. Paradis, E., Baillie, S.R., Sutherland, W.J. and Gregory, R.D. (1999) ‘Dispersal and spatial scale affect synchrony in spatial population dynamics’, Ecology Letters 2: 114–20. Pashby, B.S. (1985) John Cordeaux, Ornithologist, Spurn Bird Observatory, n. p. Peach, W.J., Buckland, S.T. and Baillie, S.R. (1996) ‘The use of constant effort mist-netting to measure between-year changes in the abundance and productivity of common passerines’, Bird Study 43: 142–56. Peach, W.J., Baillie, S.R. and Balmer, D. (1998) ‘Long-term changes in the abundance of passerines in Britain and Ireland as measured by constant effort mist-netting’, Bird Study 45: 257–75. Sharrock, J.T.R. (1976) The Atlas of Breeding Birds in Britain and Ireland, Berkhamsted: Poyser. Siriwardena, G.M., Baillie, S.R., Crick, H.Q.P., Wilson, J.D. and Gates, S. (2000) ‘The demography of lowland farmland birds’, in Aebischer, N.J., Evans, A.D., Grice, P.V. and Vickery, J.A. (eds) Ecology and Conservation of Lowland Farmland Birds, Tring: British Ornithologists’ Union. Siriwardena, G.M. and Robinson, R.A. (2002) ‘Farmland birds: Demography and abundance’, Aspects of Applied Biology: Birds and Agriculture 67: 179–88. Vickery, J.A., Bradbury, R.B., Henderson, I.G., Eaton, M.A. and Grice, P.V. (2004) ‘The role of agri-evironment schemes and farm management practices in reversing the decline of farmland birds in England’, Biological Conservation 119: 19–39. Wallace D.I.M. (2004) Beguiled by Birds, Christopher Helm: London. Walters, M. (2003) A Concise History of Ornithology, London: A&C Black. Wernham, C., Toms, M., Marchant, J., Clark, J., Siriwardena, G. and Baillie, S. (2002) The Migration Atlas: Movements of the Birds of Britain and Ireland, London: T&AD Poyser. Witherby, H.F. and Pycraft, W.P. (1907) Editorial, British Birds 1: 1–3. Wood, J.D. (2003) Horace Alexander: 1889 to 1989. Birds and Binoculars, York: William Sessions Ltd.

11 Think Tanks and Intellectual Authority Outside the University: Information Technocracy or Republic of Letters? Dolan Cummings

Readers at the British Library are sometimes asked to fill in surveys about their use of library services. Typically, they are asked first to specify whether they use the library for academic, business or other purposes. In this chapter, I am concerned with the final category, ‘other’. My concern is less with what exactly these ‘other’ readers are up to, however – though that is an intriguing question – than with how the value of their work is to be assessed in the absence of academic or commercial discipline. In fact, the question of intellectual authority is by no means simple even in the former cases. Professional stature is relatively easy to measure inside the university, thanks to a well-established system of accreditation and the academic career structure. Such formal measures, however, are inevitably inexact expressions of intellectual authority, if that is taken to mean respect based on a body of work, and an ability to win support for new ideas. This can only be judged informally in terms of academics’ influence on their peers and, importantly but controversially, on the public. Business-related research is by its nature more ends-oriented, and generally less theoretical, but inasmuch as commercial researchers hope to convince others of the value of their work beyond its specific and practical purpose, they must either conform to academic standards or face the same problem as ‘other’ researchers. Those standards, institutionalised in the academic disciplines of the university, distinguish academic authority from anything else. The important thing, then, is not so much where research takes place, as 166

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the nature of that research: academic or not. Universities are merely institutional expressions of the academic disciplines, implying a community of scholars working within an agreed intellectual framework and therefore able to judge one another’s work. While academic disciplines are undoubtedly valuable, and academic authority rightly continues to carry weight beyond the university, the alternative – what might be called ‘public scholarship’ – implies a different standard of intellectual authority. The intellectual authority of ‘public scholars’ is not mediated through the institution of the university and its academic disciplines, and therefore must be achieved directly. This characterisation of ‘other’ research opens up the possibility for intellectual engagement with the public (and by the public), free from the bureaucratic constraints and office politics that sometimes prevail in academia. Stefan Collini (1999: 324) points out that there already exists what he calls an ‘academic public sphere’ comprising academics who take a critical interest in the world of ideas beyond their own disciplines, which perhaps demonstrates the viability of a wider ‘non-specialist public’ that could support what I am calling public scholarship. In this chapter I consider the possibilities of this idea, and look at the difficulties that arise in developing non-academic forms of intellectual endeavour. It is striking that think tanks, to take the most prominent example of non-academic researchers, have tended to spurn a ‘public intellectual’ role in favour of pursuing research that is relevant to policy, directly influencing government rather than worrying about intellectual authority as such. On one level, this puts them closer to the business model of research, but think tanks increasingly style themselves as generators of new ideas, claiming more general political significance for their work. Significantly, this claim is based on the bare fact that think tanks do ‘research’, rather than any agreed intellectual framework within which its value can be judged. But research itself is no basis for intellectual authority, any more than the fact that someone worked very hard on something makes it valuable. Theories of a ‘knowledge society’ tend to obscure rather than shed light on this issue, failing to discriminate between more and less valuable types of ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’. Outside universities, think tanks and research institutes, ‘research’ tends to be understood in a banal way – ‘finding things out’, studying hobbies or family history and so on. This is about discovering already existing knowledge rather than contributing to intellectual life. Such relativisation of knowledge does not arise simply from confusion about the meaning of research. There is

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a tendency to celebrate this intellectual free-for-all as ‘democratisation’, threatening to undermine not only academic, but also genuinely public, as opposed to arbitrary, standards for judging the quality of intellectual work (Furedi 2004). Undoubtedly, however, non-academics, indeed non-professionals, can and do engage more meaningfully in research and the pursuit of knowledge. In order to appreciate this fully, and to develop it, it is necessary to reconsider theories of the knowledge society, and allow a more dynamic and thoughtful conception of research, in which intellectual authority is achieved through engagement with the public, rather than derived from elsewhere and used as a licence to hold forth on public affairs.

Intellectual authority beyond the academic disciplines There may also be more practical reasons to pursue research outside universities. It has been argued compellingly that non-academic scholarship can take on problems that the academy is ill-suited to address. US author Harold Orlans argued in 1972 that the advantage of the non-university research institute was ‘its ability to conduct interdisciplinary research unhampered by the university’s departmental mode of organisation, appointment, promotion and instruction’ (Orlans 1972: 75). In this view, the need to maintain academic authority can inhibit the pursuit of knowledge. Orlans considered this more than simply a problem of bureaucracy, citing James Carroll’s contention that academic disciplines themselves can be a barrier to productive intellectual work. The present compartmentalization of knowledge in universities in the form of academic disciplines is not coincident with social need. However useful this compartmentalization may be for the inner development of knowledge it is only marginally useful for the resolution of social questions. (Orlans 1972: 75) Carroll’s marginalisation of ‘the inner development of knowledge’ raises the spectre of the philistinism that often characterises discussion about the role of the university today, but there is nothing necessarily philistine about recognising that academic work often has little social utility; indeed it is a failure to make such a distinction between academically important and socially useful work that leads to the undervaluing of the academy. The flipside of overclaiming for the utility of universities

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is that when that utility cannot be demonstrated, the case for universities is weakened. The idea that public scholarship must be interdisciplinary is intriguing, especially because since Orlans was writing, interdisciplinarity has become much more prevalent inside academia as well as outside. At least, the term has become more prevalent, but what does it actually mean? Orlans cites RAND researcher Roger Levien, who suggested in 1969 that the extent of interdisciplinary work, even in non-academic research institutions, had been exaggerated. He posited three alternatives that were more prevalent. Multidisciplinary projects involve collaboration between researchers doing discrete pieces of work in particular disciplines, which are then assembled to form a whole. Adisciplinary work is ‘collective study by specialists who employ simple intelligence and experience rather than the techniques of their disciplines’ (Orlans 1972: 77). Crossdisciplinary projects bring together experts from different disciplines to work on the same problem, often forming new disciplines in their own right, such as biophysics. It seems likely that much contemporary ‘interdisciplinary’ research could be described as one of the above, with multidisciplinary work perhaps more common in universities, and adisciplinary work characteristic of think tanks. (The implications of this characterisation are particularly intriguing, and I will return to the idea below.) If strictly academic authority derives from expertise in a particular discipline, and can be judged by academic peers in that discipline according to a shared epistemology and methodology, interdisciplinary research implies a different standard (as opposed to multidisciplinary and crossdisciplinary work, which involve the coexistence or the convergence of such frameworks). Assessing the value and quality of genuinely interdisciplinary research is not as simple as it might seem, then. Clearly, there is a problem establishing intellectual authority in the absence of an academic discipline with agreed rules and conventions. One might of course apply a commercial or bureaucratic standard. Indeed, the Research Assessment Exercise in British universities seems to reflect a desire to develop such a standard even in the academic world, perhaps indicating that the academic disciplines are not so robust and autonomous after all. (This itself is an important issue, but not one of concern here.) Following Carroll (1969), however, one might suggest that interdisciplinary work is to be judged more directly by its social utility, but this implies a certain degree of social consensus. Certainly there can be no authority without some sort of agreed institutional or political

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framework. The latter is of particular relevance to public scholarship, and the problem is particularly apparent in the case of think tanks.

Authority without consensus Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett (1998) describe the history of think tanks in Britain in three waves. The first began between the wars and continued into the post-war period, but the institutions concerned, such as the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), founded in 1920, Political and Economic Planning (founded 1931), and the National Institute for Social and Economic Research (founded 1938), saw their role more straightforwardly as contributing to government planning, generally in the context of a Keynesian economic consensus, rather than conducting research in the academic sense, or developing new ideas as such. While the term ‘think tank’ became current in the US to describe independent research institutions such as the RAND Corporation and the Brookings Institution, in Britain it tended to be reserved for internal government units, until a second wave, which came as the economic consensus broke down with the 1973–74 oil shock. Think tanks later associated with Thatcherism, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute, emerged, proposing radical reforms. As the 1980s progressed, . . . the phrase acquired a different meaning, closer to American usage; it was increasingly applied to ideologicallycharged, free market bodies which were outside government (and whose conclusions were therefore ‘deniable’) which supported Margaret Thatcher in her effort to shift British public policy away from the postwar ‘consensus’. (Denham and Garnett 1998: 9) This notion of ‘deniability’ is important. A think tank’s independence from government confers a certain intellectual authority on policies derived from it, while also protecting politicians from responsibility. In this sense, the ambiguity surrounding intellectual authority can be turned to political advantage. There is in fact some dispute about whether the New Right think tanks really did influence the Thatcher government, or whether they merely gave an intellectual gloss to a more pragmatically based political programme. Nonetheless, the government was keen to have their backing. Despite the ideological charge of the Thatcherite think tanks, their status as independent research institutions made their ideas in some sense

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‘objective’. Even allowing for the overtly ideological nature of these particular think tanks, their very form as independent institutions focused on research made them in an important sense apolitical. Certainly the ideas promoted by the New Right, and pursued by the government, were at odds with the traditions of the Conservative Party. Think tanks are not campaigning organisations, and do not reflect the views of particular social classes or other constituencies. Their authority is based solely on their research (and therefore clouded by the problems described above). Significantly, the ‘first wave’ think tank Political and Economic Planning accommodated to the new climate as the second wave took shape, by merging with the Centre for Studies in Social Policy, and changing its name to the Policy Studies Institute (1978). In this period, the notion of research began to take something like its current form, implying the development of new policy ideas, rather than the resolution of specific problems within an agreed political framework. It must be noted, though, that this did not mean that ‘second wave’ think tanks were any more intellectually rigorous than their predecessors, or indeed any more original; rather the rhetoric of ‘research’ itself became a source of intellectual authority in the absence of political consensus. The ‘third wave’ of think tanks in the late 1980s and 1990s was bound up with the ‘third way’ in politics. The apolitical, even antipolitical, aspect of research became even more pronounced. Think tanks like the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) and Demos continued the emphasis on research and new ideas, while ditching the ideological charge associated with the New Right think tanks; they are even ‘post-ideological’. According to its website, ‘Demos is a greenhouse for new ideas which can improve the quality of our lives. As an independent think-tank, our aim is to create an open resource of knowledge and learning that operates beyond traditional parties, identities and disciplines’ (www.demos.co.uk). Meanwhile the ippr stresses its connections with other institutions as well as its interest in research: Through our well-researched and clearly argued policy analysis, reports and publications, our strong networks in government, academia and the corporate and voluntary sectors and our high media profile, we play a vital role in maintaining the momentum of progressive thought. (www.ippr.org.uk) Despite the emphasis they put on the importance of research, the intellectual authority of think tanks is often questioned. Brookings scholar

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R. Kent Weaver (1989) distinguishes between think tanks that are like ‘universities without students’ (such as the Brookings Institution itself), and contract research organisations, which have somewhat less prestige. Denham and Garnett add a third category, the advocacy tank, which is more overtly partisan, and less intellectually substantial. It is more usual for advocacy tanks to synthesise and put a distinctive spin on existing research rather than carrying out distinctive research themselves. The format chosen for their output is typically short pamphlets and papers rather than books and monographs. (1998: 11–12) While Denham and Garnett identify this phenomenon with the New Right think tanks, the description will be familiar to anyone au fait with the contemporary high-profile, post-ideological think tanks. Gregor McLennan and Thomas Osborne of the University of Bristol recently conducted a study of Demos and the London School of Economics with the aim of understanding the changing nature of ‘ideas-work’. McLennan and Osborne develop Zygmunt Bauman’s typology of intellectuals (1989), by which he distinguishes between traditional ‘legislators’, who speak with authority about the big issues, and more modest ‘interpreters’, whose style is more relativistic and conversational. They suggest a third type, ‘the mediator’ to characterise more recent intellectuals who deal in what McLennan and Osborne call ‘vehicular’ ideas. The main thing is to keep ideas ‘happening’, to keep coming up with the next big new idea, even if it turns out not to be so big or so new after all. The mediator dwells in and encourages the sense that there is a ‘marketplace’ or ‘flotation’ of ideas in the information society, in which ideas can be coined, cashed in, invested in, and out-bidded. (2005: 54) This might suggest that research itself is less important than the media buzz around new ideas. Nonetheless, McLennan and Osborne do not see the vehicular tendency as something that distinguishes think tanks from academia. [T]hink tanks themselves are increasingly taking on the trappings of university life and structure. They seek to do serious research and are beginning to apply for research funding through bodies – the ESRC for example – that normally fund only bona fide universities. (2005: 55)

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For all their fleet-footedness, then, think tanks are if anything more attached to the idea of doing research than ever. There are limits, however, to how much they replicate the structure of university life. Crucially, there is no indication that think tanks are developing anything like academic departments. Think tanks are organised according to policy areas or intellectual themes rather than academic disciplines (if anything it is universities that are adopting a think tank-like approach, with ‘interdisciplinary’ centres and so on). While think tanks lean on ‘research’ as a source of authority then, they have not resolved the question of what research means outside the confines of the academic disciplines. I suggested above that much of the actual research conducted by think tanks could be described as adisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary, which is to say that it rests on a commonsense approach, and tends to lean heavily on empirical work. This surely casts doubt on the idea that think tanks are good at developing new ideas. Arguably, the rhetoric of research is itself a ‘vehicular’ idea that helps frame the activities of think tanks without telling us much about what they actually do. In its own terms, research means very little. Since think tanks lack either a general system of epistemology and methodology such as that of the academic disciplines, or a publicly understood framework within which to conduct their research, simply asserting that something is the result of ‘research’ is not that persuasive. How are we to distinguish between good and bad research, valid or invalid conclusions? Of course, such work can be scrutinised by academics, but to the extent that nonacademic research is supposed to transcend the limitations of the academic disciplines, who are they to judge? One does not have to doubt the intelligence and good faith of think tank researchers to see that the claim to have done research is in itself no basis for intellectual authority. If it were, any crank with access to the Internet would have to be granted the same esteem as the director of a think tank. Caspar Melville (this book) points to the opportunities afforded by the Internet itself for verification or contradiction through debate, as an important mechanism for establishing the plausibility of submissions to an online forum. While this may be haphazard, it at least suggests an open rigour that is absent from mere research.

‘Research’ and the media Nonetheless, the unexamined notion of research persists as the intellectual foundation of the think tank. The disdain for ‘pamphlets’ implied

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in Denham’s and Garnett’s discussion of ‘advocacy tanks’ is telling, because the accusation of pamphleteering cuts to the quick. In a ‘postideological’ period, the rhetorical weight of ‘research’ is based on the implication of objectivity, and a certain distance from the discredited world of politics. The counterposition of intellectual authority to overtly political or partisan public engagement is an important aspect of the contemporary world of think tanks. While certain academics may look down on their output, think tanks cling tenaciously to the notion that they are in the business of research, and importantly they are aided in this by the media. The snappy, spin approach comes together with the rhetoric of research in the think tank ‘report’. A report may be the product of great intellectual effort involving extensive investigation and hours of careful thought, or it may be little more than a string of bullet points; in either case its primary effect will be made through a press release. Think tanks have developed a symbiotic relationship with the media, which means that journalists are primed for catchy ideas ‘hooked’ on think tank reports. In this respect it does not matter if there is anything of substance behind the executive summary; in many cases there is no obvious readership for the real thing anyway. The resonance of the ‘report’ is such that the media are inclined to treat anything published by a think tank in the same way. Publications of all kinds tend to be greeted as important new ‘reports’, and indeed criticised in the same terms. In February 2004, the conservative think tank Civitas published a pamphlet, Conspicuous Compassion, by the journalist Patrick West, who argued that public displays of empathy are less worthy than they appear. Despite the fact that the pamphlet comprised a polemical essay by an individual author, it was widely reported as a think tank report, and its ‘findings’ discussed as if it were the result of ‘research’. This clearly riled Beth Breeze, deputy director of the Social Market Foundation, another think tank, who dismissed the pamphlet in an angry comment piece for the Guardian. ‘Civitas is wrong to imagine that its eye-catching, media-friendly pamphlet provides anything other than light relief for a public weary of documents that contain truly important information and analyses. West’s thesis is as thin as it is entertaining.’ Breeze concluded witheringly, Do read it if you want to replenish your stock of anecdotes that wittily caricature common concerns. Keep it off your reading list if you expect any serious insights into the state of modern life. (Breeze 2004)

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In fact, Breeze made it clear that her real objection was to the substance of West’s pamphlet, which indeed was not ‘important information and analyses’, but an argument about an aspect of modern life. Breeze disagreed with West’s critique of contemporary mores, seeming instead to regard the phenomenon of public empathy as an expression of democracy and the demise of elitism. By seeking to undermine the pamphlet’s authority in terms of its lack of important information and analyses, however, Breeze avoided making her own case and drawing on her own expertise, perhaps feeling that a newspaper article was an insufficiently weighty forum. Information and analysis fit the ‘research’ paradigm; polemic does not. But it does not follow that polemic is necessarily less valuable to public scholarship. Of course, it must be informed by real knowledge and thought, even research, but too often the rhetoric of research actually inhibits the scholarly pursuit of understanding by ruling out of consideration arguments that do not fit the narrow research paradigm. Think tankers tend to preface their statements with phrases like ‘The research shows . . .’ or ‘If you look at the latest research . . .’, but in the absence of an agreed intellectual framework within which this research can be validated, such statements only put a barrier between the ‘expert’ and the unenlightened public. ‘Research’ is used as a shield against ‘unaccredited’ criticism, instead of providing a genuinely shared foundation for debate. Forgan (this book) notes that public lecturers in the nineteenth century tended to be judged according to their mastery of that medium, rather than their academic or professional credentials (which of course were much less developed in those days). As long as the audience for such lectures included scientific colleagues able to vouch for the credibility of the lecturers’ material, such lectures could be genuinely authoritative. It should be noted that along with books and pamphlets, television (with rather more rigorous criticism than is currently practised) is well placed to play a similar role today. It is unfortunate that such a promising medium is not fully exploited, and too often relegated instead to conveying soundbites based on closed ‘research’ conducted elsewhere. Whatever its faults, the fact that West’s pamphlet was something that the public might actually have enjoyed reading did make it stand out. The public is not weary of documents that contain truly important information and analyses for the simple reason that it does not read them. The flattering notion that we all keep ‘reading lists’ disguises the fact that the readership for think tank publications is tiny.

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Public scholarship Denham and Garnett argue that what all think tanks have in common is a desire to influence ‘the climate of opinion’. But this raises further questions. [W]e can rarely be sure exactly whose opinion is in question: does the phrase ‘climate of opinion’ refer to the thinking of the whole electorate, a minority of ‘thinking voters’ . . . , or just a handful of policy makers, journalists and academics who can easily mistake their private dialogue for a nationwide conversation?’. (Denham and Garnett 1998: 18) There is certainly a distinction to be made between those institutions whose work is published and those whose work is classified or otherwise inaccessible. Whether or not their work is academic in nature, those institutions whose research is intended solely for private clients or even for public policy-makers, rule themselves out of any conception of ‘public scholarship’. Even when research is published for a wider audience, however, there is hardly a tradition of public engagement with such work. A paper made available on the Internet has a potential audience of millions, but an actual audience is something very different. As suggested above, think tanks are more likely to influence the climate of opinion through the popular media than through their own publications. This in itself is no bad thing. The problem is that journalists tend to pick up on soundbites and eye-catching statistics rather than more substantial ideas, and are unlikely to ask think tank researchers to write essays or to take part in television discussions lasting more than a minute or two. To the extent that think tanks conform to the ‘mediator’ role described by McLennan and Osborne, they are happy to play along with this. Indeed, asked to write a three thousand-word essay for a lay readership, most think tankers would have a nosebleed; it simply is not part of the culture. Moreover, there is a certain self-consciousness in the think tank world about their symbiotic relationship with the media, as indicated in the quotation from Beth Breeze above, and ironically this seems to prevent think tanks from making the most of those media opportunities that do exist. This reticence reflects a narrow conception of what constitutes serious intellectual work. Despite the fact that most think tanks conduct their research free from the confines of the academic disciplines, they tend to replicate the more technical aspect of university research, aspiring to

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the credibility that comes from doing ‘real’ empirical research, even if the quality of that research is questionable and difficult to verify. What is undervalued in this process is thought itself, in particular thought of a kind that might engage the public directly rather than just providing the media with ephemeral intellectual chatter. In part, this is surely because such thinking is difficult, inevitably controversial, and perhaps considered beyond the remit of ‘research’. When I criticised a 2003 ippr study of the quality of Christmas television for its focus on types of programmes rather than their merits, one of the co-authors responded that this was ‘the standard and accepted methodology’. But standard in what context and accepted by whom? He went on to argue that, ‘It would seem fair comment to suggest that a service has improved, if it meets the quantitative thresholds set by the state.’1 Would it? Admittedly any attempt to assess the actual quality of Christmas television would involve negotiating a minefield of subjective opinions and conflicting ideals, but is not that precisely what would be required in order to determine whether it is improving? Resorting to a crude measure laid down by the state seems a terrible copout, definitive without being authoritative. The arts may seem particularly unsusceptible to ‘hard’ research, but public life in general is all about disagreement, political and otherwise. Precisely those issues that call for a non-academic approach also elude simplistic objectivity. ‘Research’ cannot be a refuge from controversy. The pursuit of knowledge must imply a willingness to engage with difficult issues and to argue about them rather than falling back on bogus sources of objectivity. As Alan Hudson argues, ‘Intellectuals should aim to speak in a strong vernacular in order to mediate a public discussion between themselves and critical participants; between thought and experience’ (2005: 47). This is a very different model of the intellectual as ‘mediator’ than that described by McLennan and Osborne. It retains some of the characteristics of Bauman’s ‘legislator’ model in terms of commitment to ideas, while encouraging more critical discussion. It therefore holds out the possibility of intellectuals winning authority by engaging with the public itself, rather than affecting authority (on the basis of supposed objectivity or otherwise) in order to gain an audience. Newer think tanks such as the New Economics Foundation and the New Politics Network are explicitly concerned about public engagement. The former describes itself as a ‘think-and-do tank’ and is developing new techniques, such as its ‘Democs’ card game, to involve the public in policy-making (www.neweconomics.org), while the latter explains on its website that, ‘We stimulate debate and campaign on issues

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relating to political and democratic structures, processes, disaffection with political culture and popular participation in politics. Our regular publications feature new thinking on these political issues’ (www.newpolitics.net). Even in this activist model of the think tank, the emphasis is on coming up with new ideas about combating public disengagement, rather than engaging the public through new ideas. None of this is to attack think tanks as such; many think tank researchers conduct work of academic or commercial quality, and make a valuable contribution to the pursuit of knowledge. But a genuine alternative to these models, and one able to address issues they cannot, demands a different source of authority. The best hope for a generally understood framework within which intellectual output can be assessed, and therefore a foundation for research outside the university, is a public that has some experience of such work. Here, the limitations of the term ‘research’ become obvious. While graduates ought to have a grasp of what is meant by academic research, nobody would expect the public to be up on the latest interdisciplinary research techniques. In any case, research, in the narrow sense of gathering information, is not really the issue. Certainly many members of the public are involved in research in various ways, but a more realistic and more important common ground between the public and specialist researchers is in reading, thinking and arguing. The public cannot engage with research presented as the final word on an issue; it can engage with an argument informed by research. And engagement with the public provides a surer footing for ‘other’ researchers than any amount of empirical number crunching.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank James Panton and other members of the Institute of Ideas’ Postgraduate Forum, who made many useful comments on an early draft of this chapter.

Note 1. My criticism was made in an essay published on spiked (http://www.spikedonline.com/articles/0000000CA4BE.htm). Jamie Cowling wrote a letter in response (http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA5B8.htm).

References Amoroso, Marina and Cowling, Jamie (2003) A Public Service Christmas? Provision of Public Service Programming on BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 & Five from 1992 to

Dolan Cummings 179 2002, London: Institute for Public Policy Research (http://www.ippr.org/ research/files/team25/project177/XmasTV%20.changes.pdf). Bauman, Zygmunt (1989) Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals, Cambridge: Polity. Breeze, Beth (2004) ‘Who cares?’, The Guardian, 25 February. Carroll, James D. (1969) ‘Science and the city: The question of authority’, Science 163, 3870, 28 February. Collini, Stefan (1999) ‘Before another tribunal: The idea of the “non-specialist public” ’, in his English Pasts: Essays in Cultural and History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Denham, Andrew and Garnett, Mark (1998) British Think Tanks and the Climate of Opinion, London: UCL Press. Furedi, Frank (2004) Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Confronting Contemporary Philistinism, London: Continuum. Hudson, Alan (2005) ‘Intellectuals for our times’, in Cummings, Dolan (ed.) The Changing Role of the Intellectual, London: Routledge. Levien, Roger E. (1969) Independent Public Policy Analysis Organisations – A Major Social Invention, Santa Monica: The RAND Corporation (P-4231). McLennan, Gregor and Osborne, Thomas (2005) ‘Contemporary “vehicularity” and “romanticism”: Debating the status of ideas and intellectuals’, in Cummings, Dolan (ed.) The Changing Role of the Intellectual, London: Routledge. Orlans, Harold (1972) The Nonprofit Research Institute: Its Origins, Operation, Problems and Prospects, New York: McGraw-Hill. Weaver, R. Kent (1989) ‘The changing world of think tanks’, PS: Political Science and Politics 22, September. West, Patrick (2004) Conspicuous Compassion: Why Sometimes It Really is Cruel to Be Kind, London: Civitas.

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Part III Openings and Challenges through the Web?

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12 Everyday Domestic Research in the Knowledge Society: How Ordinary People Use Information and Communication Technologies to Participate Ben Anderson

‘Research’ in the knowledge society Information, information everywhere, And all the world did shrink; Information, information everywhere, But who can take a drink? (with apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge) The combination of increasingly pervasive information technologies and the related structural changes in the occupational and production structures of many western economies are often claimed to have launched a ‘knowledge society’ (Castells 2000). In this society access to ‘information’, its distillation into ‘knowledge’ and its use in producing ‘value-added’ services is argued to be one of the key driving economic forces. Public actors such as the UK government and the European Commission are firmly of the view that economic growth, and the subsequent societal benefits will follow from embedding these new technologies throughout our industrial structures. For example the European Council’s Lisbon summit of 2000 clearly stated that a shift to a knowledge-based economy will not only be a powerful engine for growth, competitiveness and jobs but The information society has much untapped potential to improve productivity and the quality of life. This potential is growing due to the technological developments of broadband and multi-platform 183

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access, i.e. the possibility to connect to the Internet via other means than the PC, such as digital TV and 3G. These developments are opening up significant economic and social opportunities. New services, applications and content will create new markets and provide the means to increase productivity and hence growth and employment throughout the economy. (CEC 2002: 2) This statement, on which much of the Commission’s subsequent e-Europe 2005 agenda depends, is intended to show how information technology investment can support the Lisbon objectives of increased productivity and quality of life through increased social cohesion and economic and social ‘participation’. But participation in what exactly? In addition there is the hope that increasing access to ‘information’ will help improve the lot of UK and EU citizens by enabling them to take more informed decisions about their lives. As an example the European Commission has focused on two specific aspects – health information in the context of an aging population, and employment opportunities in the context of a European job market. Here then we have policy makers concerning themselves with research, not in the context of the generation of knowledge for industrial or academic purposes but in the context of individuals looking for information which can be of personal benefit to them. If this sounds rather too tenuous for inclusion in a book about research ‘outside the walls’ then perhaps we need to re-visit our working definitions of research in order to better reflect on who ‘researches’ and for what purposes whether inside or outside the walls.

‘Research’ in everyday life If we turn to dictionary definitions then we can see how the academic (or quasi academic) version of the term, which understandably permeates the university sector is rather narrow. re·search Pronunciation Key (r-sûrch, rsûrch) 1 n. 2 v.intr. 3 v. tr.

Scholarly or scientific investigation or inquiry. Close, careful study. To engage in or perform research To study (something) thoroughly so as to present in a detailed, accurate manner To do research for

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[Obsolete French recerche, from recercher, to search closely, from Old French: re-, re- + cerchier, to search] (source: http://www.dictionary.com). If we take a broad definition of ‘research’ such as ‘to search or examine with continued care’, or ‘close careful study’ (widely accepted meanings), then those who ‘research outside the walls’ include just about everyone: both those following an ‘academic’ mode and those involved in other research modes such as service workers as well as ordinary people in ‘everyday life’. In ‘academic’ mode, research is carried out by the employees of universities, commercial companies, governments (civil services), think tanks, pressure groups and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Such research is also carried out, as this book demonstrates, by many outside these walls. Closely related ‘research’ carried out by knowledge and service workers as well as consultants refreshing their marketable knowledge is often as diligent and careful as ‘academic research’ (see Davies, this book). But in pure head-count terms it is surely in the domestic context that most ‘research’ gets done. People do research when buying houses or cars, before selecting products and services such as holidays, when looking for advice or help (such as health) and when looking for future employment opportunities. In addition to ‘decision oriented’ information seeking, leisure and hobby activities can also require or even constitute research as many of the chapters in this book illustrate and there seems no logical reason to exclude such participation from our analysis. Indeed in focusing on domestic research we can perhaps draw greater attention to an under-researched and certainly under-theorised domain. I will call these activities ‘everyday research’ and in the remainder of this chapter I will describe the kinds of everyday research activities that are currently mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs) and especially by the Internet. However I do not wish just to paint descriptive pictures. My prime concern is in discovering whether or not ICT-mediated research is evenly distributed across the ICT-using population. If it is not and we believe that social benefits such as healthier lifestyles or better job opportunities accrue to those who use ICTs in their everyday research, then clearly policy attention and action is required. Given their topical nature and current policy attention, I focus on usage of online health information and of online job-seeking in the UK as two case studies, and will use data from two waves of a longitudinal European ICT-focused household panel survey, ‘e-Living’.1 The survey recruited a single adult in 1750 households in each of the UK, Norway,

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Germany, Italy, Bulgaria and Israel in 2001 and re-interviewed the respondents, and their partners if appropriate, in 2002.

The use of ICTs to ‘do research’ Being better able to participate in ‘everyday research’ may be an important reason for going online. In the e-Living survey we found that between 48 per cent (Italy) and 70 per cent (Bulgaria) of those who did not have Internet access but who were very likely to get it in 2001 said that their main or only reason to do so was for ‘education or information purposes’. Interestingly those who were already Internet users in 2001 did not rate this usage as highly with only 30 per cent (UK) to 43 per cent (Norway) saying that it was their most important kind of home Internet use. As part of a wide-ranging survey on personal uses of the Internet in 15 European countries the European Commission’s June 2002 Eurobarometer (Gallup Europe 2002) found that across all countries 74 per cent looked for news or topical items; 63 per cent looked for travel information; 38 per cent sought health-related advice or information; 35 per cent had bought something; 31 per cent used it to find job adverts and 31 per cent for banking. The picture is similar in the United States with a 2002 Pew Internet report (Horrigan and Rainie 2002) indicating that 59 per cent of Internet users had looked for health information; 53 per cent bought something and 43 per cent bought travel products or services whilst 48 per cent had looked for job-related information. In terms of actual usage in 2002 the e-Living survey respondents reported extensive use of travel and information services across all countries except Bulgaria, more varied use of library and similar services and extensive use of ‘educational services’ in all countries except Norway (Figure 12.1). They also reported rates of use for job-search comparable with those mentioned above with the least in Israel (24 per cent) and the highest in Germany (31 per cent) and little variation between countries. Interestingly e-Living reports much lower use for obtaining medical information compared to the 2002 Eurobarometer study with the least usage in Bulgaria (1.4 per cent) and the most in Israel (12 per cent). This may be a result of different question wording in e-Living which asked whether respondents had ‘obtained assistance’ in the last three months rather than ever ‘obtained information’. In this respect the e-Living data may provide a better guide to the frequency of such use (relatively low) although ‘assistance’ can also be interpreted as rather more than just ‘information seeking’. In the remainder of the

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80 70

% of net users

60 50 40 30 20

Israel

Bulgaria

Norway

Germany

Italy

0

UK

10

Used library or similar services

Used travel or holiday information services

Used educational services

Obtained medical assistance

Obtained information about the environment

Applied for a job or got job information

Figure 12.1 Online ‘Everyday research’ activities. Percentage of Internet users in each country who reported using the Internet to do these activities online in the last 3 months, e-Living wave 2 (2002), weighted, multiple responses, totals may be >100%

chapter I use the e-Living data to explore these two activities across the six countries.

Who’s taking advantage – two case studies As I have noted it is important to understand the extent to which the social benefits that may flow from ICTs are evenly distributed. Setting aside the rather obvious point that ICTs are themselves not evenly distributed, I therefore need to analyse the extent to which certain groups of ICT users may be more or less likely to (or able to) make best use of them once they have them, although this, of course, is

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fundamentally entangled with the prior question of what kinds of people tend to do this kind of activity in any case. The question thus becomes: are ICTs just enabling those with the social, cultural and economic capital to get more or are they levelling the playing field so that those not normally to be found ‘doing research’ can derive benefits hitherto denied them? Figure 12.2 shows age has a strong influence on the likelihood of both obtaining medical assistance (tends to increase with age) and job search (decreases with age – the 75 plus result is probably due to small sample size). These are to be expected given that older people are more likely to suffer from health problems and that employment transitions are more likely to be affecting those aged 16 to 64. However, it is interesting that the usage of the Internet for job search

40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% 16–24

25–34

35–44

Obtained medical assistance

45–54

55–64

65–74

75+

Applied for job/got job info

Figure 12.2 Distributions of online job and health ‘research’ by age. Percentage of all Internet users in all six e-Living countries pooled, e-Living wave 2 (2002), weighted

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currently declines sharply for those aged over 35. Is this an effect of Internet skills and proficiency being concentrated in the younger cohort or an effect of different occupational and labour market contexts in the older cohort? This is to some extent answered by Figure 12.3 which suggests a positive relationship between Internet experience and the likelihood of using the Internet for job research. It is possible therefore that those with the previous skills and knowledge are best positioned to do successful job research online. In contrast there is no apparent pattern for obtaining medical information. This suggests that the older users, who are almost certainly towards the ‘less experienced’ part of the scale, are not prohibited from obtaining relevant information. What we need to do now of course is unpick the relative weights of these and other variables to see which are in fact the most significant 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

0–2 years

2–4 years Obtained medical assistance

4–6 years

6–8 years

8+ years

Applied for job/got job info

Figure 12.3 Distributions of online job and health ‘research’ by years of Internet experience. Percentage of all Internet users in all six e-Living countries pooled, e-Living wave 2 (2002), weighted

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indicators of usage for these purposes. Only then will we be able to state with any certainty whether or not the ICT-skilled are better placed to participate in the knowledge society. Looking for jobs Freeman reminds us that people use a number of means to locate jobs including personal contacts and referrals, agencies, newspapers and media and dedicated job-search websites (Freeman 2002). I will set side job searches via social networks although others have noted its significance, especially for women (Bortnick and Harrison Ports 1992, Granovetter 1974) and concentrate in this section on directed job information searching. Early studies such as those of Kuhn and Skuterud suggested that up to 15 per cent of job seekers were using the Internet as a means of job search in 1998 and that 7 per cent of employed workers also did so with 5.2 per cent doing so from home and 2.3 per cent at work (Kuhn and Skuterud 2000). When considering only those with Internet access at home, they found that 49.5 per cent of jobseekers used the Internet for job search as did 15.9 per cent of those in work and 10.4 per cent of the disabled who were not in the labour force. They also reported that 11.4 per cent of jobseekers used non-home Internet access, predominantly public libraries (24.4 per cent) and other people’s Internet access (44.6 per cent), to look for work outside of the home environment. This highlights the increased usage for those with home access and the potential value of online job search via public access points to the jobseeker group, who may be less likely to have access at home. They suggest that at that time and for those with household Internet access men, the better educated and younger people, are more likely to look for jobs online. Freeman suggests that job-search websites have a number of advantages, not least wider geographical spread, timeliness and ease of searching against given criteria (Freeman 2002). He also notes that the apparently higher proportion of workers using online job searches compared to job search via other means, presumably because it is easier to do so surreptitiously or at home, may lead to an increase in employee turnover and thus a reduction in average employment tenure. More recent research has suggested that those using the Internet to do job research tend to be younger, male, unemployed, in new media/ sales sectors and have higher income and educational qualifications (Boyce and Rainie 2002). Of course many of these variables correlate, so it is important to be able to isolate their effects from one another and

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Kuhn and Skuterud do precisely this in both their 2000 and 2004 papers (Kuhn and Skuterud 2000, 2004). In the latter paper they find that Internet job searchers tend to have slightly longer unemployment spells when occupational and educational characteristics are controlled. This result suggests that Internet job searchers are adversely affected by characteristics not available in their data and (or) that Internet job search does not in fact reduce unemployment durations. If the latter is true then it may offer some support for Freeman’s churn hypothesis. Using a similar method I have examined the characteristics of job information seekers by estimating the effects of a range of variables, including age and Internet experience as well as other factors, on the probability of using the Internet for job research. The factors analysed include household wealth (number of electronic household goods), educational qualifications and occupational code (derived from industry standard ISCO codes2) as well as current working status, gender and country to control for country effects. In addition I include the only or most frequent location of Internet access (home, work, public place, other friends and family) to examine the effects of mode or location of access. Given that those who are least advantaged in the labour market are still also those with the lowest rates of home Internet access (Rose 2003), the impact of public access points on the ability to participate in this kind of everyday research is potentially important. The results of this analysis are reported in full elsewhere (Anderson 2004) and I summarise them here. Compared to those aged 16–24, those of 35–74 are significantly less likely to use the Internet for job-related research and this effect was strongest for the 55–64 age group. Those in ‘service’ jobs are more likely to use the Internet for job research but there are no effects for other occupational types perhaps reflecting the penetration of workplace Internet access into the service sector. Compared to those in paid work, the unemployed and those who are students or at school are much more likely to do it. Those who are retired or on maternity leave are less likely to do it. This is to be expected since the unemployed and those in full-time education are those most likely to be attempting to enter or re-enter the labour market although the size of the effect for the unemployed is marked suggesting that those already in paid work are less likely to do online job research, are less motivated to do so or a combination of the two. The better educated are more likely to search for jobs online and the most highly educated are the most likely of all to do so. Neither gender nor Internet experience are important, nor are location of access or household wealth.

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Overall then this pooled sample of six European countries confirms some of the findings in the literature but not others (though we should also note that these results do not imply causality, but are simply indicators of who is most likely to report this activity). Young people are more likely to do online job research as are the better educated and, as we might expect, so are the unemployed and students compared to those in work. Those in a service job are also more likely to do so, but location of Internet access does not seem to make a difference. Looking for health information There has been a recent proliferation in healthcare or health-related information available online. Cline and Haynes reported in 2001 that there were more than 70,000 such sites and noted that a combination of quality concerns and users’ inability to judge (or to be able to judge) this quality were serious concerns (Cline and Haynes 2001). Research on actual usage is becoming more widespread although in a recent special issue of the British Medical Journal which called for papers on the relationship between ICTs and health, the editors lamented that few papers focused on the ways in which ICTs can help to keep people healthy through access to information, specifically those who are marginalised in rural or urban areas (Jadad and Delamothe 2004). More recently Burrows and colleagues have provided a more nuanced understanding of how different kinds of ‘wired’ users make use of health information (Nettleton et al. 2004). They develop a typology of online health information users (and usages) which shows that different kinds of people with different degrees of ‘Internet engagement’ have developed a range of ways to fold Internet-sourced health information into their daily lives, and that these are not always defined by wealth, educational attainment, Internet experience or skills. Furthermore they show the degree of reflection and cross-checking that is common across all users and also the degree to which people will collect and collate information for future use both by their own family and also by others. This illustrates the extent to which consumption and production are intertwined – people not only ‘consume’ information but also ‘produce’ it (or perhaps re-produce it) for themselves and others even if they are not actually ‘re-publishing’ it. A 2002 Pew Internet report suggested that 62 per cent of USA Internet users had gone looking for health information online and that women and older people were more frequent users. Their descriptive data also suggest that the better educated and those with more Internet experience are more likely to do this (Fox and Rainie 2002). These health

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information seekers research drugs, look for advice, prepare for consultations, check on disease data and look for information on sensitive issues such as sexual and mental health. About 30 per cent of these individuals reported that they then take the information they have gleaned in to a consultation which then becomes the locus of conflict between research inside (the practitioner) and outside (the patient) the walls. Using the same data Houston and Allison suggest that those Internet users with poorer health are more likely to make use of Internet-based information (Houston and Allison 2004). A recent study using national USA healthcare datasets has shown that those who make use of Internet information resources tend to hold stronger health beliefs and already engage in more healthy lifestyles than those who do not (Dutta-Bergman 2004). Skinner et al. report that adolescents in Canada use information technology to support three different clusters of health-related activities: personal and social communication; websites and other interactive sources, and unidirectional sources such as TV and radio (Skinner, Biscope, Poland, and Goldberg 2003). In a separate paper Skinner et al. also note that simply having Internet access is not sufficient since healthcare is often sensitive and thus looking for information is viewed as a private activity, especially by adolescents whose Internet access may be mediated by, for example, parents, schools or siblings (Skinner, Biscope, and Poland 2003). In the European context, Spadaro has reported on the range of sources of health information and suggests that only 3.5 per cent of Europeans see the Internet as their main source of health information with 45 per cent saying their health professional, 19.8 per cent saying TV and 5.2 per cent saying friends and colleagues (Spadaro 2003). Spadaro reports that 23 per cent of EU citizens use the Internet to access health data and suggests that older people, women and the least educated are less likely to do this although it is not clear if this descriptive analysis controls for the socio-demographics of Internet access which would show much the same pattern. As in the case of job research I have developed a model within the constraints of the e-Living data to estimate the effects of various variables on the likelihood of having used the Internet to obtain medical assistance in the last three months. I included age, gender, qualifications, the household wealth indicator, Internet experience and country. I also included the only proxy for health that is available within the data – the frequency of playing sport, keeping fit or going

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walking. Finally I also included the indicator of the only or most frequent form of Internet access to examine the effects of mode or location of access. Again the detailed results can be found elsewhere (Anderson 2004). In summary, in contrast to Spadaro, I find that when other factors are controlled, those aged 65–74 are 117 per cent more likely to look for health information online than those aged 16–24. Women are 63 per cent more likely to do this than men but there are no effects for educational background nor for years of Internet experience nor wealth. This suggests that there are no apparent socio-economic or ICT literacy barriers to the use of online medical assistance or information. Men are less likely to look for information than women although this may be because they are less interested in their health and less likely to seek information than women whatever the medium. On the other hand these results may confirm Skinner et al.’s concern that the younger age groups are least likely to engage with health information at the precise point in their lives when many health-risk behaviours are initiated such as smoking, drinking and other drug use (Skinner, Biscope, Poland et al. 2003). Given that many in these age groups, especially adolescents, may be very unlikely to engage with healthcare professionals, the hope that Internet-based resources may help to get important health messages home may not be realistic. However until data is available which allows us to control for the incidence of poor health we will not be able to disentangle this effect from a separate age effect. Most interestingly of all, I find that those who access the Internet solely or only from a friend or relative’s home are more likely to look for health information online than those who have other forms of access. These individuals are 118 per cent more likely to look for medical assistance online (all other things controlled) than are those whose main or only location of Internet access is the home. Although not statistically significant those who could only use ‘public’ locations of access (work/college/public library) were less likely to look for health information online. Given Skinner’s concern that those with only semi-public access are less likely to look for sensitive information and that these people are often the young and the socially deprived, the latter result is to be expected. However the increased likelihood of looking for health information if access is only or mostly via friends and family suggests the opposite effect and warrants further exploration.

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Conclusions This chapter has suggested that when thinking about ‘research outside the walls’ of academia we need to think much more broadly than just ‘amateur research’ and extend the concept to those in industrial research and development, NGOs and government policy-oriented research, consultants, knowledge and service workers. More importantly for this chapter I also argue that we should extend the concept to anyone who conducts ‘close, careful study’ or who ‘seeks diligently’ and thus include everyday research activities which are not intended to contribute to the ‘sum of human knowledge’ but to address particular personal issues. This kind of ‘research’ seems to receive little attention in the research literature and it may turn out to be substantively different having little requirement for external validity or accountability. What matters here is not the views of peers but the extent to which the research leads to an effective (perceived or actual) decision although of course the decisions taken and the evidence used to support them can be exposed to household ‘peer review’ of a penetrating kind. As I have shown such ‘everyday research’ is increasingly mediated by ICTs and in particular the Internet due to the proliferation of information sources and services. By way of examples searching both for job-related information and for health assistance have emerged as important uses of the Internet. Whilst domain experts are concerned to understand how this new medium will affect both worker and employer search strategies and unemployment duration (job search) or processes of quality assessment and engagement with hard-to-reach groups (health information), a more basic question which I have addressed here is whether or not, given that a person has Internet access, there are social and structural barriers to carrying out everyday research. Interestingly the patterns differ between the two case studies in the six European countries covered by the e-Living data. Those who are older or least well educated are the least likely to look for job information online when other factors (such as occupation type) are controlled. In other words those who may be most at risk from long-term unemployment (older, less educated workers but interestingly not the least wealthy) may be the least likely to take advantage of the work-finding opportunities provided by Internet services. The benefits of Internet job research are therefore clearly accruing to the better educated and the young of either gender rather than those who may be in most need. However the lack of an Internet experience effect shows that this is not due to lack of Internet skills and suggests that further exploratory research is necessary.

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In contrast education makes no difference to the likelihood of searching for medical assistance although we do find the same effect for age as we might expect. Whilst there are also no Internet experience effects, the data do show a strong gender effect. Thus older women whose main or only location of Internet access is through friends or family are the most likely to search for online medical assistance. As noted above this location effect warrants further investigation to understand the social processes at work. In addition there is suggestive evidence that those whose sole or main location of Internet use is through public access points are least likely to search for online health information even when age is controlled. Taken together these results show that age, educational level, location of access and social context can effect the likelihood of doing two different kinds of everyday research online. However two of the oft-quoted, years of Internet experience and wealth do not. Given that only location of use is open to policy (or market) influence in the short term, some thought may need to be given as how best to enable access that supports actual use as opposed to access in principle. To return to our parody of Coleridge, it is not clear that all are equally able to drink.

Notes 1. e-Living: Life in a Digital Europe (www.eurescom.de/e-living/), funded by the European Union’s FP5 IST Programme 2001–2004, IST-2000-25409. 2. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/class/isco.htm.

References Anderson, B. (2004) Everyday Research in the Knowledge Society: Who Uses ICTs to Find Job and Health Information (2004–12), Colchester: Chimera, University of Essex. Bortnick, S. and Harrison Ports, S. (1992) ‘Job search methods of the unemployed, 1991’, Monthly Labor Review, 115, 12: 29–35. Boyce, A. and Rainie, L. (2002) Online Job Hunting, Washington, DC: Pew Internet and American Life Project. Castells, M. (2000) The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age – Economy Society and Culture, vol. 1, 2nd ed., London: Blackwell. CEC (2002) eEurope 2005: An Information Society for all – An Action Plan (COM 2002, 263 final) Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. Cline, R. and Haynes, K. (2001) ‘Consumer health information seeking on the Internet: The state of the art’, Health Education Research 16, 6: 671–92. Dutta-Bergman, M.J. (2004) ‘Health attitudes, health cognitions, and health behaviors among Internet health information seekers: Population-based survey’, Journal of Medical Internet Research 6, 2: e15.

Ben Anderson 197 Fox, S. and Rainie, L. (2002) Vital Decisions: How Internet Users Decide What Information to Trust When They or their Loved Ones are Sick, Washington, DC: Pew Internet and American Life Project. Freeman, R. (2002) ‘The labour market in the new information economy’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy 18, 3: 288–305. Gallup Europe (2002) Flash Eurobarometer 135: Internet and the Public at Large – Results and Comments. Granovetter, M.S. (1974) Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Horrigan, J.B. and Rainie, L. (2002) Getting Serious Online, Washington, DC: Pew Internet and American Life Project. Houston, T.K. and Allison, J.J. (2004) ‘Users of Internet health information: Differences by health status’, Journal of Medical Internet Research 4, 2: e7. Jadad, A.R. and Delamothe, T. (2004) ‘What next for electronic communication and health care?’, British Medical Journal 328: 1143–4. Kuhn, P. and Skuterud, M. (2000) ‘Job search methods: Internet versus traditional’, Monthly Labor Review 123, 10: 3–11. Kuhn, P. and Skuterud, M. (2004) ‘Internet job search and unemployment durations’, American Economic Review 94, 1: 218–32. Nettleton, S., Burrows, R., O’Malley, L. and Watt, I. (2004) ‘Health eTypes? An analysis of the everyday use of the Internet for health’, Information Communication and Society 7: 531–553. Rose, R. (2003) ‘Digital choice, 1st results from the Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS)’, Paper presented at the iCS/OII Internet Research Symposium, Oxford (17–20 September 2003). Skinner, H., Biscope, S. and Poland, B. (2003) ‘Quality of Internet access: Barrier Behind Internet use statistics’, Social Science and Medicine 57, 5: 875–80. Skinner, H., Biscope, S., Poland, B. and Goldberg, E. (2003) ‘How adolescents use technology for health information: Implications for health professionals from focus group studies’, Journal of Medical Internet Research 5, 4: e32. Spadaro, R. (2003) European Union Citizens and Sources of Information about Health (Eurobarometer 58.0), Brussels: The European Opinion Research Group (EORG).

13 Building Knowledge through Debate: OpenDemocracy on the Internet Caspar Melville

The Internet has the potential to usher in an era of global democracy and communication without borders. Open, decentralized, abundant, inexpensive, user-controlled and interactive, it is the first medium that allows anyone, anywhere to find or create communities of interest, to publish to audiences around the world . . . to participate in government and civil society across the borders of time and distance. (Berman 2000). This comment by the Executive Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology exemplifies the way we were told back in the earlier days of Internet evangelism that the future would be connected. It would be interactive, information would become free to move instantly around the world. Implicitly the digital promise was one of greater democracy. The technology of personal computers connected to each other over the Internet offers an unprecedented reach, transcending limits imposed by nationality, geography, clock-time and access (the ‘digital divide’ notwithstanding). As the theorist of new social movements Manuel Castells has argued (1996, 2001), the model for this new connectivity – in contrast to the top-down state, institution or landscape of distinct class interest – is the network. And this network could potentially include anyone who has a computer and Internet access. Across this network, information, hitherto controlled by states and rich media corporations, would be distributed free – both with no cost and without censorship or ideological bias. Wherever they are and as 198

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long as they can get electricity, users can plug into this information for the price of a computer (the cost of which, at least in the west, has plummeted). As with TV they can look at the Internet and take from the Internet. But they can also add. The Internet is a publishing platform with unprecedented low barriers to access, a way to make your voice heard and interact with people all over the world instantly. It potentially offers that holy grail for democracy activists – active participation. But how well has the Internet delivered on such early promises? How, concretely, can democratic participation in the knowledge society be built and sustained digitally, especially in light of the well-documented attempts by states and global corporations to curtail freedom, limit information flows and commodify Internet use (see for example Derakhshan 2004, Fang 2003, Vaidhyanathan 2003, 2004). I want to explore these questions in relation to one particular attempt to create democratic debate using the Internet, the website openDemocracy (www.openDemocracy.net).1

Building democracy on the Internet OpenDemocracy ‘went live’ on the Internet in June 2001. The originating idea was Anthony Barnett’s, a freelance political journalist and author who had written extensively on Vietnam, Russia, the Falklands war and constitutional issues and led the constitutional pressure group Charter 88 during the period when it was arguably Britain’s most influential political NGO. In 1999 he assembled a small group of like minds to think through how to exploit the resources and promise of the Internet in a democratic political project. After some false starts and setbacks sufficient seed money was obtained from small foundations and donors to build a small staff and set up the website which was to be the core of the project. Although political from the start, openDemocracy was designed to be part of the media – a readable accessible web journal which carried argument, comment, analysis and debate, furthering democracy through the independent production of information and argument. The advantages of the Internet for this were clear. In terms of publishing entry costs are low (unlike print or broadcast): once the website and content management system are built the actual publishing costs are small (mainly labour); with no limits on space nor the complex distribution problems that so bedevil small publishing operations. But more than that, the project’s uniqueness pivoted around the

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Internet’s interactive possibilities. The idea was always to present, side by side, articles and other commissioned (but not, at least in the early days, paid for) content, with the messages (‘posts’ in Internet lingo) published to the site by its users. These two factors – low publication cost and interactivity – made the Internet an ideal platform for a project addressing the deficiencies in governance, policy and justice on a planetary scale, and stimulating the kind of open debate, discussion and the presentation of new initiatives essential to a healthy democracy. Or so its founders believed. Central to the project was its independence. This applied in several areas: politics, economics and location/perspective. In political terms although the founding group were by and large veterans of left-leaning political organisations and media, the determination from the start was not to confine the debate within any political ideology: the organisation has no ‘line’. The most interesting debates and the freshest thinking, the founders intuited, comes from debate between people of vastly different opinions, experience and perspectives, not between those who agree with each other in advance. This commitment to ‘open debate’ also meant being independent of any particular political party or programme. Secondly while the aspiration was eventually to be fully self-funded openDemocracy has been from its inception a not-for-profit project (though not a charity) which would always put whatever money it could earn back into the business.2 OpenDemocracy’s founding team decided at an early stage not to accept advertising or sponsorship to try to ensure independence from corporate control or manipulation. Third was the aspiration to transcend a narrow national frame. The Internet offered an unprecedented opportunity to establish a world-wide conversation, to be global3 rather than national in coverage, reach and perspective. This meant, among other things, the need to commission widely outside the UK and edit carefully to open out local assumptions and national references. Built on the platform of this independence, articulated through its internationally available website, openDemocracy is thus part of an attempt to open politics and ideas to a global audience, including those outside the walls both of academia and of political and economic power. Founder editor Anthony Barnett expresses the core of this aspiration as: seeking to establish a new quality of conversation, a different sort of interaction, with all the dangers and risks involved for those used to tribal arguments and taking of sides. We want to create a new culture

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of intelligent engagement, a sharpness of mind and breadth of experience that can live up to democratic exchange. (Barnett, pers. comm., September 2004)

Participative democracy? So how does openDemocracy capitalise on the democratic potential supposedly offered by the interactivity and participation of the Internet? People’s biggest reason for getting onto the Internet remains access to e-mail. Hardly surprisingly the promise of virtually free communication with people you know – basically cheap phone calls – provides an initial incentive to get connected. But in addition to a cheap way to connect with the already known, the Internet promises connection with those unknown. We are, perhaps, over-familiar with the arguments about the anonymity of the ‘virtual’ world and its possibilities for the exploration of sexual fantasy (and the related threat of ‘grooming’ by people pretending to be other than they are) but equally strong in the psychological selling power of the new digital technologies is the promise of connection with real people, those being themselves, geographically inaccessible but now connected digitally. The Internet apparently offers at least the possibility of getting to know, finding common ground and debating with people across the world: it has the potential to host a global public sphere. This communication is facilitated through online discussion software (which enables computer users to ‘publish’ onto websites), called, in the early days of the Internet, ‘chat’. Chatrooms, virtual ‘spaces’ where a user logs on to communicate in ‘real time’ with other users through the medium of writing though with few of the norms of conventional print, were one of the Internet’s earliest and most instantly successful forms. Their promise is precisely the offer of membership of a community or network, a chance to participate and be ‘listened to’. The quality of chat on the Internet is the subject of much, well deserved, scepticism. Examples of the ridiculous, the hateful, the insular and the banal are only as far away as a mouse and a Google search. But ‘chat’ is also multiple and diverse, ranging from the trivial and personal to high quality debate and expert discussion. The idea behind the openDemocracy web magazine is to combine the accelerated temporality of the Internet, especially instant participation, with the slower pace and more historically attuned rhythm of a high quality, writerly, magazine. There is an implicit tension here. In order

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to enter the realms of influential media, at least as currently understood, high standards of journalistic rigour – fact checking, caution, and ‘objectivity’ – are expected. But allowing space on the website to other users who can post unedited and anonymously (most entries to the forum use a web pseudonym) inevitably challenges the cornerstone of editorial integrity: control. A large proportion of openDemocracy’s economic resources are devoted to the production of carefully edited articles published in a fortnightly ‘edition’ onto the website, although the content is also updated daily. A team of 6 commissioning editors, working with 3 assistants and the help of (unpaid) external editors, commission, edit and publish articles on a wide range of subjects from topical political crises to the nature of American power, debate over relations between Islam and the west, or ‘big ideas’ like multiculturalism and globalisation. The website also publishes fiction, poetry, testimony and photo-essays. Commissioning entails a high level of persuasion – openDemocracy cannot afford to pay for all its contributions, and when it can this is way below market rates – and attention to editorial detail. But alongside these texts, and presented in parallel to them, are the member forums where anyone who signs up with their name and e-mail can ‘post’ their own contribution directly onto the site. It is in the juxtaposition of these two kinds of publishing, and the inter-relation they are given on the website (through hyper-linking, and the way member posts can be highlighted and presented in e-mail communication and on the ‘front page’), that we can see the novelty and the potential of openDemocracy, and the Internet in general, as a new platform for political debate.

Researching outside academia Judged by its vision statements, core values and website contents, openDemocracy has aspirations every bit as serious, and seeks to be as intellectually and factually rigorous, as academic research. But if openDemocracy does ‘research’ (the word is not used by the staff to describe their practice) it certainly takes place outside the walls – at least those of academic institutions. There are none of the institutional affiliations that support academic journals, openDemocracy is not in-house in any university or institute. Yet a large proportion of the commissioned authors are academics, perhaps as many as half (the actual figure is not recorded). OpenDemocracy has published pieces by many of the senior academics in the ‘best’ universities in the UK and America, as well as

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numerous articles by teachers, lecturers and researchers from across the world of academe, including from North and East Africa, the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, Hong Kong, South America and throughout Europe. Although openDemocracy is outside formal academia, then, and not (thankfully for those who work there) subject to governmental Research Assessment Exercises, its work is linked in multiple ways into academic research. Not only are many authors themselves academics, and usually writing on the subject they are currently researching, but the website also publishes work drawn directly from academic research projects: chapters of books, summaries of research projects, scholarly reviews of literature. Critically each submission is edited to make it accessible beyond the confines of any one academic discipline. OpenDemocracy has also used its Internet platform to enhance extant academic research or present it in new ways. Examples might help here. In 2002 openDemocracy was approached by a young PhD architecture student, Eyal Weizman. His thesis project was a unique three-dimensional mapping of the West Bank, using expertise he acquired as a pilot in the Israeli Defence Forces to take aerial photographs and map the occupation across different levels – from the underground water aquifers, to the air and radio waves. Using the capabilities of the Internet to present multi-media information, the project was published as a 10 part series – The Politics of Verticality – with maps, photos, plans and text juxtaposed and interlinked in a way that would have been impossible in print. Or again – a rather different example – in mid-2003 Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor in the media department of New York University, was completing work on a new book about peer to peer technology and the impact on systems of power (published in 2004 as The Anarchist in the Library). OpenDemocracy agreed to publish a series of essays from the book before publication, with editors then commissioning responses to each essay from experts in the fields the essays covered (law, science, file sharing, Internet governance). These were published side by side on the website. By the time the proofs were ready for the book, several arguments had been changed or clarified and critiques incorporated from the responses. Vaidhyanathan’s research had been strengthened by its exposure before hard-copy publication to a group of experts around the world to which he had had no previous access. In his acknowledgements he thanks openDemocracy.net for providing the ‘ideal forum to audition these issues globally, edit[ing] deftly and allow[ing] me to solicit instant feedback from a group of enlightened intellectuals globally’ (2004: 194).

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One appeal of the website, then, is as an alternative or accompaniment to the academic journal market and the ‘quality’ political journals. There is a consistent flow of complex but edited-to-be-accessible writing by academic researchers from the disciplines of political and social theory, politics, globalisation, media and culture. But alongside academic voices openDemocracy publishes journalists and policy researchers, professionals from a wide variety of disciplines (lawyers, doctors, NGO workers), artists (writers, photographers, musicians) and many who, though they have jobs, write in their personal capacity. These people write for openDemocracy for a variety of different reasons and on many subjects. Think tankers and NGO workers report on research projects and debate best practice and new initiatives; eye-witnesses from Georgia to Baghdad and Hong Kong report on the conduct of elections or revolutions, or on the tragedies they have witnessed; enthusiasts write on film or photography, writers submit fiction, concerned citizens offer polemics of all kinds. The editorial barriers are high (the majority of unsolicited texts are rejected) but many – an eye witness in Fallujah, a young Iraqi returning home, a student on Canadian multiculturalism – make it onto the website, after themselves being carefully edited and hyper-linked. Similarly forum posts – unsolicited publication to the site by a member – come from across the world, representing the 155 countries which the membership of over 40,000 spans. Members in America are numerically dominant, reflecting both the patterns of the Internet which boomed first in America and, perhaps, a national predilection for self-expression. But forum posts also come internationally, including from remote areas of Africa, South America and China far beyond the urban centres – another benefit of the Internet’s dispersed network power.

Building knowledge through debate The website’s organisation and sign-posting attempt to put into practice the principles of research – the idea that arguments need to be challenged, that context is relevant, that deeper debate and discussion will lead to greater knowledge. So although some articles are published which stand alone, as ‘features’, the bulk are placed in the format of a ‘debate’. These debates are, in turn, housed within themes, of which there are ten, including conflicts, democracy & power, arts & cultures and media & the net. The site navigation and organisation (known in web publishing as the

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‘information architecture’) strive both to reflect a belief in clarity and to emphasise inter-relation. If a reader wants to find discussion of, for example, American power and its relationship to the world, this debate, housing over sixty articles from around the world and across the political spectrum, can be found in the ‘conflicts’ theme. But in finding the ‘conflicts’ home page the inquirer will also be offered debates on the Iraq war and Israel/Palestine. The site’s structuring manifests the belief that these events and issues are inter-related, and offers the browser a chance to follow a variety of routes through the material. Such an organisation suggests an interest in context, surprise and the discussion of difficult questions that is by no means the norm on the Internet, or in our entertainment driven media culture in general. In his essay ‘The daily We’ (2001) Sunstein cautioned against the Internet’s tendency toward personalisation, its filtration potentials used to market specific pre-selected information to clients, creating the possibility of a ‘newspaper of me’. This would lead people, he argued, to avoid information they had decided in advance was not relevant to them, reinforcing their view of the world and leaving their assumptions and prejudices unchallenged. Such ‘polarisation’ could erode democracy, increasing extremism (with like-minded groups reinforcing each others’ narrow interest) and cutting off the flow of unexpected encounters with people and information which makes for a healthy ‘public sphere’. In its design and technical decisions openDemocracy appears aware of this danger. The material it offers, on a broad range of subjects, is posted side by side on the front page, and e-mail communication is with the full membership, not filtered by pre-selected interest. As yet no personalisation of the material, no filtration has been offered to members. Membership of openDemocracy presupposes a cast of mind that is open to surprise, diversity and the unexpected (if Sunstein is even half right, this is a small section of the Internet population). Debates on openDemocracy are designed to place any given article in the context of a larger debate unfolding over time, a contrast to the time-bound, disposable coverage of the daily newspapers. The character of debates can vary – sometimes they emerge from topical circumstance, for example the debate ‘After Madrid: War, prevention, dialogue?’ or ‘Iraq: understanding the handover’. But in addition to event-centred discussion there are the contested exchanges, debates around ideas and policy in the context of but not subservient to events. These focus on a particular area or set of ideas – global media ownership, war-journalism ethics, migration policy in Europe. Such debates include commissioned articles from as wide a range of global, and political perspectives as can

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be found – each successive piece responds to the previous ones, and the debates run for months. The structure of the debates places all articles in a list together so readers can see how arguments unfold over time and also how they change or evolve as they are put in juxtaposition with new arguments, fresh perspectives and new information. Potentially such debates can have significant advantages over both the atomised, context-less agenda-chasing coverage of most newspapers, and the infinitely slow unfolding of academic debates in the pages of journals. In openDemocracy debates, as James Curran argues (2002) in the only scholarly attempt to analyse openDemocracy so far, the articles are not ‘time bound’ in the way newspaper coverage has to be. The juxtaposition of articles with different perspectives which build up over time means the meaning of pieces can change depending on how they are read and against which responses. The format also allows the reader to experience arguments in different ways at different times (for example a 2003 debate about whether to go to war in Iraq and its likely consequences could, if read in 2004, offer the chance to assess the arguments’ accuracy and coherence in a new revealing way). The ‘always there’ nature of Internet content (articles remain on the openDemocracy website in perpetuity) ensures accountability – these arguments are always there to be checked, critiqued and countered. For Curran debates in this form can approach the very highest form of academic inquiry: ‘Debates can become rather like that most privileged of academic experiences – a “colloquium”, a rolling set of seminars in which different speakers carry forward the same debate while referring to previous papers and contributions’ (Curran 2003: 10).

Validation and accountability Research ‘inside’ the walls is wrapped in layers of validation. Methodologies, peer review, references in the text, footnotes, bibliographies and a rigid hierarchy which ingrains deference and encourages equivocation (arguments routed through others’ arguments rather than made directly) are all designed to ensure that academic research is accurate (and can also mean it is obtuse). How then does openDemocracy ensure that what it publishes is accurate, verifiable, true and readable? The most frequently used technique might be called informal peer review prior to the publication of articles. This includes both empirical review, the kind of verification necessary to ensure factual accuracy, and intellectual review aimed at assessing the consistency, value and originality of argument.

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As in newspaper journalism there is in the end no foolproof way of establishing the veracity of reports. Here the rigorous application of a rather vague sounding principle, that of plausibility, pervades. The combination of a deputy editor with a broad range of expertise and knowledge and the verification potential of the Internet (where facts, reports and assertions can be cross checked rapidly), and an editor with a highly developed ‘bullshit detector’ come into play together. Some of the old saws of journalism are proven in practice. A journalist not known to the organisation burst into the office to offer a scoop – she had proof, apparently, of nuclear weapons buried somewhere in the Middle East, trained on the west. As a rather green editor this sounded good to me, but the editor was cooler, suspicious of the argument. One of the ironic advantages of being an independent media organisation with tight budgets is that openDemocracy can always ask, why us? If someone has a scoop why would not they take it to a newspaper who could pay real money? A brief examination of the actual text revealed the confusion and implausibility typical of conspiracy theory, and it was rejected. A different example was the article received from an e-mail based listserv (a common form of news dispersal in both academia and news journalism) from Fallujah on the day American troops cut off the city in June 2004. In this case the author was known – openDemocracy had published several pieces from Iraq by her – and the broad facts were also corroborated, conventional media confirmed that US troops were engaged in gunbattle in Fallujah. But the writer also said that American snipers were firing indiscriminately from rooftops and killing hundreds of civilians – a potential scoop and a perspective unavailable in the international media. This could not be verified because no journalists were inside the city at the time. Editors pored over the text checking each word and assertion: Should the American be called ‘snipers’? (yes, the New York Times used the same phrase). Was the author being favourable to the ‘resistance’? (she calls them mujahaddin, not terrorists – but makes clear that as a peace worker she is caught between the two, hostile groups). In the end it was an editorial judgement to publish, based on the plausibility of the data and the freshness of the information.4 In such cases it is the combination of fact checking and editorial experience, and an approach that tempers caution with daring, which forms the background for editorial judgements. Any news and current affairs publication needs to display accuracy and reliability in order to achieve trust amongst its audience and the potential for influence on

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decision makers. In many cases editors call on their own networks of contacts, working pro bono, around the world to check facts, details and plausibility. A similar model of editorial judgement based on experience and plausibility operates in relation to the more theoretical or academic content of the website, reinforced through a loose but trusted network of colleagues and friends. Within this network, operating through e-mail and phone, are known, senior and reliable academics in most major disciplines. As and when a text is received which seems to require expert assessment for the quality of its empirical assertions or its arguments, editorial judgements are informed through a loose associate board, a network of its own, operating both within and outside the walls of formal academic research. But as important as the forms of verification openDemocracy calls on prior to publication are the verification or contradiction opportunities opened up by the Internet itself. OpenDemocracy is determined not to publish factual inaccuracies or arguments that are contradictory or otherwise spurious, but precisely because its policy is to publish different kinds of arguments, many of these will be by definition contestable. The Internet’s interactive element affords the opportunity for members to answer back to published material through the forums – to correct errors, to complexify with counter-examples, to offer a different perspective. A user posted from the Lebanon to contradict the argument made on the site by the leader of the Arab Muslim League; an Arab posted in response to two reviews of Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 with an argument more subtle and compelling than either commissioned reviewer; an expert on chemical weapons posted immediately he had read a report from weapons inspectors in Iraq to question their conclusions. Because of the unrestricted access to the forums and the potential dangers of libel, hate speech and factual inaccuracy, the issue of moderation requires careful consideration. Websites which offer forums have a variety of ways of ensuring that posts do not breach laws of libel, copyright or hate speech. Some use pre-moderation, with messages screened by a moderator who checks or edits them before posting to the public site. This is unwieldy, time consuming and expensive (moderators need training and pay) and runs counter to the instantaneity and lack of gate-keeping which is the most appealing aspect of net interactivity. OpenDemocracy’s practice, according to chief moderator Solana Larsen, is to operate ‘light touch’ post-moderation (messages go direct onto the public site, only moderated later). Though it has the technology and

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licence to delete or edit posts it prefers to engage errant posters – for example those trafficking in racial stereotype – in a discussion of why their posts are deemed problematic. The most exciting thing for Larsen has been the degree to which a self-generating culture of mutual respect, inquiry and willingness to change according to new information has developed on the site – a form of self-regulation and accountability without the need for heavy-handed policing. Very few posts have been removed, and when other members engage those who are ‘flaming’ (Internet jargon for unwarranted or aggressive argumentation) on behalf of a community dedicated to open discussion and creative thinking, there is strong evidence that the community is assimilating the idea of a new mutually respectful and inquiring form of engagement on the Internet, which is openDemocracy’s overall mission.

A public language? One of the issues when it comes to the aspiration to host a new kind of global conversation is, inevitably, about language. OpenDemocracy publishes in English, and there is of course an element of contradiction in attempting openness to the world in one language (and one associated with colonisation at that). English may be increasingly the language of international exchange, business and the Internet (although Spanish, and now Chinese threaten this dominance), but there are inevitably limits on reach, as well as questions of cultural power. OpenDemocracy plans in the future to offer material in translation, but currently economic limitations prevent this. A small but growing proportion of articles are translated out of their original languages by the multilingual staff which includes competence in Arabic, French, German, Urdu, Italian, Swedish and Danish. The website has also made the ‘politics of translation’ a central theme , as in the debate over translation in the ‘Arts & culture’ theme, the debate ‘Multiculturalism: Translating difference’ which focuses on cultural difference through politics, policy and experience, and the ‘Untranslatable words’ project featuring short articles on words which cannot be translated into English. In terms of tone, style and language one of the biggest challenges for openDemocracy lies in the relationship with the academy. Many of the authors work within academic institutions and their specialist vocabularies. Part of the engagement with ideas, policy and research is precisely about bringing these institutional experts into dialogue with those ‘outside’ – both those in other institutional frameworks, journalism,

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business, NGOs, governments and those without access to networks of power at all apart from their access to the Internet. This presents a challenge, both because the technical and conceptual jargon of each given discipline – and their accompanying assumptions – are opaque and require explaining and unpacking, and because the quality of writing is unevenly distributed across the academic population. One of openDemocracy’s most obvious benefits, and something to which considerable resources are committed, is the way editors take complex heavily footnoted and referenced academic papers and open them out to make them communicate beyond the narrow confines of their home discipline. Feedback from academics published by openDemocracy (some famous for their obscure and circumlocutory styles) suggests many are grateful to editors for rending their arguments clearly and accessibly – for, in effect, offering their ideas for debate to a new untapped audience.

Conclusion Having weathered the dot-com boom and bust, the Internet, still in its infancy, has an open future. Governments and major corporations attempt to control content or generate revenue. But the Internet can also provide the platform not only for political intervention, organisation and protest (as well as for organising terrorism and other counter-democratic practices) but also, as with openDemocracy, for building open knowledge through debate. As Vaidhyanthan argues in The Anarchist in the Library (2004), it can exploit the distributed, unregulated, instant communication potential of electronic media (e-mail, web forums, text messaging, peer-to-peer file sharing, mobile phones, blogs), to present and support new forms of political engagement and world-wide participation. Personalisation and the coagulation of narrow communities of interest may continue. But meanwhile openDemocracy, among a host of other independent websites like Salon, TomPaine.com and of blogs (a powerful emerging force affecting journalism and online discussion), exemplifies the possibility of establishing a form of open, democratic political culture on the Internet. This might, in the future, be considered the foundation of a truly global public sphere in the knowledge society. Can it work? OpenDemocracy is doing its best to deliver on the promise which James Curran saw back in 2002: ‘A void is opening up in which democratic and media systems have not yet adjusted adequately to a shift of political and economic power. OpenDemocracy represents an attempt to fill this vacuum . . . seeking to build a new democratic order [by] hosting a global conversation’ (Curran 2002: 11). Success or failure will rest on

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how successfully openDemocracy combines high quality commissioned material with the huge possibilities, and attendant dangers, of instant participation.

Notes 1. This chapter is based on my three years’ experience with openDemocracy as part-time media editor, then full-time executive editor, and on informal interviews with colleagues, including the founder editor Anthony Barnett. The views it expresses are my own. 2. With around 25 full-time staff the operation is expensive to run and not yet economically self-sustaining. Funders have included foundations in the UK and US, big and small, including Esmée Fairbairn, The Ford Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies. In 2003 the Ford Foundation granted a long-term low interest loan to grow the commercial aspects of the business – individual and group subscriptions – with the aim of its becoming self-funding. 3. As for many in the early days of the Internet ‘global’ was a buzzword of early openDemocracy. More recently the term has come out the other side of the spin cycle of fashion looking soggy and meaningless. At openDemocracy, as elsewhere, the search is on for alternatives (‘planetary’? ‘world scale’? that old favourite ‘international’?). 4. The decision appeared justified when over 15,000 read the piece online within a few days (another advantage of Internet-based media is the rapidity of impact and feedback), every major media outlet – BBC, CNN, NBC – sought an interview with the author, and the New York Times published her story.

References Barnett, Anthony (2004) Personal Communication to author. Berman, Jerry (2000) ‘Introduction to democratic values for the digital age, summary of CDT activities 1999 – work plan 2000’, http://www.cdt.org/ mission/activities2000.shtml Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, M. (2001) The Internet Galaxy Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curran, James (2003) ‘Global journalism: A case study of the Internet’, in Curran, J. and Couldry, N. eds Contesting Media Power, Lanham, Maryland: Roman and Little field. Derakhshan, Hossein (2004) ‘Censor this: Iran’s web of lies’, http://www. openDemocracy.net/debates/article-8-85-1683.jsp Fang, Weigui (2003) ‘Reflections on China’s Internet boom’, http://www. openDemocracy.net/debates/article-8-85-1334.jsp Sunstein, Cass (2001) ‘The daily We’, available online at http://www. bostonreview.net/BR26.3/sunstein.html Vaidhyanathan, Siva (2004) The Anarchist in the Library, New York: Basic Books. Vaidhyanathan, Siva (2003) ‘P2P: The new information ecosystem’, http:// www.openDemocracy.net/debates/article-8-101-1319.jsp

14 Blogging: Personal Participation in Public Knowledge-Building on the Web Mark Brady

From a humble beginning as ‘What’s New’ pages, blogs have arisen to become arguably the most popular online personal publishing platform on the Internet. Over the last few years blogs have come to the fore appearing not only in the news media but also in search engine results pages. Blogs (also known as web logs, or weblogs) are websites that contain frequently updated ‘posts’ with the most recent entry at the top of the page and the previous ones displayed reverse-chronologically. The type of information contained within a blog varies greatly from individual to individual. Authors of blogs (known as bloggers) can describe dayto-day observations in their lives, or more specific topics of interest to them, such as web design or cycling. Some frequently visited blogs are topic related (e.g. http://www.instapundit.com, one of the most visited blogs). Some mix this in with personal events in the author’s life (e.g. www.kottke.org, another popular blog), such as going on holiday or meeting new people. Since blogs are websites, they are controlled and navigated using hyperlinks, and posts typically incorporate hyperlinks to other blogs or news sources, together with related comments and discussions. When blogs start linking to each other and commenting on what has been said, huge, distributed discussions can erupt that include many different bloggers, and concern many different topics.

Snapshot of blog format Blogs appear in many shapes and sizes. The design is at the author’s discretion, much like a typical webpage. Nevertheless, the majority of blogs converge on a simple layout of a title banner at the top of the page, 212

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a ‘side bar’ at the left or right of the page with the ‘posting area’ featuring the main content taking up the remainder of the page (Figure 14.1). Possibly the most varied and idiosyncratic area of the three, the side bar, is an eclectic mix of links and information related to the blog and its author. Typical features of the side bar include a ‘blogroll’ or list of links to other blogs, an archive of past posts in date order (which can go back a number of years) and information about the author, not dissimilar to an ‘About’ page on a personal web site. However, the side bar often displays many other types of information besides the few examples given here, a symptom of the diversity present in the blog community (collectively known as the ‘blogosphere’). Blogs are created using the same language as web pages and therefore they inherit the properties of a web page. As a result of this, blogs are cross-modal in that they can display not only text, but also images (most commonly in the form of digital photographs), audio and video. It is also possible for a blog to have more than one author, sometimes known as collaborative blogs. A single blog, therefore, can incorporate the writings of many people, usually with each post having a signature at the end designating the author. These types of blog are popular among families and organisations, although they also have many other uses. The ease with which blogs can be set up means that they are ideal

Title banner

Posting area

Figure 14.1

Typical layout of a blog

Side bar

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Sunday, August 1

1

Do video games lead to murder, as some newspapers claim, or are newspapers themselves to blame? 2 by Suw Charman on August 1, 2004 12:40PM (BST) Vince writes about the assertion by the Daily Mail that the game Manhunt lead a 17 year old boy to murder his schoolmate. He disagrees, and posits instead that if any external influence was involved, it would be more likely to be that of the Daily Mail itself. Start with this post and then read the following two. Leave comment | Permanent Link | Cosmos

Saturday, July 31

"This movie is to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery." by Suw Charman on July 31, 2004 11:00PM (BST) Quite possibly the best review of The Day After Tomorrow that I have read so far. Via Kottke.

4

Comments (1) | Permanent Link |Cosmos 3

One-handed splinter extraction advice required by Suw Charman on July 31, 2004 04:56PM (BST)

One of the drawbacks of living on one's own is lack of extra hands. I have just managed to skewer myself with three large chunks of 2×4, and one small one. (Before you ask, I was ferreting about in the loft, looking for my years old INXS tapes (and before you ask about *that*, it was just a sudden urge, ok?) when I overbalanced and unwisely grabbed at a rafter.))

Figure 14.2 Screenshot from the Chocolate N’ Vodka blog showing 3 posts (provided by kind permission of Suw Charman). [1] shows date that the post was written. [2] Title of post, author’s name and exact date and time when post was created. [3] comments and permalink (described here in full as ‘Permanent Link’, see below). [4] Reference and link to a post on another blog. Words underlined are hyperlinks. From chocnvodka.blogware.com, a blog by Suw Charman which has been running since 2003.

for ephemeral events such as conferences allowing many different people to publish information rather than a single individual being responsible for all the information. To illustrate the format further, Figure 14.2 shows a screenshot from a blog called Chocolate N’ Vodka. Note the ordering of the posts according to time, also links within the posts to other websites and blogs.

Brief history of the blog It is difficult to judge the exact moment when blogs came into existence since there is some debate about when a personal homepage becomes a blog. Blogging does not seem to have been invented by any one person or organisation (certainly not part of university research or designed initially as a research tool); rather it has emerged due to a series of events brought about by many people. In 1993 Mosaic, the nascent web

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browser company, published a page on its website called ‘What’s New’ (Blood 2003). This listed and linked to new sites on the web that users of the browser could visit. With the World Wide Web blossoming, more people soon took the cue to produce links to new and interesting sites found while surfing the web, and publish them on their own personal homepages. As this style of web page became more popular, it became apparent that a name was needed to differentiate them from other web pages. Jorn Barger, a writer, was the first person to use the term ‘web log’ in 1997. During the early summer of 1999, Peter Merholz, a user interface consultant and web designer, used the term ‘wee blog’ on his weblog, which soon became truncated to just ‘blog’. These first sites were edited by hand in HTML (hypertext mark-up language) and then uploaded to a web server manually. They were thus perhaps technically closer to our concept of a personal homepage, although the typical ‘link and comment’ pattern seen in blogs today was present. As there are virtually no distinguishing features of a blog to determine it from a normal webpage, other than layout, it is almost impossible to know the number of blogs in these early stages. Even now it is difficult to know the number of active blogs in existence. However, one can assume that between 1993 and 1999 the numbers were very small, most being authored by those with an interest in various aspects of information technology. It was not until 1999 that a number of companies emerged to produce software that allowed blogs to be created and updated very easily. This allowed people with previously little or no knowledge about HTML and the Internet to begin producing their own blogs. The move towards making the medium more accessible spurred a growth in the number of bloggers, and therefore the diversity of blogs. The features of blogging that make it stand out as a unique medium also allow it to be seen as a step in the mass ‘amateurisation’ of publishing (Coates 2003a). Before the age of the Internet it was theoretically possible for everyone to publish material that was accessible to anyone who could read and afford a newspaper. However, the decision to publish was at the discretion of an editor and it largely depended on literacy skills, social class and luck whether your contribution was selected from the thousands of others sent to the newspaper or magazine. With the advent of the Internet, publishing ‘one-to-many’ became infinitely easier. Anyone with a computer and Internet connection could publish their own material allowing anyone else with the necessary equipment to read it. In the early days of the Internet, this was limited to those with the money to spend on the equipment and the knowledge

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to set it up. As electronics prices dropped, the number of people able to publish increased, yet there was still no easy way to quickly create webpages and frequently update them without dealing with files and downloading programs onto the computer. Finally, blogs appeared. A company called Pitas launched a new web service which provided the ability to simply visit a website, sign up and publish a blog within minutes. Updating a blog became as easy as clicking a button. The increasing pervasiveness of the Internet in the home, workplace and in public areas provided practically anyone with the ability to publish.

Blogging as public space for distributed knowledge-building Since the first appearance of what we now recognise as the blog, there has been a move towards it becoming a far more contributive medium. In particular, three additions to the blog have had far-reaching effects in the way that the blog community operates; permalinks (permanent links), comments and trackback. Indeed, the fact that the blog community or ‘blogosphere’ is a community is owed largely to these innovations (none are 100 per cent ubiquitous throughout the blogosphere, however, suggesting it is still evolving). Permalinks point to individual blog posts, comments enable readers to feedback about an individual post, and trackback is a citation notification system – simple changes in terms of program development but with far broader social, collaborative effects. Permalinks, usually found at the end of a blog posting, provide a permanent link to that post. Following the permalink from another web page will link back to the blog, providing the post with its own page, together with its associated comments and trackbacks. The ability to point to specific posts, rather than to a blog as a whole, provides a landscape for conversations whereby specific references can be made to comments by a blogger. Furthermore, permalinks provide an increased incentive to link between blogs and posts, building up a huge networked conversation. Permalinks have the added benefit of furnishing a blog with a memory (Coates 2003b). Clearly there is a limit to the amount of information that can be displayed on the front page before it becomes unmanageable and too hefty to download. Instead of posts ‘dropping off’ the bottom of the page and ceasing to exist, permalinks allow posts to be archived and referenced even when they are not displayed on the front page, providing the content with longevity. By allowing other bloggers to point to individual posts, the permalink effectively breaks

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down the blog home page into a finer grain of many posts. This allows the post to be treated as a unit in its own right – a kind of archive – and therefore allows the implementation of comments and trackback. Typically located at the end of a post, comments allow other users to directly leave feedback about the attached post. The comments are viewable by everyone reading the blog thus opening a direct route of contact with the author as well as the blog’s audience and helping to increase the immediacy of the conversational element of blogs. Since they are readable by anyone reading the blog and anyone can leave feedback, they are also a way of allowing readers (who do not need to author their own blog) to communicate with each other with the blog post as the topic of discussion, potentially creating ties between readers. Comments also help to increase a feeling of others’ presence so it can be seen which blogs are more popular as well as which posts generate more discussion. Trackback is a more recent addition, again usually found at the bottom of a blog post. Trackback is like a citation alert mechanism, allowing blogger A to inform blogger B that blogger B is being referenced by blogger A. For example, Dan reads a post on Lara’s blog and decides to write his own post about it on his blog. So he publishes his thoughts and since they both use the trackback system, Lara is informed that Dan has just written about her. Unlike linking with a permalink, whereby the person being linked to is unaware, trackback is a visible two-way bridge between two blogs. This permanent bridge-building encourages links between blogs and increases the social networking that helps to enlarge and maintain communities. The above three components of blogs together contribute greatly to the mechanism with which the blogosphere is maintained and becomes a networked mass of linked people and information. So far I have described the way that these components promote communication and feedback between individual blogs. Now let us stand back a level and look at the overall effect that this has upon the information that passes along the links and nodes of the networked blogosphere. Because blogs are public and allow for dynamic interaction, active collaboration and sharing are made possible. This allows ideas and knowledge to become transparent and easily transferable across disciplines, and to many diverse sets of people. Certain ideas are not picked up or noticed, while others become popular and spread rapidly throughout the blogosphere. Linking from one blog to another using a permalink or trackback supports the easy and often rapid creation of associations between ideas.

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Further, again because blogs are public, web services as well as individuals can tap into their power to develop interesting uses. One such service is ‘All Consuming’ (allconsuming.net). This searches recently updated blogs every hour for links to books on well-known websites such as Amazon. ‘All Consuming’ makes an assumption that when a blogger links to a book on one of these sites, it will be accompanied by some meaningful text about that book. These blog entries are then associated with the book on the service’s website. The site thus becomes a place where people can research purchasing a book by reading people’s blog entries to see what they say about it – an online community-built book reviewing system that works by pooling particular types of information from blogs. A sudden rise in the number of blogs as well as interest in them occurred shortly after September 11, 2001 when the World Trade Centre in New York became a victim of terrorism. Blogs furnished ordinary people with the ability to publicly display their shock and disgust at the tragedy. The ability to cross-link between blogs paved the way for discussion, as a method of trying to understand and deal with what had happened. Blog communities provided an emotional support mechanism. Although at first the social side of blogging was not apparent, the introduction of permalinks, comments and trackback has contributed greatly to its popularity. It could be argued that it is the connective and contributive attributes of blogging that has caused it to spread so virally throughout the web, and in turn define blogging as the inherent differentiator from personal homepages (Marlow 2004). A recent study reports that 27 per cent of American Internet users read blogs in 2004, a 58 per cent increase on the previous year (Pew Internet 2005). Anderson comments in this book that research can be seen as something occurring among the public, outside of university walls. As described above, one of the first uses for blogs was to point readers to places of interest on the web. That use has not changed to the present day, and blogs are used as filters whereby collections of information about a single topic can be shown, omitting often irrelevant information. For example, one blog entry explains some of the scientific background to a science fiction film, linking to relevant articles and discussions on the web for further reading and clarification. Another blog with a focus on the Middle East brought together several articles from US, UK, Japanese and New Zealand news sources. When people use the Internet to research particular topics, such repositories are useful stopping

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places, providing for the accessible accumulation and synthesis of knowledge that are important dimensions of research. Blogging is about sharing. The act of blogging makes information public through publishing online. The public information is then available for viewing by anyone with Internet access. Many bloggers are experts within a particular field; they research a subject and use their blogs to publish and distribute their acquired knowledge about the subject area. This information is then free to view, allowing others to learn and add to their own knowledge. It is common for such bloggers to provide links to articles and papers supporting their claims, enabling readers to verify the sources. When many blogs arise around a particular subject area, it is often the case that they will link to one another and begin discussions. When these discussions form around the task of reaching a particular goal, formed communities can work towards its achievement through group research and collaboration. Although blogs were never designed for this purpose (it could be argued that blogs were never ‘designed’ at all), the functionality of a blog lends itself very well to such spontaneous creation of community (shared documents carrying information, it has been suggested (Brown and Duguid 2002), can foster community, providing social glue). The citation notification mechanism of trackback makes it possible to track conversations and trace arguments across many blogs, forming links and therefore networks of blogs and bloggers. This, in turn, provides a platform for collaboration, and resources for research and accumulation of knowledge. A recent report claims that 12 per cent of American Internet users have made use of these ‘interactive’ features on blogs (Pew Internet 2005). A trend is emerging of many new blogs, and in turn blog communities, appearing around global events. As noted earlier, this first became noticeable around the 9/11 tragedy when many people found blogs a useful means of sharing their thoughts. The subsequent war in Iraq sparked a new wave of blogs, as did the 2004 US presidential election. The contentious issue of whether the war was justified or not, as well as the many arising issues surrounding the war and the election, provided fodder for many inter-blog discussions around which communities arose. The interesting phenomenon here is that these communities appeared in a self-organising way, without direction from a central controlling figure. A famous example of how blogs can quickly form communities and achieve goals is the role of blogs in the controversy surrounding George W. Bush’s military service. An American TV news network produced

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memos suggesting that Bush received preferential treatment in his national service. Only a few hours after the report was broadcast thousands of bloggers were discussing claims that the documents were forgeries, despite the White House at first seeming to bow to the original news story. Some of these bloggers were ex-military personnel from the time of the president’s experience in the armed forces. They provided information about the format of military documents in 1972, suggesting that the Bush memos did not conform to this. Others were typographic experts who provided strong evidence suggesting the documents were produced using a modern word processing program and not a typewriter in 1972, as claimed by the news story. Following much public and media interest, bloggers started discussing, and drawing attention to a Dallas newspaper report about the secretary of the man responsible for releasing the memos who suggested that they were forged. The result was that the TV news network admitted they could not prove authenticity, and the news reporter was forced to formally apologise for reporting on an unsubstantiated story. This shows how blogs can mobilise and respond incredibly rapidly en masse around a topic to contribute and form new knowledge towards a common goal collaboratively. In this example experts combined their knowledge to arrive at a goal (providing evidence suggesting the memos were fakes and discrediting the news story). Finding blogs relevant to a popular topic of interest is not a difficult task. This is because they tend to rank highly in search engine results pages. Websites that have many incoming links and are updated frequently have a propensity to be favoured by search engines (owing to the algorithms used by search engines), causing blogs to frequently appear in the top search results. Due to this phenomenon people interested in the war in Iraq were able to easily find blogs with that theme. Another aspect that facilitates the creation of communities is the way that blogs can act as collections of links surrounding a particular theme. One ‘war blogger’ may publish a post about an aspect of the Iraq War, including several links to other blogs from around the blogosphere in her post. Her post can then be linked to by many other bloggers interested in her topic. The links that she has included in her post may then be re-used by many others in their posts. Each wave of this cycle can bring together huge numbers of blogs into discussions. Salam Pax (otherwise known as the ‘Baghdad Blogger’) was the subject of this type of propagation of links and information. He was a civilian who was living in Baghdad throughout the invasion of Iraq and had his blog recognised and linked to by many other blogs interested in the first-hand

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accounts he was able to provide. Eventually the links became so prevalent throughout the blogosphere that journalists discovered the blog and the author became a media celebrity. Another instance was an influential blogger reporting on an IT consultancy company who fraudulently obtained his telephone number to sell him their wares. So many bloggers linked to his story that it affected search engine rankings, so that the blog posting appeared in search results above the company’s own website (Haughey 2002, Slate Magazine 2002). Topical blogging, such as war-blogging, illustrates how blogs can be used for knowledge creation and knowledge sharing. A blog can bring together many points of view from many different blogs and many different articles from around the web, into a single post by linking to them (for an example see Figure 14.3). Comments and trackbacks allow readers of the post to contribute their own relevant links that help to support or reason against the argument. That post can then be used and combined with other posts in other blogs, and in doing so, further the argument. This pattern is not limited to political discussions or current affairs, however. There are blogs for discussions in philosophy, for example, and a language blog where linguists collaborate to discuss and track the frequency of non-standard language usages (The Economist 2005: 89). The pattern of the distributed creation and sharing of knowledge in public space can be applied equally to discussions of scientific, religious or social nature, or any other interests.

Politically Correct Interventionism The first black female Secretary of State testified yesterday at her confirmation hearing that we now have an adjunct to the infamous ‘Axis of Evil’ – the Outposts of Tyranny: ‘To be sure, in our world there remain outposts of tyranny and America stands with oppressed people on every continent . . . in Cuba, and Burma (Myanmar), and North Korea, and Iran, and Belarus, and Zimbabwe.’ You’ll note that this new grouping of targets is geographically and ethnically diverse: a multicultural rainbow coalition of bad guys. Cuba – Hispanic. Burma – Asian. Belarus – European. Zimbabwe – African. Iran and North Korea are thrown in as reminders. But this is an encouraging development: she left out Russia. Although I’m sure that was just an oversight, to be corrected shortly. Figure 14.3 Blog posting bringing together many different articles into a single posting (the words in bold are links to other articles) (From antiwar.com/blog)

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Controlling and motivating knowledge synthesis: A collaborative process One of the criticisms of blogs is that they provide personal opinions of their authors; typically one individual. Certainly, one use of blogs is to vent opinions. For the everyday ‘researcher’ looking, for example, for advice on which product to buy, these kinds of personal views can be useful. For more traditional forms of research, however, unmediated personal opinion is to be avoided. The criticism lies in the fact that there seems no way of knowing whether any one blog entry has been properly fact-checked and that its arguments are lucid and relevant. There are, however, a large number of blogs that do foster knowledge, which helps to illustrate how people are not necessarily reluctant to share knowledge. For research in the blogosphere to meet the standards of the research within the academic community (i.e. within university walls), there needs to be a peer-review system in place. Permalinks, comments and trackback provide a mechanism for this. Blog posts can be read, linked to and commented on by other bloggers with similar interests. The public display of the information allows others to view it and comment on it. Facts are checked, arguments are analysed and sometimes countered by the readers, some of whom may be experts, as in the Bush memo forgery example. The same phenomenon also occurs for less sensationalist issues, and it is common for entire discussions to surround a single blog post. As one blogger says: it doesn’t matter that I’m not an A-list blogger, [readers of the blog are] still going to call you up on it if you get it wrong, and if they know about it then you’re not going to get away with it. (Suw Charman) As suggested in the quote, it is not necessary to have a large audience in order to gain feedback about one’s blog entry (an ‘A-list’ blogger is one that is considered to be hugely popular, with many incoming links and tens, even hundreds, of thousands of hits per day). The key audience comes from other interested bloggers and regular readers of particular blogs. So what are the motivations that drive people to invest personal time into sharing their knowledge and taking the risk of exposing it to public assessment? Bloggers’ motivations vary greatly from person to person, as one would expect. A blog can be seen as being a personal as well as a public medium and it has been argued that the success of blogging

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is partly due to this (Roell 2004). The benefits of blogging, therefore, can be seen as satisfying both personal and public motivations. At a personal level, a blog is an efficient way to store and organise information. Blogs are sometimes described as ‘notepads’ as well as online diaries. For some bloggers, their blog is a way of keeping notes and useful URLs (web addresses) in an organised way. Blogs can sometimes be used as ‘mental scratchpads’, with blog posts showing where corrections have been made by digitally ‘crossing out’ unwanted text but still allowing it to be seen. This is a common practice amongst bloggers that also enables readers to see how the author’s ideas have changed. Many bloggers categorise each post as they publish it, allowing all posts of a particular category to be viewed at once. Recent software announcements have marked the beginning of a desktop search software war, with statements declaring that currently it is ‘easier to search 6 billion documents on the Internet than it [is] to find a single file on your hard drive’ (Washington Post 2004). Since blogs are archived by search engines, bloggers can take advantage of their intelligent search algorithms, making it easier to find past blog entries, and creating an attractive way to store and retrieve information. Bloggers can also link to posts from other blogs, connecting their own ideas with those of others. In fact, this very connection of knowledge can enable creation of new knowledge (Roell 2004): you’re trying to synthesise an original viewpoint from the different angles that you’ve read . . . (Suw Charman) Blogging can simply be about people researching and writing about a subject that interests them. Although bloggers do research in order to write a post, that research is not considered a chore, but rather a pleasure. it’s really just like anyone else would sit down in front of the television evening news, it’s just me out of interest looking at stuff . . . (‘Matthew’, blogging since 2000) The reward for doing this is the cognition that it encourages, allowing new thoughts to develop. the more I write, the more I think about stuff . . . (Suw Charman) sometimes having started [to write] a weblog post, I think in order to finish it, I need to look at least at stuff that I might not have otherwise looked at. (‘Matthew’)

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The second set of motivations lies in the public nature of blogging. The connectivity of the blogosphere nurtures incentives to keep blogging, such as popularity. The blogosphere can be seen as a playground, populated by millions of blogs. Many bloggers strive to travel further towards the top of the lists of the most-read blogs, towards the top of the ‘power curve’ (Barabasi 2002, Shirky 2003). I felt that people were expecting content and that in order to me to crawl up the power curve, I had to keep producing content . . . (Suw Charman) Popularity in this sense can be seen as having a large readership, monitored by site meters which count the number of times a page is sent from a web server to another computer. It is common to see links on a blog to web pages displaying this information, allowing anyone who visits the blog to view it. Another, perhaps more revealing, metric for judging popularity is the number of incoming links a blog receives. The assumption is that if someone is linking to a blog, then it is an endorsement. Clearly this may not always be the case, for instance if someone links to a blog in the context of describing how bad it is. Furthermore, services tracking incoming links only track a proportion of sites on the web due to the sheer size of the web and limits of tracking technology. Therefore, although ‘disapproving’ links are rare, using incoming links as a measure of popularity is not entirely accurate. Links seem to be more common when pointing to something of interest, or to support or disprove an argument. Many services have arisen around this metric, ranking sites based on their incoming links. As with the site meters mentioned earlier, bloggers sometimes put links on their sites to these services so others can see how they are faring in the blogosphere rankings. From the point of view of the blogger, the more links that point to their blog, the more channels there are directing people to visit, thus increasing the potential for readership. Nevertheless there is a deeper motivation in clamouring for audience and links. Larger numbers of visitors bring with them a higher chance of comments and feedback, providing social interaction and the potential for transfer of knowledge. More prominence leads to increased social capital and access to knowledge. if you get something wrong, or people disagree with you, they will tell you . . . they will blog about it and go, you know, [you’ve] got this

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completely wrong, and then that’s useful in itself because it’s a point of view I haven’t thought of . . . (Suw Charman) This public collaborative aspect of blogging has something in common with certain other web developments. A similar, new technology to the blog that is closer to the centre of the debate on the authority of un-mediated media is the wiki, and in particular Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). A wiki is a web-based system that allows people to create large numbers of linked web pages very quickly and easily. Wikipedia is essentially an online encyclopaedia that is created and edited by anyone and everyone. The way that it works and provides useful information is that there are so many people who find it useful that they add data to it and correct information when it is found to be incorrect. The system works under the same approach as the open source programming movement that has become so documented recently. This made its major impact with Linux, an operating system to rival Microsoft’s Windows Operating System. The difference between the two systems is that Linux was produced by a mass of completely undirected, unpaid and independent programmers, whereas Windows was produced by a central software house, collectively pumping millions of dollars into the project. The developers who produced Linux did it entirely in their spare time and at no cost. Linux is in wide use across the globe. Research in the realm of the blog as well as the wiki is akin to this open source programming movement. Less serious uses of blogs have also been made such as collaborative treasure hunts, but nevertheless show ways in which they can be put to use in real world situations (Lester 2003). Users with a personal interest in a technology can collectively and collaboratively, in a distributed and largely undirected environment, provide useful public resources.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated how blogs can enable people to engage in the knowledge society. Blogs are not limited to use by professional researchers, but can also be used by ordinary people conducting more everyday research. This is aided by an important feature of blogs: their accessible and public nature. Bloggers’ willingness to share and connect information works towards creating a mass of experts and novices where all benefit.

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Larger organisations, such as All Consuming, also help to make connections, pooling information found in blogs to make useful resources for research. Although blogs are a distributed medium, services that take advantage of the diversity of the blogosphere can forage for information and collate it into meaningful repositories. These links that services as well as individual people form between blogs help to create a network that allows information to spread rapidly and virally. The diversity in the blogosphere also plays a key role in allowing ideas to spread into new domains. The links act as channels through which communication and collaboration can occur, allowing groups of bloggers to work towards a common goal. Blogs can act as a door into the knowledge society. They enable people to accumulate knowledge as well as share and manage it. But blogs are merely tools; they are not a golden ticket into the knowledge society. Knowledge is synthesised by communication between people sharing objectives. Blogs facilitate this by making people easier to find, and providing immediate and direct communication channels once contacts have been established. Many people keep blogs and therefore there is a great variety in the kind and quality of knowledge available. Commenting and linking between posts enables visible and public feedback that can expose flaws in an argument and point to better, more accurate sources. Blogs have evolved components that better facilitate communication between readers and authors. This increased ability to communicate helps to foster collaboration between bloggers, as well as forming diverse types of community that can engage in activities such as research and problem solving. This chapter has used some current affairs examples of how bloggers achieve this by bringing resources together and sharing knowledge to jointly further their common understanding of a topic. But similar patterns of communities voluntarily working towards a common goal can be seen in other blogging topics too, as well as in the open source movement, suggesting that new tools may be encouraging a cultural shift. Another important aspect of this chapter has been an exploration of the motivations that keep bloggers blogging. Bloggers do not merely publish information, but also use the blogosphere as a source for increasing their own knowledge and supporting or disproving their claims. We have seen that blogs can be used as notepads for exploring one’s own thoughts and ideas, and also as notice boards for allowing others to contribute and to develop ideas. Blogging is a significant part of a new culture of voluntary, contributive and collaborative participation that, despite being distributed in structure, can be highly focused in organisation.

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A large number of blogs, perhaps the majority, are not about research or collaboration. There is, however, an important subset (still a substantial number) that do participate in research and/or collaboration. These communities provide insights into how research can be conducted in public space without the support structures present in universities.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the many individuals who agreed to be interviewed about their experience of blogging as part of my unpublished PhD research and in particular those granting kind permission to be quoted here (anonymity has been preserved where requested, thus names given in quotes here are fictitious). I would also like to thank the ESRC and BT for providing the funding for this research.

References Barabási, A. (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks, Cambridge MA: Perseus Publishing. Blood, R. (2003) A Weblog Handbook, Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing. Brown, J. S. and Duguid, P. (2002) The Social Life of Information, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Coates, T. (2003a) ‘(Weblogs and) the mass amateurisation of (nearly) everything’, Personal blog: Plasticbag.org, 3 September 2003, available at http:// www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/09/weblogs_and_the_mass_amateurisation_ of_nearly_ everything.shtml Coates, T. (2003b) ‘On permalinks and paradigms’, Personal blog: Plasticbag.org, 11 June 2003, available at http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/06/ on_permalinks_and_paradigms.shtml The Economist (2005) ‘Corpus colossal: How well does the world wide web represent human languages?’, 22 January: 89. Haughey, M. (2002) ‘Note to domain owners: Critical’, Personal blog: A whole lotta nothing, 8 February 2002, available at http://a.wholelottanothing.org/ 2002/02/note_to_domain.html Lester, J. (2003) ‘Integrating and evolving a mob: The growth of a smart mob into a wireless community of practice’, paper presented at International HCI 2003 Conference, 22–27 June, Crete, Greece. Marlow, C. (2004) ‘Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community’, presented at the International Communication Association Conference, May, New Orleans, LA, available at http://web.media.mit.edu/~cameron/cv/pubs/04-01.pdf Pew Internet & American Life Project (2005) ‘The state of blogging’, Data Memo, January, available at http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_blogging_data.pdf Roell, M. (2004) ‘Distributed KM – improving knowledge workers’ productivity and organisational knowledge sharing with weblog-based personal publishing’,

228 Openings and Challenges through the Web? paper presented to BlogTalk 2.0, ‘The European Conference on Weblogs’, 5–6 July, Vienna, Austria. Shirky, C. (2003) ‘Power laws, weblogs and inequality 2003’, available at http:// www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html Slate Magazine (2002) ‘Google time bomb: Will weblogs ruin Google’s search engine?’, available at http://slate.msn.com/?id=2063699 Washington Post (2004) ‘Google’s search for dominance’, October 15, available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A350062004Oct15.html

15 Using the Internet as a Research Tool: Between Information and Communication William Davies

In order to understand a tool’s function, we have to know not only what it can do, but also what it cannot do. It is part of the function of a frying pan, for instance, that it can not be used to make a cup of tea, or at least, not without a great deal of difficulty. But we nevertheless consider it a useful and worthwhile addition to a kitchen, despite this slight inflexibility of purpose. In fact, we might go further still: perhaps we enjoy using a frying pan to cook our breakfast because of its inflexibility of purpose. Futuristic gadgets which promise to replace the traditional tools of the kitchen threaten many of the rituals of cooking that make it an enjoyable pastime in the first place. A frying pan that could make a cup of tea would not necessarily be a very desirable item, simply because it combined two functions in one. On the other hand, old tools are likely to acquire new functions through adaptation. A tool may be designed with one function, but be used for others altogether. A table knife is designed for cutting food, but can also be used for transferring it to the mouth. In this sort of situation, where technological limits are stretched, social limits are erected in order to defend the tool’s function – ‘don’t lick your knife!’ being a parent’s way of quashing the ingenuity of a child. The uses and abuses of a technology are fraught with this sort of politics. Maintaining one social order often consists in delimiting the legitimate uses of a tool; subverting a social order is equally possible through expanding those uses. Witness how teenagers will often prefer to sit on the back-rest of a park bench with their feet on the seat, rather than use it in the manner for which it was designed. This acts as a very subtle form of appropriation and rebellion. 229

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In this chapter, we examine the uses of the Internet in the context of research that goes on outside of the university walls. The argument presented is that the Internet is a tool without a research function as such, for the fundamental reason that there is barely any area of research in which it is entirely useless. It is characterised by a deep flexibility of use, and for this reason, it places tremendous strain on the conventions and etiquette that specify what legitimate and illegitimate research practices look like. Where table manners are anchored in the clear-cut distinction between what a knife is ‘for’ and what a fork is ‘for’, the Internet brings no pre-set purpose with it. It is able to store and circulate information in such a variety of ways, that it has the potential to integrate separate research activities, and to muddy divisions between them. If the act of research were simply that of finding or accessing, the Internet would have expanded our capabilities to the point where research would take no time at all. But whether it be collecting or publishing information, research must also involve delineating and endorsing. In a digital world, this is referred to as the creation of ‘metadata’, the file names, folder names, domain names or (in the case of email) the name of the sender and the date when sent. If I send a fellow researcher an article via email, my names acts as the endorsement (or metadata) for the information concerned. It is less important to the recipient that they have found or accessed it, than that it was I who sent it to them. Should it be that the article was published in The Economist, then that too is an additional and different type of endorsement. The Internet is famed for its ability to help researchers find and access information, but this same trait also creates a far greater plurality of ways to endorse information, some of which are social, some of which are public, and some of which are in between. Such is the innate flexibility of the Internet. The same technology supports web-browsing, in which factual information is sought from around the world, and email, which can support quite intimate acts of communication. Existing social etiquette makes the distinction between the two quite clear, but the technology does not. Hence, the Internet also supports social activities that lie on a spectrum between the two, as with email lists, where any number of people can sign up to a community to share ideas and information. Where previous Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as radios or telephones, have had their social functions established partly through their technological limitations, the Internet’s flexibility of use means that its function is never set. This point is examined more fully in the next section.

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For researchers operating outside of universities, this has conflicting implications. On the one hand, it opens up new opportunities to access information and form knowledge-sharing communities, but on the other, it raises serious questions about what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate research activities. The innate flexibility of networked computing removes technological bottle-necks in the way that information is stored and circulated that may, in retrospect, turn out to have been valuable ways of regulating and policing research activity. Large institutions, notably universities themselves, have the ability to enforce etiquette politically, regardless of new technological possibilities. The academic world can insist that the printing press and the book remain the technologies around which academic life revolves. Non-academic researchers are less likely to enforce such institutional limits, and so the removal of technological limits can lead to a dizzying freedom. The question that this chapter raises for researchers outside of academic institutions is what type of social etiquette will they use to regulate research activities, once technologies no longer constrain them. As will be explored, the etiquette that has done most to uphold research standards in the past (both inside and outside the university walls) is the distinction between private and public realms. Distinctions between valid and invalid research, between legitimate and illegitimate methods are judgements made in the public realm, according to publicly established norms. In particular, a clear-cut separation between public and private activities is one of the principles of good intellectual inquiry that dates back to the Enlightenment. Where universities can uphold these norms through social practices such as peer review, non-university researchers now have the opportunity to by-pass the public realm, thanks to the fact that their sources and outputs no longer need to pass through the technological bottle-neck of the printing press. Our newly expanded publishing capabilities force us to confront the troubling hypothesis that the Enlightenment ideal of the public realm was rooted contingently in specific publishing technologies of that age. Could it be that the tools of the twenty-first century have so much flexibility of use, that they hinder our ability to build strong public research conventions? Finally, one caveat must be made. For the most part, new technologies supplement their predecessors, rather than replace them. The train, the car and the aeroplane can happily co-exist, as can the radio and the television. Once again, this is partly because we enjoy the technological limitations of less capable technologies. Long train journeys are places where one can read, while the radio is something to listen to while

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doing the washing up. So it is with new ICTs. The Internet will not replace the book, the telephone or the letter, and it would be peculiar for a researcher to rely entirely on the Internet for all her research needs. However, the removal of technological limits is significant in its own right, even where social and political limits ensure that practices remain unchanged. Having the possibility of doing things differently does at least raise political questions about whether that possibility should be embraced, and if not, why not.

A medium without function To be strict about it, any information technology is also a communication technology, and vice versa. There is no tool that is able to hold information, but unable to communicate it; nor is there a tool that is able to communicate, without conveying information of some kind or other. In this literal sense, researchers have long made use of all manner of ICTs, including books, pens, newspapers, libraries, telephones, letter paper, televisions, lecture halls and so on. Each of these is a technology designed around human needs to store and disseminate knowledge. The storage and the dissemination can never be split from each other altogether. But within the broader social and political project of controlling information flows, each of these tools lends itself to one fairly specific research function. The lecture hall is not designed to enable the sharing of intimate personal information, for instance, and nor is a telephone designed to spread national political news. Abusing a tool’s established function tends to be a form of subversion. In these examples, this might involve whispering at the back of the lecture hall, or leaking important government information through a phone call to a journalist. For the most part, ICTs have been designed around specific norms of what passes for legitimate handling of information, and then help entrench those norms. Before we come on to the question of social etiquette, and the norms of the public realm in particular, we need to examine what it is about different ICTs that makes them suitable for different types of research activity. The answer is quite simple: variations in potential scale of communication. A book (and the printing press, on which it is dependent) is an ICT that lends itself to mass distribution, because it is sufficiently complicated and time-consuming to produce. It would be a no more useful way of communicating ‘wish you were here’ to one’s mother than a postcard would be a way of communicating the complete works of Shakespeare to a large readership. The technological properties

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of a book lend themselves to ‘one-to-many’ communication (i.e. publishing), while the technological properties of a postcard lend themselves to ‘one-to-one’ or ‘one-to-few’ communication. Thus it is that while researchers use various technologies that might technically be described as ‘ICTs’, the relatively narrow functions of these different technologies mean that some are closely associated with publishing and public interaction, while others are equally associated with socialising and private interaction; some ICTs emphasise the ‘I’ – the information – and others communication, the ‘C’. The Internet, on the other hand, has an arguably unique ability to support any scale of interaction, and hence any normative model of interaction. It supports one-to-many publishing, as with an online newspaper; one-to-few announcements, as with an email circular; one-to-one intimacy, as with a private email; few-to-few conversations, as with instant messenger or email lists; and so on. Where the inflexibility of previous technologies left it fairly clear where the division lay between public and private conduct, the scalability of the Internet creates infinite shades of grey. Moreover, the fact that very different types of communication occur via a single medium means that ambiguity can occur even where users do everything to avoid it. In a medium with such flexibility of use, it becomes very difficult to specify that a ‘publication’ is actually as public as its author intended. Weblogs and home pages are publishing platforms, and what gets written on one could potentially be read by several hundred million people. But it goes without saying that a vast number of these sites are only read by a few people who happen to know the author. The author will often end up communicating with a few dozen people by shouting to the entire world. Conversely, it becomes very difficult to specify that a confidential discussion is as private as its participants would like. Emails technically pass through the public domain, but social etiquette very often refuses to acknowledge this. People pass secrets via email, which is fine until there is public interest in those secrets. A number of high level scandals have now come to light thanks to private emails being used as public evidence. Those outside of the public eye can encounter something similar, though more commonly as personal embarrassment, for instance through clicking ‘reply all’. Academics do not encounter this ambiguity as either a significant problem or a significant opportunity. To date, publishing via books and journals remains almost the only respected source or outlet of written content in the academic world, while lectures and tutorials are an enduring face-to-face means of sharing of knowledge. There are a few

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academic journals that exist purely online – such as First Monday – although many academics would hesitate to recognise them as authoritative. In the eyes of many academics, the Internet is not merely an ambiguous sphere of communication, but an intrinsically untrustworthy one. Caricatures of the medium paint it as the home of gossip and rumour, where lack of editorial filters leave the reader entirely unable to endorse the credibility of information. Given that nearly any knowledge-based institution now has some form of online presence, this caricature is palpably absurd. Researchers seeking credible information online are likely to turn first of all to traditional sources, such as the BBC, respectable newspapers, think tanks and universities. As already stressed, new technologies are more likely to supplement established ones, rather than replace them, and the same is true of new media and old media. Anyone who believes that the printing press is still the only credible funnel for the dissemination of information has no reason to fear the Internet in and of itself, when so much that is disseminated offline is also disseminated online. It is not media themselves that provide endorsement, but institutions, and the Internet’s greatest service to a researcher is to provide access to institutionally endorsed knowledge, but in a cheaper and more convenient fashion. Nevertheless, it does pose a challenge to the supremacy of the printing press and the publishing institutions which guard it. Researchers outside of the university walls are no more eager to dispense with endorsement methods than those inside academia, but they are in a position to query the editorial processes which currently filter and endorse information, and the Internet offers them the opportunity to construct new ones. Nobody, be they inside or outside of academic institutions, would want to live in a world of extreme relativism, where competing truth claims are all granted equal credibility; only judged on the most cosmetic level does the Internet herald such a scenario anyway. It may be that the norms of the book-publishing industry provide the most legitimate means of filtering worthy from worthless content. But we must be sure that it is the social norms that we put our trust in, and that we are not investing blind faith in the printed word itself. For this reason, we now turn to a discussion of publishing, and its claims to be different from mere printing.

Publishing, printing and socialising The ideal of the publishing industry is to de-contextualise communication, and to replace it in an artificially neutral context. This, at any rate,

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is the ideal of the modern public realm, as it emerged in the eighteenth century and was captured philosophically by Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (Kant 1987 [1790]). As Kant put it somewhat paradoxically, ‘In order to play the judge in matters of taste, we must not be in the least biased in favour of the thing’s existence but must be wholly indifferent about it’ (Kant 1987: 46). Somehow, the person who guards the gateway to the printing press must throw off all of her individual likes and dislikes, and judge purely according to principles of good judgement itself. One of the most significant implications of this ideal is that a publisher, critic or peer reviewer should disregard the personal or private identity of the author. Jurgen Habermas, Kant’s most acclaimed living heir, has celebrated the early participants in the modern public sphere for having ‘preserved a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether’ (Habermas 1985: 36 [1962]). According to Habermas, genuinely public dialogue is guided purely by the content of what is said, and not by the status or reputation of the speaker. Likewise, the validity of published work is assessed on terms that are intrinsic to the argument being made, not on extrinsic social or political factors. In practice, maintaining a public sphere according to these norms is very difficult indeed. It is far easier to award a publishing contract to an author on the basis that she is a friend, than on the basis that her voice should be heard. The institution of academic peer review is arguably the least compromising filter that exists around the public sphere, a practice which does everything possible to judge intellectual argument according to artificially neutral criteria. Yet, the noble public ideal underlying this practice makes it only more frustrating when informal social politics appear to govern academic institutions internally. Pejorative terms such as ‘nepotism’ and ‘cronyism’ are rooted in the Habermasian belief that access to the public sphere should not be distributed according to birth or status. The fact that it is the media, publishing industry, academia and world of politics that are most commonly accused of these things does not imply that these are unusually corrupt professions, but that these are the spheres where public norms are most expected. A carpenter who trains his son for a future carpentry career cannot be accused of nepotism, because he makes no claims to public norms in the first place. Equally, non-academic researchers are not expected to remain unaffected by private social networks because they do not commit to such a lofty public ideal in the first place. Across the economy, the merging of working activities and socialising can be tolerated. It is the merging of public activities and socialising that can not (Arendt 1958).

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To return to the theme of scale discussed earlier, the ideal proposed by Kant and Habermas is one in which large-scale communication should be categorically independent of small-scale communication. For communication to be public, it has to be driven by a principle of universal inclusivity and independent criteria of validity, rather than by the purely private desires or thoughts of the writer or speaker. This is the fundamental difference between publishing and mere printing: publishing is motivated by an ideal of a single public sphere, in which all can be included, while printing is simply the technological replication of words. According to this argument a weblog in which the author aims to share a joke with her friends is not a piece of publishing, even if it ends up being read by each of the Internet’s seven hundred million users. An academic journal article, on the other hand, may be read by only a few dozen people, but can make a genuine claim to have been published. It is critical to the ideal of the public realm that it is not contingent on technological capabilities, but is philosophically rooted in a belief that public sharing of knowledge exists for its own sake. But it just so happens that print media reinforce this public/private schism. As the previous section explored, it has always been fairly obvious which technology is suited to large-scale sharing of knowledge (books, journals etc.) and which technology is suited to small-scale sharing of knowledge (letters, telephones etc.). Moreover, it has also been fairly obvious that those technologies that are suited to large-scale sharing of knowledge represent a bottle-neck through which only a small amount of knowledge can pass. It has always been very convenient for philosophers of the public sphere that print media are relatively inflexible both in terms of communicative scale, and of limited capacity. Once again, the limits of the tool are actually part of its social value. Digital media thus represent a challenge on two fronts. First, they remove technological scarcity, forcing publishing institutions to develop a greater socio-political raison d’etre, in the absence of a technological one. In the UK, this has been manifest in recent debates about the future of the BBC. Critics of the BBC have argued that a large publicly funded public service broadcaster was only necessary while radio spectrum was scarce, and that the original role for the BBC was to ensure that this limited resource was used in the interests of all. The counter-argument made by the BBC is that public service broadcasting owes nothing to the existence or otherwise of technological limitations, and everything to a commitment to a shared public sphere (BBC 2004). The Internet poses similar challenges to newspapers, forcing them to abandon the argument that they cannot publish an article due to lack of ‘space’.

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Secondly, digital media introduce a new ‘scalability’, as already discussed. The Internet is a single technology which supports very large-scale communication, very intimate communication, and every single possible tier between the two. The radical disjuncture between public and private communication, so philosophically important to Kant and Habermas, loses any technological manifestation, once the Internet is introduced. Smaller, more private public spheres become possible, as do larger, more public private spheres. Despite its integrating potential, the Internet enables The Public Sphere to fracture into a number of smaller public spheres (Davies 2004). News, information and art criticism can just as easily be circulated amongst a small community of interest as amongst the population of an entire country. If publishing and academic institutions are confident in themselves, new media should be no threat at all, and they could continue to exercise the same filters around the public realm, regardless of the technologies involved. After all, the BBC remains a forceful news presence in an age of digital media, in fact the end of spectrum scarcity and the greater diversity of news sources may ultimately make it a more essential institution. The fact that many academic institutions remain so suspicious of the Internet suggests a lack of confidence in their own ability to uphold the norms of the public realm, in the absence of technologies to buttress them. Even assuming that traditional research institutions succeed in asserting their professional authority in this new terrain, and that academic endorsement remains unrivalled, this will not prevent nonprofessionals from exploiting the flexibility of the Internet to develop new normative models of research, with new types of endorsement. In an environment in which information is in huge supply, the greatest challenge is in building credible social filters for accessing information that is valuable. Universities are one such filter, but they have a clear remit to rate information by how credible it is, and focus their publishing etiquette upon this one question. Those outside of universities have the liberty to value information in other ways – for instance its usefulness, popularity or rarity – and new media provide them with ways of developing new hierarchies to do this.

New media, new hierarchies Contrast a piece of art criticism with a statement of love. The former, in line with true public norms, should be conducted without reference to the identity of the artist, or any relationship that the critic might have

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with her. It is, as Kant put it, ‘disinterested’, aiming to assess the work purely as a piece of art, rather than as a social or psychological specimen. Love is the complete opposite. It is dedicated purely to the person being loved, and exists only in terms of the relationship with her. As a direct inversion of the principle of disinterested criticism, love is not concerned with what is said or done, but only with the identity of the person saying or doing it. These polar opposites represent an extreme contrast between the public and private spheres. But of course there are a range of intermediary levels of interaction, that are neither entirely public or entirely private. Experienced socially, the boundary between the public and the private domain is a wide grey area. A business reception or a neighbourhood is a social gathering in which interactions are not quite public, but not private either. People may not know each other, but they know of each other, not because they are celebrities but because the group is of a size in which reputations can develop and become disseminated. This is the type of social sphere that non-academic researchers habitually inhabit, and reputation is its main currency. Reputation is an asset that lies squarely between the public and the private domain. Where the art critic in the public realm judges the artist only according to what they do, and the lover in the private realm appreciates the loved-one purely on account of who they are, reputation is assessed through a combination of the two, with the addition of what others have said about them. Our social lives regularly consist of reputation evaluation, although much of the time, we make friends instinctively without worrying too much about who they are or what they have achieved. But in more public types of socialising (i.e. networking), reputation plays a powerful role. The politics of reputation are endemic, but very rarely theorised. Anyone who has socialised in communities that are larger than a friendship circle, but smaller than a large public gathering, will intuitively understand the politics of reputation. It is most obviously seen in the gossip that circulates around neighbourhoods or offices, where an individual can gain notoriety without any formal endorsement. Face-to-face socialising is typically the basis for the development and dissemination of reputation, which is why it is so rarely theorised – very little in the formation of reputation ever gets laid down on paper. The result is that it is a politics that typically remains tacit. There are two reasons for this. First, we may prefer it if our judgements of reputation remain tacit. Where the art critic has a professional obligation to write what she thinks, it may be more embarrassing for us

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to write down what we think of someone outside of the public domain, even if we do not really know them. Secondly, print media do not lend themselves easily to this scale of interaction. Communities that are quasi-private, quasi-public are extremely common, and things such as business cards are designed precisely for them; but they have never had a medium of communication designed for them. The Internet’s flexibility of social scale makes it possible to sustain these communities, and thus to formalise reputation in a way never hitherto witnessed. Consider an email list that 50 people are signed up to. To begin with, each user assesses the contributions on their own merits, but as certain individuals make contributions of differing quality, reputations start to develop. Users start to use the email list to discuss the quality of previous contributions, and reinforce a collective view. Clearly, this is no different from the behaviour of the print media and the public in response to a certain novelist. The first novel is something of a surprise, the second one confirms the writer’s talent, and so the third and fourth will sell well regardless of their quality. But that is celebrity. Never before has this dynamic been possible within small and quite closed communities. ‘Reputation technologies’ are technologies which enhance these effects further. The Amazon.com reviewer system enables users to review books, then for other users to rate the reviews. If one reviewer proves especially popular, they gain the status of a ‘star reviewer’, and their thoughts potentially carry greater weight in the future. Ebay.com, the online auction site, operates a similar system to help buyers and sellers trust one another. After an honest transaction has been carried out, the buyer and seller can go and give each other positive ratings, so that others can trust them in the future. Evaluation of personality is codified in a way that neither private friendship nor public critique deems legitimate. Academics trade in the currency of reputation like anybody else. Indeed the academic world is of the perfect scale and competitiveness to support just such a politics. But with its ongoing commitment to book-publishing, reputation dynamics are confined to face-to-face socialising and gossip, rather than becoming formalised. This is not to say that reputation politics are therefore insignificant in academia, and many academics would testify that the system of peer review is far less transparent than it ought to be. Any system is liable to be ‘gamed’ or even abused. However, the commitment to book-publishing means that researchers can never duck public critique altogether. Even though behaviour may fall well short of the ideal of the public sphere, the

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nature of traditional media means that the ideal cannot be abandoned altogether. Outside of academia, the professional and normative distinction between public and private activity is harder to uphold, indeed, it is often viewed by non-academics as cumbersome: it is often easier to source information through trusted individuals, than to judge it for oneself. The Internet’s removal of a technological dividing line between public and private communication means that hierarchies built on reputation can become codified and quasi-institutional. The search engine Google introduces exactly such a hierarchy, in which a web page is ranked in terms of how many other sites have linked to it, rather than on its contents. Non-academic researchers are perfectly able to dismiss this reputational assessment, and evaluate the quality of information for themselves. But the codification of these reputation dynamics does at least raise the possibility of a new decentralised model of how research is endorsed. The question is whether we commit to this model.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that the inflexibility and limitations of publishing technologies may very often be crucial to their social and political usefulness. Print media seem outmoded in comparison to digital media, but they enable a regulation and policing of research activity that academia is unlikely to dispose with. Specifically, because print publishing lends itself to a large scale of communication, this helps to reinforce the norms of the public realm which state that public communication is entirely different from private and social communication. Legitimate research must be judged publicly, that is, according to impartial criteria; research that is affected by private or social factors (for instance, by money or friendship) is not legitimate. By eradicating the clear-cut technological distinction between publishing and socialising, the Internet opens up a sphere of research which is quasi-public and quasi-private. It facilitates new communities of knowledge that sit between the public and private realms, where reputation – the sum of what others in your peer group think of you as a person – can rival credibility or accuracy as the basis for new research hierarchies. Academics enforce their research norms and methods with sufficient institutional weight that reputation cannot trump credibility and accuracy as the basis for hierarchy. But researchers outside of universities may not. The greatest threat of a community ordered by

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reputation is that popular individuals emerge as arbiters over the truth, rather than institutions and regulations. Two possibilities lie before us. The first is that academia, and the single Public Realm which it idealises, will remain the pinnacle of research activity. Academic publishing will remain the highest form of endorsement, and non-academic researchers will still look up the pyramid when seeking credible information, and seek to climb that pyramid when seeking to build their own status. The constraints of print media will mean that book and journal publishing will remain valuable bottle-necks through which information must pass before being deemed credible. New media, meanwhile, will enable greater ease of access to academically endorsed knowledge – through more free online duplication of journal articles and more online-only journals – and help researchers circulate such published information socially. Small knowledge-sharing communities will use the Internet to keep in touch, and share and recommend sources of information. But those sources will still be publicly endorsed through a form of editorial critique or peer review. The alternative is far less attractive. In the absence of strong institutional commitments to the norms of the public sphere, the Internet could be used by researchers to develop alternative hierarchies, where research is officially judged on the identity of the author as much as on its intrinsic merits. In the absence of any media bottle-neck, arbitrary filters emerge, in which certain individuals and communities evaluate the status of research and its researcher in tandem, returning us to a pre-Enlightenment model of knowledge endorsement. This may be an unlikely scenario, but it is one that technologies themselves no longer prevent.

References Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. BBC (2004) Building Public Value, London: BBC. Davies, W. (2004) Proxicommunication: ICT and the Local Public Realm, London: The Work Foundation. Habermas, J. (1985) [1962] The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, London: Polity. Kant, I (1987) [1790] The Critique of Judgement, Indianapolis: Hackett.

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Part IV Reflections: Are There Lessons for the Present?

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16 Research, Universities and the Knowledge Society Frank Webster

Introduction: What’s so special about university research? A familiar argument runs as follows. We live nowadays in a Knowledge Society, so we must expand our personal and collective knowledge if we are to prosper. This promotes the part education plays in our age; all readers will be aware of the pressing need to gain credentials for individual success as well as for our educational institutions to be top notch. An especially important form of knowledge, that which provides advantage in this highly competitive world, is research, the cutting edge knowledge that enables innovation. Because of this universities are today’s central institutions since not only do they produce the high calibre personnel who maintain the Knowledge Society, but also they generate the new knowledge which ensures market success. This refrain is especially attractive to those of us employed by universities. It flatters our role as teachers of students whom we aim to equip with the skills necessary for success in the Knowledge Society. Whether it is Ancient History or Biochemistry, the argument is that undergraduate study cultivates essential capabilities such as communicative abilities, analytical competences and advanced reasoning. More important, the logic that identifies universities as powerhouses of research appeals to academics’ self-image as valuable for the very reason that many, perhaps most, of them have remained in higher education – to advance research in their chosen disciplines. This is what motivates university faculty above all else; it is where status is won (and lost) and to be told now that it is essential to the Knowledge Society is music to their ears. Years of cuts in funding, of cumbersome inspections, and an unrelenting decline in social esteem, are endurable when assured that 245

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we really are vital contributors to the commonweal. However late it has come, this acknowledgement is remarkably good for morale. Contributors to this book will have shaken faith in this logic. For instance, Keith Vernon has reminded us that a great deal of research needed by industry has long been undertaken by industrial enterprises themselves. And this continues: whether it is pharmaceuticals, engineering or chemistry, practical research has been conducted primarily by private and state enterprises themselves and universities have been by-passed. The weight of research of use to industry has been located in government institutions and a limited number of approved firms. Universities have certainly made contributions here and there, but on the whole theirs has been secondary and subordinate to the corporate sector (Edgerton 1996). So when universities claim to be powerhouses of research of crucial economic significance we might wonder on what basis of evidence they make such grand claims. It is as well to remember that Microsoft was begun by a university drop-out (as was Apple), that biotechnology is entrenched in private organisations, and that drug companies by and large conduct their own, proprietary, research. To be sure, universities do play a leading role in the development of theoretical knowledge, and as I argue later this is important, but it seems dubious to claim that university research is vital for economic success. It is as well to remember that research inside universities is historically novel. Universities are amongst Britain’s oldest institutions, but few of their founding features have survived apart from the name since the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They performed a number of functions over time, from training the clergy to keeping young noblemen off the streets, but conducting research is by and large a post-Second War concern. Even Britain’s leading universities, Oxford and Cambridge, undertook little research prior to the 1930s. The idea of the university as a research institute is an early nineteenth-century German conception formulated by Wilhelm von Humboldt that found expression in the United States in Johns Hopkins and M.I.T., yet this only came to be seen as a vital role in recent decades. The primary role of universities over the past two hundred years has been to equip undergraduates for the professions. This activity still brings in the lion’s share of revenue at most universities (typically around 70 per cent in British universities), though it can be easy to forget this when listening to the research obsessions and fears of faculty, especially their ranking in the Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs). It might be admitted that much economically germane research, especially scientific and technological, is done in corporate and government

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organisations, but surely humanities and social science research is university-based? Undeniably, higher education is the location of many professional historians, political scientists and literary critics. Yet it is also clear that a great deal of even this sort of research is undertaken ‘outside the walls’. For instance, in my own disciple, Sociology, there are sixty or seventy departments, of sizes varying from three or four staff to thirty or so, in British universities. Most do pursue research on a wide range of matters, from social mobility to the operation of lap dancing clubs. However, none contributes to identifying the salient features of contemporary society anything like so much as the government statistical services. Not least because of the prodigious resources required to conduct nation-wide social analysis, added to which should be the matter of having a legitimate right to gather often-intimate information on citizens, how we know ourselves is much more about census and survey statistics than it is about the sociological research stars at London School of Economics or Leicester. Ask yourself, where do you get sociological knowledge of family life, mortality, educational attainment or employment, and the first order answer is always from the government statistical services (called, rather off-puttingly, the Office for National Statistics). For sure, for most people these statistics are mediated through newspapers and television with stories such as how many people are cohabiting, trends in abortions, when women are most likely to give birth to their first children, or what each household owns in the way of consumer goods. Such information is readily available via the Internet (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/) and a moment’s thought makes clear its sociological character. There can be no excuse for sociologists overlooking the priority of government services providing us with knowledge about how people live now (cf. Bulmer 1980). In comparison, university-based sociologists, while they contribute much to thinking conceptually and while they often produce fascinating insights, are small-time activists. Earlier chapters in this book will have reinforced this message of the under-estimated, but vital, role of non-university research activity. Whether it is tracking the distribution of birds (Jeremy Greenwood), acknowledging the contribution of amateurs in the cumulation of botanical knowledge (David Allen), or open-mindedly considering the part played by missionaries in researching distant locations (David Livingstone), important and innovative knowledge was generated, and continues to be generated, beyond universities. Mass Observation, though pioneered in the 1930s by a poet (Charles Madge) who finished up as a Professor of Sociology, is an exemplary illustration of this

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non-university research, in this case scores of voluntary observers being able to provide richly textured accounts of what it was like to live through the Blitz, to experience British pubs, or attend the coronation of a monarch (Dorothy Sheridan). Above all, perhaps, who can imagine family history without the army of volunteers and enthusiasts about whom Michael Drake writes with such sobriety and sympathy? So much research is undertaken outside the university that one might anticipate some sense of modesty from those inside the walls. There is generally no such thing. Frequently non-university research is dismissed as amateur, lacking in rigour, partial, unsystematic and poorly conceived. Ronald Barnett offers some judicious observations on these sorts of charges, and finds that they generally lack support in evidence or in logic. If some extra-university research is flawed, so too is some university research, while a good deal of both fulfils the criteria of high-level research work. Even the dismissive suggestion that nonuniversity research is lacking in a necessary detachment is unproven. Much non-university research is highly motivated (e.g. pursuing genealogical research in parish registers, examining the patterns of bird migrations), though it may still manage to attain the disinterestedness essential to good research. Conversely, a good deal of internal university research (e.g. in business schools or for the defence industry) is emphatically partial and on occasion may be marred by its orientation to clients. Derek Bok (2003), recently retired President of Harvard University, warns about just this. Bluntly, neither university nor non-university research is prima facie better than the other.

Historicising the university We might begin to understand things better if we historise the university. As I said above, the university is an ancient institution, but it has been extraordinarily adaptable over the years, so much so that it has changed enormously while retaining the same title and nomenclature such as Dean and Vice-Chancellor. In addition, universities can never be imagined as a singular sort of institution or as offering a homogeneous experience. Their very size, the range of debate and disputation within them, as well as the bringing together of young people from disparate locations, ensures considerable room for different encounters and orientations. This is despite the fact that, in the United Kingdom, the cloistered and ivory-towered world of Oxford and Cambridge has been so often represented as the university’s epitome in an enormous volume of novels and scripts (many of which have found their way into movies

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and television adaptations) such as Brideshead Revisted, The Glittering Prizes, Porterhouse Blue and Shadowlands. Ian Carter’s (1990) splendidly angry examination of the corpus of relevant fiction emphasises Oxbridge’s dominance when it comes to imagining the university in the UK: almost all British university novels play modest variations on one of three linked stories: how an undergraduate at Oxford (usually) or Cambridge came to wisdom; how an undergraduate at Oxford (usually) or Cambridge was stabbed in the back, physically or professionally . . . and how rotten life was as student or teacher outside Oxford and Cambridge. (Carter 1990: 15) Against this Oxbridge of recondite manners and rituals, exclusivity and cultivated unworldliness, needs to be set the much more down-to-earth connectedness of ‘civics’ like Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, universities that prioritised practicality and science, supported part-time study, and were very much the creation of far-sighted and determined industrialists and entrepreneurs who were proud not to be like Magdalen and Kings (Armytage 1955). Still more, the history of Scotland’s universities reveals a significantly different conception and practices to those of Oxford and Cambridge (Davie 1961). In the North there was a decidedly greater connection to the outside world, residence of staff and students being spurned, as was the tutorial system of teaching, both displaced in favour of cheaper forms that thereby allowed a markedly more open system of entrance than south of the border (Anderson 1983). But if Scotland set the pace, there is much more to observe about the opening of universities to wider constituencies. Agitation for this began long ago, as noted with regard to Scotland. The plainer, often nonconformist and more practically engaged provincial institutions in England were also significantly more open than Oxbridge from their establishment in the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the major and accelerated expansion of opportunity to enter a university came, in the UK, only towards the close of the twentieth century, though the United States and much of Europe has a longer and more admirable tradition of access. It is only recently, for instance, that the UK has moved from elite rates of participation (where less than 10 per cent of the age group studied at university) to allow one-third or so of 18-year-olds to attend. In the UK the university is also changing decisively from being an experience for the few, towards one in which many more

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students attend higher education but live increasingly at home, find part-time employment to pay their way, and rarely see their teachers outside the classroom. Today fully half of all students in London live at home, while a majority have some form of paid employment as they study, and opportunities to interact with lecturers in extra-curricular matters are rare. There has been reform and strenuous efforts are made to extend the opportunities for entry of less represented groups, yet the fact remains that the higher one goes in the hierarchy of British universities, the more exclusive they are in terms of social class recruitment especially. At the uppermost levels of British universities, at Oxford, University College London and leading provincial institutions like Edinburgh, Bristol and Birmingham, 40 per cent and more of students come from private schools that are attended by only 7 per cent of the age group. Moreover, most of the remaining students come from homes in the higher social classes though their parents have sent them to selective state schools or comprehensives in superior catchment areas. They do so largely because the cultural and economic capital such well-to-do groups possess translates readily into excellent scores in the entrance examinations. The children of road workers, postmen and factory operatives still make it to university only in tiny and disproportionately low numbers. In this light it does not seem surprising to note that the knowledge produced by universities is still today contested and even rejected by many of those towards the bottom rungs of our society. There is a long history of this rejection. It is often suggested that university knowledge was especially authoritative in the past, and that in recent years this esteem has declined. I say more about this below, but would emphasise here that, in the days – say the years up to the 1940s in the UK – when a university education was restricted to the privileged (only on rare occasions admitting highly exceptional working class boys), and at the more prestigious limited to the upper middle class, then these were times in which university knowledge was, when not openly contested, commonly ignored by the working classes who represented the overwhelming majority of the population. Much research from the universities during this period1 was challenged from below or ignored as irrelevant to ordinary lives. Consider, in this light, for instance, the establishment of alternative centres of higher learning such as Ruskin College (Oxford) and Fircroft (Birmingham) by radical thinkers and the trade union movement. These were consciously created as alternatives to the exclusive domains of the upper class, and the alternative envisaged entailed different forms of knowledge. Beyond the likes of Ruskin and Fircroft

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were a host of labour movement education programmes that stood against the alleged authoritative knowledge of the university. If one wants a vivid picture of this outlook consider the passionate outrage with Christminster (a thinly disguised Oxford) of Jude Fawley in Thomas Hardy’s magnificently tragic novel published in 1895. It is important not to misunderstand this point. To observe that university knowledge was once, and still remains so for many, contestable and of little pertinence is not to say that non-privileged people are philistine. Jonathan Rose (2001), in his marvellous book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, demonstrates convincingly that, while working people left school in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with little education, for the most part they were literate enough to tackle novels and often equipped with a love of literature. There was a Samuel Smiles-like enthusiasm for reading amongst many autodidacts at a time when university was out of bounds to ordinary people. What they read was accessible literature, above all Charles Dickens (a non-university attendee and early school leaver himself), and also the likes of John Bunyan and of course William Shakespeare. Rose shows that these authors were read widely by working classes people who took such works as both expressions of life and as educational resources for life. They provided readers with ‘frames’ for making sense of the circumstances they encountered and they were enthusiastically drawn upon not as abstract entertainments, but as ways of comprehending and helping to explain how people lived. Perhaps a ‘Uriah Heep’ might be encountered in an office, school might have been like something out of Dotheboys Hall, a nurse reminiscent of Sarah Gamp. Such literature, reflecting much of their own experiences back to people, assisted their comprehension, and extended their horizons (cf. James 1963–74). It is revealing that working class readers largely ignored literature that was tied closely to the universities. Thus the fashionable Bloomsbury set, which was intimately connected with especially Cambridge and London University circles in the inter-war period, was little read by working class audiences who found their references alien, their style elusive and their subjects uninteresting. In return they were often sneered at by highly intelligent and erudite (and liberal, even ostensibly leftish) authors such as Virginia Woolf, Harold Nicholson and E.M. Forster as half-educated ‘mass’ audiences that lacked the sophistication to come to terms with To the Lighthouse or A Passage to India, still less The Cocktail Party and The Waste Land (Carey 1992). Rose tellingly suggests that, had the Bloomsbury set been more open-minded and accessible, then they might have done much to take Modernism to the

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working classes, since so many of those members hungered for education but were excluded and alienated from the university at this time. There is some continuity discernible here as regards the rapid growth of higher education since the Second World War. Commentators on literature and the arts have increasingly established themselves in universities where they have forged careers and pioneered degree courses in an array of spheres. Many of these academics have taken as their subject a catholic conception of culture, ranging from television to newspapers, fashion to youth lifestyles, yet as they have done so they have commented on these familiar phenomena in an inward-looking way, writing only for people like themselves (and often for professional advancement) rather than for wider audiences (Jacoby 1987). The very subjects of study are prohibited from understanding what is written, though it is often enough about things they experience themselves, because of dense and jargon-soaked theory (cf. Nussbaum 1999). The time when a significant body of intellectuals consciously wrote for the ‘intelligent layman’ appears to have peaked in the 1930s and early post-war period, manifested in the likes of H.G. Wells, George Orwell and J.B. Priestley. While universities have expanded boundlessly, while they have provided opportunities for many once excluded constituencies to enter, and while have begun to address the concerns of much ordinary life, so too have grown extraordinarily exclusionary forms of writing (or, to adopt the favoured terminology, ‘discourses’) that act as ‘insider’ languages which ensure that the untutored reader can make no sense of what is being said. What I am suggesting here is that a historical account of the university leads one to appreciate that knowledge may be shaped by social and economic circumstances. For most of the time the university in Britain was an arena reserved for a minuscule minority, its knowledges partial and the preserve of the few. The most esteemed universities, notably Oxford and Cambridge, until well into the twentieth century were chiefly about training for the church, the law and medicine (and the latter had few reliably scientific tenets to transmit), while much else was concerned with instilling knowledge of the ancient world and classical language, an exclusive development that marked those with high cultural attainment – and those without it. Undeniably, non-conformist institutions grew in the nineteenth century and these were oriented towards science, technology and the burgeoning need for teachers, though these were noticeably possessed of less prestige, their knowledges dismissed as ‘practical’ or ‘mere training’. The working class majority responded by challenging this partiality and exclusivity, though one suspects that more often the university was simply dismissed by most as an altogether

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different world. Yet there were other facets of working class life evident in the enthusiasm for the novels, for improving the mind, and the thirst for knowledge slaked by correspondence courses and attendance at the trade union college. It is generally agreed that the golden age of universities – if such there was – stretched from the post-Second War era until the early 1970s (Halsey 1995, Bender 1997). In part this was a result of sustained expansion that brought with it a steady flow of additional posts, extra and large-scale establishment of new universities (many on greenfield sites) during the 1960s. Expansion allowed an increase in student numbers and an evident feeling of increased opportunities. Moreover, buoyant job opportunities meant that there were plentiful positions for the graduates of post-war universities, something that stimulated the mood of optimism as regards higher education. More than this, however, it was in the 1950s and especially in the 1960s that universities appeared to be places of aspiration in at least two senses. The first, already mentioned, was that they provided routes into solidly middle class occupations for those who gained entry. As credentials took on an increased importance, so did holding a degree certificate become more important. That most of those winning entry to the new and expanded universities were from privileged homes did little to disturb this positive mood. The second sense, however, was the faith in the university as a place of research, in the sense of developing knowledge through discovery, experimentation and truth-seeking. This was an era in which an aspirant Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, could present his party in late 1963 as ‘modern’ because of its commitment to exploiting the ‘white heat of technological change’. Science and technology were privileged here as major forces for change, and the expanded universities both expressed and were to stimulate this imperative. Research was essential to this endeavour, and universities were presented as central to the research enterprise. At the same time, universities, while funded from central government, were left alone to develop as they best thought fit, core ideas being that a better educated populace was in itself a public benefit, and that universities should be independent in going about their research. In this period research came to be widely admired, as dispassionate, progressive and authoritative.

The postmodern university and knowledge The 1950s and 1960s were the apogee for the university in terms of resources, reputation and the commitment to research. Over recent decades

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there have been changes that might be described as the emergence of the postmodern university (Webster 2001). There are several reasons for this, but the outcome is unmistakable: the university today has borders that are indistinct from the rest of society, it lacks internal cohesion, and it has lost much of the esteem it held but a few decades ago. Peter Scott (1995), who has written quite the best account of the situation, discerns an affinity between today’s Post-Fordist Economy, Postmodern Times and the Postmodern University. The affinity is that nowadays everything is shifting, is flexible, impermanent and without fixity. Accordingly, higher education is exceptionally ‘fuzzy’ (Scott’s leitmotif), is ‘fluid’, ‘non-linear’ and ‘complex’, so much so that it is not at all clear what defines the university itself. This can be exciting for some, but others it leaves bewildered. The spread of postmodern practices and associated thought has had major consequences for higher education and, necessarily, for research. First of all, postmodernism undermines the university from without. It does this by hitting hard at the old university claim to be the privileged institution where would be developed innovative, authoritative and expert knowledge. Postmodernism does this, for example, by asking what is so special about the university when so many people now have access to the Internet which allows us to enter and access no end of knowledge whenever we want, wherever we are, and for and from whomsoever interests us. Or again, what distinguishes a university when nowadays we have umpteen alternative sources of knowledge, on the net itself of course, and also in the plethora of think tanks such as the Institute for Public Policy Research or the Heritage Foundation, or in those research and development centres located inside corporations like Shell, HCSB and British Telecom, or in knowledge intensive organisations such as the BBC, the Independent, or Channel Four? Finally, Michael Gibbons (1998) rightly objects that not only is universities’ monopoly on the development of knowledge challenged, but also that their claims for authority are compromised because they have over the years produced millions of graduates who are equipped to reflect critically – and that this includes being sceptical of the claims made by universities about the standing of their own research. Postmodernity also undermines the university from within because what we find, in this vastly expanded and transformed institution, is that there is no longer any collective entity, so that the old conception – that a university is a community of scholars, doing different tasks, but united in commitment to a common pursuit of enlightenment – goes up in smoke. There is no ‘inner life’ in the postmodern university, and

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all imaginings of such, perhaps of a coterie of elderly dons in erudite disputation, are fantastical. Quite to the contrary, all we come across in the postmodern university are conglomerates of ‘differences’ (Bauman 1997), a bewilderingly complicated milieu in which physicists cannot (and do not even try) speak to economists, and where nuclear physicists can make neither head nor tail even of theoretical physicists. Indeed, the same goes for every ‘discipline’, and the closer one looks the more one appreciates that conceptions of unified gatherings of scholars is an illusion (Clark 1997). Instead, we have huge numbers of people, with radically different interests and agendas, united about nothing save perhaps the availability of car-parking facilities (as an exasperated Clark Kerr was said to have declared while President of the University of California). Zygmunt Bauman (1987) adds to all this the observation that university faculty have been reduced to being merely another ‘voice’ in postmodern society, with no special claims to possess definitive knowledge. Where once university members might have been deferred to as legislators, they have now diminished into interpreters, whether the matter is science, literary taste or aesthetic judgement. It no longer matters much that you are called ‘Professor’, what you say is only one opinion amongst many others. Depend on it, the scholar who proclaims that there is a poetic canon at the head of which is, say, John Keats will be vigorously attacked because this is only his (no doubt allegedly ‘elitist’) opinion and that an equally valid opinion puts Bob Dylan in the pantheon (and St Andrews University recently bestowed a doctoral degree on the writer of Blowing in the Wind and Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, something never achieved by Keats). This accords with Jean-François Lyotard’s (1984) well-known argument that a principle of performativity (i.e. utility) predominates today, thereby undermining the one-time university justification that it pursued ‘truth’. If science is no longer discovery-led, but is rather guided by the search for patents and inventions, and if management and engineering subjects have fully entered today’s universities, then previous arguments for the university must be forfeited. But if the former defences of what might be included in the university are breached by performativity criteria, then the boundaries of exclusion from the university also collapse, and with them the former hierarchies, at the top of which were subjects such as Classics, Natural Science and Philosophy. If performativity alone is what matters, then why not degrees in Tourism, Golf Course Management or even Leisure Studies? And if this is so, then what characterises the university today other than its being a

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collection of differences, a diversity of knowledge activities pursued – and routinely abandoned – only because there is some performativity justification for their adoption? This has been conceived as the transformation from a Mode 1 type of knowledge that is homogeneous, rooted in strong academic disciplines that are hierarchically organised, and transmitted to novitiates in an apprentice-master relationship, towards Mode 2 knowledges which are non-hierarchical, pluralistic, transdisciplinary, fast-changing and responsive to diverse needs such as students’ experiences, industrial priorities and social problems (Gibbons et al. 1994). This plurality of knowledges must announce an end to common purposes of the university, there being no possibility of agreement on goals or even on methods of work. By extension, we must forego thinking about how to define what a university might be, instead simply accepting that there are an enormous number of very different institutions with different purposes and practices that might be called universities (for want of a better term). The university is also being undermined because of the increasing difficulty of distinguishing it from growing sectors of industry. The suggestion here is that knowledge-rich corporations such as Microsoft, Ford and Pfizer, and even media organisations such as Channel 4, ‘already possess many of the features of a university’ (The Economist 1997). These are brimming with highly educated employees, frequently those who possess doctoral degrees and working on cutting-edge projects in software production, advanced electronics, biotechnology or socio-economic investigation. The university can no longer be identified by virtue of its separation from the ‘outside world’, while at the same time ‘big companies . . . are becoming more conscious of their role as creators, disseminators, and users of knowledge – a definition not altogether different from that of a university’ (The Economist 1997). Questioning the once privileged role of the university as regards research subverts its former distinctiveness. Serious questions may now be asked about the supposed indivisibility of teaching and research that, in the view of some, characterises a genuine university. As more and more students are to be offered places on degree programmes, then it may be asked whether it is really essential that all of their teachers be involved in research. Though it is unpalatable to many working in universities today, the research evidence just does not support the assertion that research and teaching are necessarily mutually supportive (Astin 1993, 1999). There may be no compelling reason to locate research inside universities. RAEs, and the distribution of funds on the basis of achieved ranks,

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mean that resources go for the most part to a dozen or so institutions. It has been estimated that 25 per cent of research funds in the UK go to just four universities, Oxford, Cambridge, University College London and Imperial College, so why not separate the leaders from the rest? Perhaps the best place for it is in autonomous centres, rather than in universities where other matters may be a hindrance. As The Economist (1997) put it, ‘an intelligent Martian might wonder why a university – autonomous, chaotic, distracted by all those students – should be an efficient place in which to sponsor economically worthwhile research’. All this means that scarcely anyone can speak for, still less define, the university today. The only enthusiasts are those postmodernists who will celebrate the heterogeneity, pluralism and ‘multivocalism’ that apparently thrives in (and outside) higher education, but even they can find no raison d’être for their own employment inside a university.

Universities and theoretical knowledge It is to be expected then that many commentators now envisage the university to be in crisis if not in ruins (Readings 1996), expressing and contributing towards a world in which knowledge is uncertain, provisional and performance-directed (Barnett 2003). The university appears to have lost its once privileged position as the arbiter of truth and truth seeking through diligent research. A great deal of what university staff currently claim is their special contribution – research – was not even attempted by universities until quite recently, has long been practised by external organisations, and it continues to take place ‘outside the walls’. Part and parcel of this has been a general diminishment of university status, its activities and judgements as well as its authority challenged within and without. In some respects this decline of deference as regards universities expresses a healthy impulse, but constant scepticism does make life awkward for those in higher education. Nonetheless, there is one contribution towards the Knowledge Society that universities do make disproportionately and which deserves emphasis. This does not fit with the narrow conception of research, eliciting original knowledge, which so appeals to many university personnel.2 But if we extend the notion of research in the direction of its popular definition as ‘finding out’, collating facts and investigating subjects, then we might, within this more encompassing conception, include an ability to understand and absorb knowledge, to apply what is known to novel situations and come up with innovative answers to problems, and to have developed capacities to explore and to critically

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assess phenomena. If we do this, then some major concerns of contemporary universities come clearer. In addition, as Ronald Barnett (1999) has stressed, these are essential in helping people come to terms with a world, our world, in constant and accelerating change. What I wish especially to highlight here is the university’s distinctive concern with theoretical knowledge. By this I mean knowledge that is abstract (i.e. without immediate practical application), generalisable (i.e. not limited to specific experiences or situations), and codified (i.e. formulated in texts of one sort or another that range from lecture courses, carefully constructed undergraduate programmes, to journal articles). This should not be confused with theory conceived as an arid and unworldly phenomenon. What I imagine by theoretical knowledge is, for the most part, a matter of generalisations based on empirical evidence and sustained observation. This should not be conceived as self-indulgent armchair thinking, though it undoubtedly requires intensive and high-level thought removed from the exigencies of daily life. It requires exactly this, yet it is simultaneously much more: theoretical knowledge is also a matter of ‘thinking at the edge’, of pushing boundaries of what is (temporarily) accepted and of constantly re-examining that which is accepted. This is adventurous thought, though it is not undisciplined, and it is something healthy universities undertake as a matter of course. It is also something that is not encouraged, on the whole, in the ‘outside’ world, especially in the commercial realm where orthodoxy, or at best incremental adaptation, is encouraged because that is safe and secure. I do not doubt that spaces where theoretical knowledge may be nurtured can be found in many places, some unexpected – one thinks, for instance, of Schumacher producing Small is Beautiful while employed by the National Coal Board, of Alfred Schutz making his daily living working for a bank while thinking through the bases of social interaction, and T.S. Eliot creating insightful and complex criticism while in the employ of the publisher Faber. Contributors to this book have drawn our attention to other spaces ‘outside the walls’. But it also needs to be clear that such spaces are hard to find, harder than ever now that commercialism has penetrated so much deeper into so many spheres of life. These spaces remain, sometimes precariously, as a distinguishing characteristic of any university worthy of the name (Slaughter and Leslie 1997). It seems to me (Webster 2002) that the pre-eminence of theoretical knowledge is a major indicator of the Knowledge Society, marking a move from a world based on practice and experience to one where just about everything begins with theory, whether this be in building a bridge,

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assessing global warming or making family decisions. Over time it is possible to trace a decisive shift away from the imperative of the practical, where things were done on the basis of tradition, trial and error, and immediacy of demand, towards one in which theoretical knowledge – from principles of physics and mathematics to knowledge of fertility patterns and demographic trends – plays the major role in both personal as well as collective actions. This shift towards the primacy of theoretical knowledge is consonant with what Anthony Giddens (1990) has called reflexive modernisation to identify heightened self and social scrutiny that depends on access to, as well as development of, theoretical knowledge. It is what has allowed us to extract oil from the North Sea and the Arctic Circle, to develop the personal computer, and to create a sophisticated social order that is capable of adjusting to constant flux. Precisely because of the repositories of theoretical knowledge upon which we may draw, we can calculate the essential structures that will support buildings that reach far into the sky, we can assess the likelihood of environmental degradation and plan births. To be sure, these activities are intensely practical and real-worldly, but we may engage them on a basis of risk assessment that is feasible just because we have command over theoretical knowledge. Universities are repositories of theoretical knowledge and they play a key role in its maintenance and transmission, in the form of books and articles, lectures and seminars, and also in equipping large numbers of students with competencies to access, handle and even to contribute to theoretical knowledge. Universities do not act alone here: Caspar Melville and Mark Brady in this book draw attention to the Internet’s potential in terms of fostering reasoned and informed debate whether in publishing openDemocracy or even in blogging, and these are valuable contributors to a healthy climate of intellectual inquiry and critique in which universities may thrive. Universities are privileged sites for cultivating theoretical knowledge since, in spite of undoubted pressures bearing upon them (and these are many), they still do have the autonomy, resources and values of free inquiry that are axiomatic to sustaining reflexive knowledge (Castells 2004). Theoretical knowledge needs to be distanced from the everyday world even when engaged with the world, that it may be sustained, reproduced across generations, and kept vital by regular and systematic critical inspection. It can often be difficult nowadays to defend support for institutions that are so resolutely detached from practical affairs. Politicians, like investors, look for a return on their commitment of public resources. Called to account on these terms, universities readily

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slip into justifying themselves on grounds that are far removed from their true purposes (Shils 1997). Nevertheless, there is also widespread agreement that understanding the world is of value beyond commercial accountancy, and that universities are institutions in which knowledge to meet this aspiration may be accumulated and passed on to succeeding generations. Universities, dedicated to nurturing theoretical knowledge, have a major part to play now and in the future. In fulfilling that role, however, they have no need to make claims either that research within the walls is their pre-eminent contribution or that research outside the walls is of a lesser order.

Notes 1. Research here needs to be extended in definition from a notion of original knowledge to include that which is presented as definitive since, to repeat, universities actually pursued little original research at this time. 2. Incidentally, this type of research is not necessarily the high-level activity that is frequently assumed or asserted. For example, such research might involve ascertaining public opinion on a matter of current affairs or testing the chemical constituents of a virus. This sort of research requires technical competence and rigorous method, but it is not notably difficult.

References Anderson, R.D. (1983) Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Armytage, W.H.G. (1955) Civic Universities: Aspects of a British Tradition, London: Benn. Astin, Alexander W. (1993) What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Astin, Alexander W. (1999) ‘How the Liberal Arts College affects students’, Daedalus 128, 1, Winter: 77–100. Barnett, Ronald (1999) Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity, Buckingham: Open University Press. Barnett, Ronald (2003) Beyond All Reason: Living with Ideology in the University, Buckingham: Open University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (1987) Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity, and the Intellectuals, Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Zygmunt (1997) ‘Universities: Old, new and different’, in Smith, Anthony and Webster, Frank (eds) The Postmodern University? Contested Visions of Higher Education in Society, Buckingham: Open University Press. Bender, Thomas (1997) ‘Politics, intellect and the American university, 1945–1995’, Daedalus 126, 1, Winter: 1–38. Bok, Derek (2003) Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, New Haven: Princeton University Press.

Frank Webster 261 Bulmer, Martin (1980) ‘Why don’t sociologists make more use of official statistics?’, Sociology 14, 4: 505–23, reprinted in Bulmer, Martin (ed.) (1984), Sociological Research Methods: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Carey, John (1992) Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice amongst the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, London: Faber & Faber. Carter, Ian (1990) Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years, London: Routledge. Castells, Manuel (2004) ‘Universities and cities in a world of global networks’, Sir Robert Birley Lecture, City University London, 17 March. Available at http:// www.city.ac.uk/social/birley2004.htm Clark, Burton R. (1997) ‘Small world, different worlds: The uniqueness and troubles of American academic professions’, Daedalus 126, 4, Fall: 21–42. The Economist (1997) ‘Survey: Universities’, 4 October. Davie, G.E. (1961) The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the 19th Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Delanty, Gerard (2001) Challenging Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society, Buckingham: Open University Press. Edgerton, David (1996) Science, Technology and the British Industrial ‘Decline’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbons, Michael (1998) ‘A Commonwealth perspective on the globalization of higher education’, in Scott, Peter (ed.) The Globalization of Higher Education, Buckingham: Open University Press. Gibbons, Michael, Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, Martin (1994) The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, London: Sage. Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity. Halsey, A.H. (1995) The Decline of Donnish Dominion, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacoby, Russell (1987) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, New York: Basic Books. James, Louis (1963/74) Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–50: A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England, Penguin: Harmondsworth. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, English trans., Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nussbaum, Martha (1999) ‘The professor of parody’, The New Republic, 22 February: 37–45. Readings, Bill (1996) The University in Ruins, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rose, Jonathan (2001) The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, Peter (1995) The Meanings of Mass Higher Education, Buckingham: Open University Press. Shils, Edward (1997) The Calling of Education: The Academic Ethic and Other Essays on Higher Education, ed. with introduction by Steven Grosby, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Slaughter, Sheila and Leslie, Larry (1997) Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

262 Reflections: Are There Lessons for the Present? Webster, Frank (2001) ‘The postmodern university? The loss of purpose in British universities’, in Lax, Stephen (ed.) Access Denied in the Information Age, Houndmills: Basingstoke: Palgrave. Webster, Frank (2002) Theories of the Information Society, 2nd edn, London: Routledge.

17 Re-opening Research: New Amateurs or New Professionals? Ronald Barnett

Introduction In this book, we have seen many examples – both historical and contemporary – of ways in which systematic inquiry has been conducted outside the walls of the university. Sometimes, those inquiries have been those of lone ‘amateurs’, sometimes they have been undertaken within groups or as a form of collective life in particular geographical regions and sometimes, too, they have been organised even on a national basis. So, the extent or the level of such nonacademic inquiry is not at issue. What have been at issue, I think, have been other matters. In this chapter, therefore, I want to draw out some of the themes that have been evident in the contributions that we have been offered and raise some general issues that arise from that overview. There is, though, a fundamental distinction to be made across the issues that present themselves. On the one hand, there is the matter of the character and status of the knowledge that is produced outside the university sector: is it, in fact, an inferior kind of knowledge? Or can it claim to be Knowledge, with a capital ‘K’ as it were? On the other hand, there is the matter of the processes of knowledge production: are they more inclusive, more – as it might be said – democratic? Do they provide a riposte to the exclusivity, and even the elitism, of universities? These two matters, of course, are connected in interesting ways. For example, it may be judged that the forms of knowledge being produced outside the academy do not always match the severity of the criteria for sound knowledge tacitly proclaimed by the universities. On the other hand, it may also be judged that the very openness of participation in those extramural enquiries mark them out as having a social validity 263

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not always available to university research. The accounting sheet may turn out to rather nicely balanced. In working our way towards that reckoning, we shall try to accomplish two other things. First, we shall necessarily be drawn in to developing at least the sketchy makings of a classification of the manifold knowledge efforts beyond the academy’s walls. How might we differentiate them? What are the key characteristics that some of them, at least, have in common? But, and secondly, we shall also have to go on to offer some observations about the current state of play, epistemologically speaking. That is to say, how are we to understand the production of knowledge in the twenty-first century? Is extramural enquiry still to be seen as a pursuit around which hovers, with all its many overtones, the attribute of ‘amateur’? Or, is extramural enquiry now to be reclassified as forms of professionalism, worthy of a place alongside academic undertakings? Or, rather, in this fluid world of the twenty-first century, are such categories of amateur and professional now to be ditched; and if so, are there any obvious replacement categories? These, then, are the tasks ahead of us in this chapter: (1) some initial efforts in ordering and sorting the extramural activities identified in this book; (2) some reflections on the processes by which those knowledges have been produced; (3) a commentary on the status of such extramural knowledges; (4) a peer into the crystal ball, to try to glimpse knowledge production in the twenty-first century.

Enquiring into inquiry How might we understand the forms of knowledge and the processes of knowledge production characteristic of universities on the one hand and the wider world on the other hand? Are there sharp boundaries or differences between them? Do the forms of knowledge associated with universities meet standards of knowing that extramural knowledge neither does not nor cannot meet? In other words – and the question has at least to be placed on the table – is extramural knowledge not really Knowledge at all? To draw upon the term ‘knowledge’ in placing the forms of understanding acquired outside the university may be felt to be analogous to using the term ‘research’ to describe the enquiries that journalists or novelists put in hand, in investigating the background for a newspaper item or even a book. In other words, ‘knowledge’, used in an extramural setting, is deployed in an honorific sense; we know that it is not the real thing and we automatically make allowances.

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This line of thought might be captured in an observation about the terms ‘inquiry’ and ‘enquiry’. If an ‘inquiry’ is a systematic search for understanding, an ‘enquiry’ is a personal, and even a somewhat casual, effort. The inquiry is grand and visible; the enquiry is almost invisible. The inquiry is communal in character; the enquiry is private. On the one hand, the Royal Commission; on the other hand, the lone individual, engaged in an ephemeral and low level undertaking. Coming closer to our theme, then, we can talk comfortably, against these reflections, of academic inquiry. Certainly, we may wish to pause and consider how the various forms of academic inquiry overlap: does the academic inquiry undertaken by historians have anything in common with that undertaken, say, by chemists? Just how do we understand academic inquiry? Suppose one wanted to boost the level of academic inquiry in a new university: how might one go about the task? The questions seem to confirm that we naturally want to turn to ‘inquiry’ as the appropriate term when we have in mind systematic efforts to gain understanding and that it is precisely those forms of knowing efforts that we associate with the academic world; and, by implication, perhaps, it is ‘enquiry’ that characterises knowing efforts beyond the walls of the university. However, such a conclusion is surely premature: there are a number of objections that can be lodged against it. Self-evidently, inquiries are conducted outside universities. National inquiries are precisely vehicles for determining the ‘truth’ of matters in an area of major social or political importance: they are systematic, collective and public in character. On the other hand, either our historian or our chemist could put an enquiry to a member of staff in the university’s library; or even to a research colleague, perhaps on the other side of the world, probably by using the Internet. This little foray into the semantics of ‘inquiry’ and ‘enquiry’, then, offers a direct insight into our key theme, that of trying to place – epistemologically speaking – knowing efforts both within the academy and without. So far, no grounds are opening to us by which we might classify university knowing as formal, systematic and collective on the one hand, and extramural knowing as informal, non-systematic and individual. All such classifications – formal/informal; systematic/non-systematic; collective/individual – are to be found both in the academy and beyond it.

Universal truths Another possible line of demarcation of academic/extramural knowledge beckons. It might be alleged that one difference lies in the

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durable/ephemeral distinction. At least, academic knowledge is durable and long-lasting. Extramural knowledge surely is flimsy in comparison, having a here-today, gone-tomorrow quality about it? It is apparent, however, from several examples in this book that this longlife/shortlife distinction will not hold up either. The work of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), which draws on the systematic efforts of thousands of amateurs, derives its reputation in part precisely from the robustness of its data having been built up over time. The Mass-Observation Project, which seeks to develop an ‘anthropology of ourselves’ through self-records, is over twenty years old. Durability in these two projects takes on different timbres but, in both undertakings, the data stretch back over a long period of time, they are part of durable projects and their systematicity will ensure that the data will be long-lasting, available to researchers generally to enhance understanding for years into the future. In the BTO project, too, we see individual amateurs themselves involved in sustaining systematic efforts – producing certain observational data – over very many years: such ‘amateurs’ have an evident commitment and a professionalism. Against the background of the evidence marshalled in this book – very often of painstaking efforts over long periods of time, often engaging with topics of a long-lasting interest, and producing data of such systematicity that it has become available to others even in subsequent generations – it is evident that the category of short-term/long-term can clearly do little work in trying to demarcate academic from extramural knowledge. There is, though, a notable recent twist to this story that is worth taking on board. The twist comes in the form of the Mode 1/Mode 2 thesis offered by Michael Gibbons and his associates, especially Helena Nowotny and Peter Scott (Gibbons et al. 1994, Nowotny et al. 2001). The thesis, as is well known, includes the idea that a new form of knowledge production has emerged in knowledge-based – especially science-based – enterprises. This is a form of knowledge production that is essentially ephemeral in nature and it is ephemeral in at least two ways: it is engaged on short-term problems and the inquiry processes are themselves short-term. Indeed, this latter point takes on an edge in that it is observed that teams are formed – or, even, just come together – to close in on particular problems and that these teams disband when their work is over. One reason, it is also observed, for this ephemerality in the composition of these teams is that they are multi-disciplinary and that it is the project that holds them together. Once the project is finished – successfully or not – the raison d’etre for the team’s presence vanishes, and so does the team itself.

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These formal aspects of the Mode 2 story are well enough known and picked out. Less remarked on perhaps is the evaluative component of the story, for accompanying the story is surely a subtle commentary of the form ‘and such Mode 2 knowledge is worthwhile’. In other words, a normative story is present alongside the formal sociological account. I mention this because it offers an interesting line of thought for our present theme and that line of thought is hinged around the idea of problem-solving. Michael Gibbons and his associates make much play with the idea of problem-solving. But what is surely notable about problem-solving as it is played up in that narrative is that it looks to problems that arise out of an immersion in the world. In other words, it is not problem-solving as such that is heralded but rather a particular form of problem-solving. Not for these authors the problem-solving that arises out of efforts to derive sound descriptions of the world (of the kind commonly associated with Mode 1 knowledge characteristic of the academy, as these authors depict it). Here, instead, it is a problem-solving in situ. The difference between the two modes of knowledge – Modes 1 and 2 – can be drawn in two parallel ways. In one way, we can read the difference as one of modes of being in the world: whereas Mode 1 calls for a mode of being that is separate from the world, Mode 2 calls for a mode of being that is inserted in the world. On the one hand, the ivory tower stance; on the other hand, a rolling-up-the-sleeves stance, and getting involved directly with the world. To put it more formally, the two modes of knowing point to contrasting ontologies: being-with-the-world but separate from it; and being-in-the-world. The other difference in the two modes of knowing lies in the durability and ephemerality of the knowledge that is produced. Whereas Mode 1 prides itself in its durability, Mode 2 wins its spurs – paradoxically – by being ephemeral. Of course, it is readily understood that Mode 1 knowledge itself changes but a sense of its progression remains in some senses: even if Karl Popper’s picture of an edifice of knowledge being built up over time is discarded (since much work in the disciplines fails to move in such linear ways), still there remains a sense of a conversation moving on over time (cf. Popper 1975). But this very durability of Mode 1 knowledge turns out to be a blunt instrument in dealing with the immediacy of problems that, say, surgeons or engineers or architects or social workers or town designers have to face. If professionals are going to be able to do the best for their clients, then they have to attend to the exigencies of particular circumstances and situations. These two sets of distinctions between Modes 1 and 2 knowledge come together in the idea of universality. Both the durability and the

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mode of being called for from Mode 1 knowledge suggest universality in the sense that the status of the knowledge that emerges from such processes has a universal validity; or at least, it can plausibly claim to be universal. Mode 2 knowledge, in contrast, is local through and through. It is not just of the now, it is also of the here; here-and-now. Mode 2 is of the moment. That is its particularity. The twist to our story here, as to the comparative virtues of academic and extramural knowledge, is that even if extramural knowledge turns out to be characteristically local instead of universal and ephemeral rather than long-lasting, that may be all to the good – on some readings at least. The very universality that has enabled academic knowledge to pride itself on its supremacy now turns out, for some, to be a drawback. Universal knowledge is not the kind of knowledge to enable one to get on in the world; at any rate, not in this crazy, multicultured, highly complex and incessantly changing world. Attention to the immediate, the local, is everything. Extramural knowledge, in other words, should not feel downcast as its lack of universality. On the contrary, its very lack of universality is testimony to its potential in-the-world; or, to put it more formally, to its use value. Local and ephemeral knowledge: this is what is required these days to get on in the world. It is formal universal knowledge that has its ‘legitimation crisis’! Of course, things are not as simple as this, and on either side of the argument. On the one hand, as we have seen in this book, many manifestations of extramural knowledge are long-lasting, are formal and are durable; and may even be produced as part of a collaboration with the academic world. On the other hand, increasingly, the knowledge produced within the academy is non-universal. Whether as their permanent callings (as in the fields of leisure, hospitality and transport studies) or as temporary diversions (as where economists take time out to evaluate and commentate on national economic policies) or where individuals live hybrid lives between their academic and professional sites (as in architecture or medicine and the related health areas), much of the work of ‘academies’ is focused on particular matters. Particularity, it should be noticed, can be a feature of the knowledge production of academics whether it is conducted within the walls of the university or outwith those walls. We are seeing the personal, the autobiographical and the first person idiom now emerging as particular research forms not only in the social sciences and the humanities but also in some of the professional areas. Beyond the confines of the campus, academics put their expertise in the service of solving problems in the ‘real world’ that are manifestly local and particular in character.

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That the spaces of the university are enclosed by buildings – whether ancient or modern – is no indicator as to the status of the knowledge produced therein. The universities are no longer to be identified entirely with universal knowledge.

The new democracy of knowledge production We have done three things so far in this chapter: (1) Identified some dimensions by which we might begin to classify forms of knowledge, both within and beyond the walls of the academy; (2) En route, we have noticed that it is far from easy to draw up demarcation lines between academic knowledge and extramural knowledge: in both sites, formal and universal knowledge can be found and, in both sites, too, ephemeral and context-specific knowledge can be found; (3) We have observed that extramural knowledge may be gaining something of a renaissance: if there are features that characteristically attach to extramural knowledge, they may turn out to be just the features that the wider world prizes in the contemporary society. It is worth, perhaps, pressing this third point. To begin with, we should underline a distinction that we observed in our introduction, namely that between the status of knowledge and the genesis of knowledge. The status of knowledge, its formal characteristics, its legitimacy, its credibility as knowledge: these are one set of issues (and are typically among the concerns of philosophers). The processes by which that knowledge came to be produced and the extent to which those processes might have changed over time: this is a quite separate set of issues (Gellner 1969). Historically, in the philosophy of science, this distinction gave rise to talk of contexts of verification on the one hand, and contexts of discovery on the other hand. What is interesting for our present purposes is that, in our contemporary times, amidst the arrival of ‘the knowledge society’ and the parallel developments of the information society and globalisation, this nice distinction – between discovery and verification – is itself breaking down. The medium has become the message. That is to say, the means by which knowledge is produced and disseminated – such as solving of complex multidisciplinary technological problems in situ; the manipulation of electronic data, including in iconic form; the tacit knowledge acquired by professionals – become a mark of the status of knowledge itself. ‘Intellectual property’ is another nice related term in this context: the property attaches very often to a technical process or a technological product,

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and much less to the formal propositions underpinning such processes or products. This emerging collapse of the boundary between judgement and process is a feature of the so-called knowledge society. In the knowledge society, by definition, the production of knowledge is distributed across society. Perhaps not everyone is in the knowledge production business, but many now are. But amid such a democratisation of knowledge production, it is surely inevitable that the old demarcation lines break down. We have seen two kinds of dissolution of knowledge borders. In the earlier part of our explorations, we saw how the boundaries between academic and extramural knowledge are collapsing. Now, here, we are observing the dissolution of the distinction between judgement and process. What counts as knowledge becomes a function of the kind of knowledge it is, rather than a matter of fulfilling formal conditions of knowledge. In the knowledge society, certain ways of encountering the world are felt to be valuable and mostly these are ways that bear immediately on the world. It is often a knowledge with immediate value; it is a performative knowledge (cf. Lyotard 1984). In the knowledge society, the thought emerges that we should abandon any hope or pretence of identifying any demarcation lines between valid forms of knowledge and inferior forms of knowledge. The thought arises, too, that we should give up any sense that certain forms of knowing are associated with some sites of knowledge production; after all, we have seen that formal knowledge is to be found in extramural settings and ephemeral knowledge is to be found in academic settings. All this is to be expected. After all, we live amid ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000) or, as I have termed it elsewhere, ‘an age of supercomplexity’ (Barnett 2000). This is a world in which all bets are off, nothing is certain, all concepts and frameworks are up for grabs, and are incessantly challenged and renewed. In such an age, claims to knowledge are contested and from many quarters; and so there emerges a sense of fragility. But the upside is that opportunities open for new claimants, bearing new forms of knowledge, to gain a hearing. This, after all, has to be part of the new democratisation of knowledge production. The parties proliferate, even if here they are knowledge parties as distinct from political parties. All it takes is a critical mass of followers with not just the means of production but media and opportunities for dissemination and customers who value the new knowledges and the new claimants can be in business. And so the think tanks spring up, the websites multiply with their dialogic forms of

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communication, the television channels mushroom, and the consultants’ reports proliferate.

New amateurs or new professionals? What is striking in this new knowledge order is that old categories become obsolete. Perhaps there just may have been a time – in the fairly recent past – when formal ‘real’ knowledge could be identified with universities and less substantial ways of knowing were felt to be associated with extramural knowledge. One could at least be forgiven for believing then that the professionals were found within academe while those extramural activities were the efforts of (mere) amateurs. As several examples in this book have demonstrated, any such view was overhasty: the so-called amateurs in the wider society were often highly professional in their approach. But the point here is that no such classification – of professionals within the walls and amateurs beyond – can even be plausibly entertained in the contemporary fluid world. For this fluidity attaches to knowledge itself. It spawns, as we have also seen, not just a Mode 2 knowledge, but many knowledges (plural). The boundaries dissolve and the demarcation lines dissolve too. In the process, as we put it, epistemic identities dissolve. Formerly, botanists and geologists could recognise each other as botanists and geologists, whether they were within the walls of the academy or outwith the walls. Now, in the knowledge society, such definiteness of identity structures crumbles. In such an age, too, literacy is no longer tied to writing but becomes inherently ‘multimodal’ (Kress 2003). Partly, this ending of tight knowledge identities comes about because, as we have seen, what counts as bona fide knowledge is itself no longer clear cut. The new knowledges have hardly begun to acquire common names: experiential learning or e-learning or multimodal literacy or Mode 2 knowledge – terms such as these hardly trip off the tongue in high table conversation, let alone in everyday interchange. Partly, too, this loss of knowledge identity is a matter of the fluidity of knowledge boundaries: in the knowledge society, knowing is inherently a coat of many colours. Even the terms ‘multidisciplinary’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ are too definite for they speak the old language of knowing-throughdisciplines when just that kind of knowing is being put in question (cf. Peters 1999). And partly, too, this fluidity in knowledge identities is a result of the democratisation of knowledge production that is a sine qua non of the knowledge society. If everyone can be their own knowledge monger and if the knowledge police are thin on the ground, then all

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manner of knowledge garbs are likely to spring up; a bit like the actual styles of self-presentation to be seen on Camden high street in London on a summer’s weekend. If, as we have seen, the distinction between professional and amateur no longer is of much help to us in classifying knowledge identities in the modern world, are there any other categories that can be pressed into service? Indeed, could there be any such categories in such an epistemologically changing world, a world of knowledges in which the validity of many of even formal knowledges is in doubt? Think, for example, of the protests that attach to vivisection associated with medical research or to various aspects of biotechnological research, in which genes are manipulated. In the contemporary world, even ‘scientist’ and ‘academic’ may fall under some suspicion as acceptable categories of epistemological identity. The difficulties that attach, therefore, to locating stable and legitimate knowledge identities are as much political as they are sociological and philosophical. In some communities, the computer ‘hacker’ is presumably well regarded, indeed even heralded as a person who shows up corporate incompetence of one kind or another. In others, such people are reviled: yes, they have extraordinary knowledge, understanding and skills, but they are misusing that knowledge to effect discomfort on many ‘innocent’ individuals. This contemporary reflection confirms the point that Ernest Gellner made some time ago, that the appellation ‘knowledge’ is a normative judgement. It is an act of conferring dignity and esteem on certain approved ways of understanding and interacting with the world. And, of course, some are in stronger positions than others to influence and even control the means of conferring dignity and esteem; though the examples we have just been noting indicate that there is here an epistemic battle ground, in which the knowledge claimants often violently contend with each other. The violence is often more than verbal in character; sometimes blood is spilt; people even die. Our question remains, therefore, although now it takes on something of an edge: are there any categories by which we can distinguish knowledge identities in this fluid and messy – and even bloody – world? Two categories surely suggest themselves. First, a category hinged around power: in this world, as in others, there are the knowledge powerful and the knowledge powerless. This is not just a matter of the extent to which electronic web pages are created by a very small proportion of the world’s population, read by a larger proportion and remain inaccessible to yet a larger proportion. It is also a matter, as remarked, as to the capacities of individuals and groups to exert discursive influence as it

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might be termed. Some are simply better placed than others – through their access to various media, resources and networks – to influence the ways of coming to know the world that are felt to be worthwhile. And the ways of knowing that attract high marks change remarkably rapidly in the contemporary world (or at least are quickly overlain by new ways of knowing): numbers give way to systems modelling and the relative fixity of the latter gives way to representations of multimedia form, that are themselves changing in real time. Perhaps, in the therapeutic society that may be emerging, we shall see yet newer forms of self-understanding being heralded. Alongside this dimension of power there stands, surely, another dimension by which we may distinguish knowing efforts, even in a fluid age. This is the dimension of the market. We have glimpsed its presence more than once in these explorations: a criterion of knowledge value in the contemporary world is – as we noticed earlier – that of customer interest. Knowledge mongers need their customers: no customer then at least reduced value, if not nil value, in the knowledge on offer. Of course, these two dimensions of knowledge identities – power and market – intersect but they are by no means identical. These days, knowledge markets open – especially through the Internet – even to the relatively powerless; contrariwise, some are in positions of power to influence a discourse – for example, about the way in which the quality of a public service might be evaluated – even though markets may be only minimally involved. So, within fluidity and contestation, and amid plurality and dissolving boundaries, epistemic identities may be strongly contoured by markets and power. These emerge as structuring modalities. But, if so, this is surely a dismal outturn. At the very moment when knowledge opportunities open up more than ever before, so they also seem constrained by such ubiquitous presences as markets and power. This democratisation of knowledge production, heralded by the knowledge society, turns out – like so many appearances of democracy – to be a limited democracy; indeed, a controlled democracy. We may even have here a corrupted democracy, for the new knowledge may turn out to be tainted by power and the influence of the market. The new democracy has a doubly suspect air about it.

A knowledge ethic for the twenty-first century The proliferation of extramural knowledges in the knowledge society indicates a potential in society for new public spaces. The new electronic

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media, on which many of the new knowledges depend – though not all, by any means – much aid this potentiality. Now, individual knowledge producers can speak immediately to the world and have the world speak back to them. In this respect, in this democratic inquiry becoming itself a kind of public narrative, extramural knowledge shows again its capacity not just to ape academic knowledge but even to surpass it in the very forms by which it wishes to be known. Academic knowledge has long prided itself on its capacities for openness and transparency, and for dialogical conversation. Now, at the very moment when academic interchange in some areas is in the dock as being corrupted by big business (as in the pharmaceutical fields) and when academic journals become increasingly vehicles for the vain and the pretentious, it is extramural knowledge that shows signs of exhibiting genuine dialogical properties (witness William Davies’ and Caspar Melville’s chapters here on the use of the Internet). But, as we have seen, there also have to be doubts about the character and quality of extramural knowledge. Some of it is tainted by the presence of the market and of power. Some of it is tightly managed; large corporations, indeed, may have their own ‘knowledge managers’ (Ichigo et al. 1998) and their task, one might presume, is not only to ensure the optimum exploitation of the knowledge produced by and circulating within such companies but also to manage it as such, to control it in the interests of a company and to safeguard the company’s brandname and so forth. At the same time, too, much extramural knowledge lacks any kind of formal quality control (and so students have to be given health warnings about accessing data too readily from the Internet). Lastly, we are now recognising that much bona fide knowledge is held tacitly as ‘process knowledge’ and ‘personal knowledge’ (Eraut 1994), especially within the sophisticated practices of professionals; and such knowledge is typically unavailable for public scrutiny, let alone general critical reflection. ‘We are all publicists now’ – this seems to be a mantra in the knowledge society. As knowledge producers, we put ourselves into public spaces or, at least, spaces that have varying degrees of collectivity to them. Can there or should there be any rules for this new knowledge society? Or, to the contrary, should we welcome a situation of epistemological mayhem, in which not just anything goes but that anything goes in whatever form you want it to go? In fact, as we have observed, we have a situation quite some way from one of epistemological anarchy. The Internet is increasingly policed, the knowledge managers in the

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corporations control both the form and the content of their knowledge production, and the presences of power and the market exert their influences. Some quite severe controls are already at work, and working in particular interests, and so any suggestion that there might be more control will be anathema to many. I think that we may be able to have it both ways. It is possible to sympathise with those who blanch at any suggestion of knowledge control or surveillance but yet also want to reach for a knowledge ethic that works in the collective interest. What could those collective interests be that do not themselves bring in their wake control, limitation and undue self-censure? Is a knowledge ethic not a legitimation for thought police to be active? Not necessarily, provided that the ethic itself holds to ideals of openness. The fear must be, after all, that the new knowledges may herald forms of closure in society, of limitations of accessibility and surveillance. In that case, a knowledge ethic that was formed in the spirit of openness could just play a helpful part. What might be the elements of such a knowledge ethic? Surely, its components would have to be something like the following: A will to communicate A carefulness in communicating A willingness to hear responses A preparedness to explore the limits of one’s imagination A hospitality (cf. Derrida 2001) towards other presences and other voices A determination to listen and to understand. A knowledge ethic that forms along these lines, not through any kind of formal dictat but organically among knowledge producers, would surely assist the development of the public sphere. Nothing would be ruled out except utterances and processes that were liable to corrode the emergence of such a genuine space for collective inquiries. A knowledge ethic could just help matters forward. Agencies, such as think tanks and knowledge organisations, might even wish publicly to sign up to just such an ethic, even while each developing its own local sense of ‘standards’. Of course, the presences of power, the market and narrow professional interests would still be forces for limiting knowledge and openness. But a knowledge ethic of the kind just sketched could just act also as a set of public standards that brought such malign influence to book.

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Conclusion Knowledge has always been produced outside the walls of the academy. And much of that knowledge production has been every bit as formal, systematic and open as the academy would have us believe characterises its own knowing efforts. At the same time, academic knowledge has probably never been as rational, disinterested and open as the academic world would wish to portray. It turns out that the so-called amateurs producing knowledge in the wider society are often highly professional in their approach, while the so-called professionals within the academy can be seen departing from the formal knowledge manifesto, the script of which they have written for themselves. This essentially fuzzy situation, in which both academic and extramural knowledge share characteristics in common, is being exacerbated in the modern world. By definition, the knowledge society is a society in which knowledge production is widely dispersed: not quite everyone may be producing their own knowledge but at least the opportunities are available for just that development. At the same time, organisational and professional life is increasingly formed around collective forms of knowledge production and knowledge management. Under these circumstances, the categories of amateur and professional, in relation to inquiry, collapse. ‘Research’ itself becomes a fuzzy category, too. But the fuzziness that accompanies this democratisation of inquiry is accompanied by tendencies to misshape: the fuzziness is becoming misshapen. The market, power, unequal access to media and differential positions in the new knowledge networks ensure that while all can have a voice, some have more of a voice than others. At the same time, the laissez-faire tendencies of knowledge production in the knowledge society mean that standards slip to some extent. The standards of email exchange are not those of the academic journals. The idea suggests itself, therefore, that a knowledge ethic just might be helpful in this new knowledge order. To be appropriate to a fluid world (a world of ‘supercomplexity’), this ethic would have to be build around concepts of openness, accessibility, diversity, dialogue and creativity. Such an ethic could have a number of positive features: • It would act less to constrain the substance of knowledge production and more to provide standards for the processes of its production, recognition and dissemination; • It could curb the worst features of the market and power;

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• It might also enhance the extent to which different forms of inquiry engage with each other (so adding to the fluidity that characterises the modern world); • It could help to unify the knowing efforts and the forms of inquiry within and beyond the walls of the academy (walls that are dissolving in any case); • It could play its part in helping to form a learning society that was open, self-critical, and interested in developing collective orientations towards responsible inquiry. It just might be a knowledge ethic for our times.

Acknowledgements I should like to thank Ruth Finnegan and Alison Phipps for helpful comments on drafts of this chapter.

References Barnett, R. (2000) Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity, Buckingham: Open University Press. Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity. Derrida, J. (2001) ‘Hospitality, perfectibility, responsibility’, in Patton, P. and Smith, T. (eds), Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction Engaged – The Sydney Seminars, Sydney: Power Publications. Eraut, M. (1994) Developing Professional Knowledge and Competence, London: Falmer. Gellner, E. (1969) Thought and Change, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994) The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, London: Sage. Ichigo, K., von Krogh, G. and Nonaka, I. (1998) ‘Knowledge enablers’, in von Krogh, G., Roos, J. and Kleine, D. (eds), Knowing in Firms: Understanding, Managing and Measuring Knowledge, London: Sage. Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age, London: Routledge. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2001) Rethinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity Press. Peters, M. (ed.) (1999) After the Disciplines: Disciplinarity, Culture and the Emerging Economy of Studies, Westport, CT: Begin and Garvey. Popper, Sir K. (1975) Objective Knowledge, London: Oxford University Press.

Index accountability, see validation of knowledge/research activist bodies, 2, 185 Adam Smith Institute, 170 Adams, Mary, 143 African literature, 9 Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, 55 agronomy, 3 AIP, see Archaeological Investigations Project Airy, George, 69, 70, 76 Aitchison, K., 102, 108 All Consuming, 218, 226 All Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group, 103, 108 Allen, David E., xiv, 4, 10, 36–49, 51, 120, 134, 152, 162, 247 Allison, J.J., 193, 197 Almondsbury Local History Society, 137 Alter, P., 80, 90 amateurs and archaeology, 95–109 and astronomy, 2, 3, 23–35 and botany, 36–49 concept of, 6–7, 66, 263–77 and family and local history, 110–23 and professionals, 66, 75–6, 263–77; collaboration with, 3, 106, 107, 160; overlap with, 3, 4, 66, 263–4, 272, 276 see also independent researchers; professionalisation; volunteers Amazon, 218, 239 Amoroso, Marina, 178 Amundson, R., 55, 62 Ancient Monuments Act, 98 Anderson, Ben, xiv, 4, 149, 183–97, 218 Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett, 73 Anderson, R.D., 249, 260 Andrews, E.K., 90

anthropology, 54, 57–8, 138, 149 antiquarianism, 95–7 APPAG, see All Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group Apple, 246 Arbuthnott Community Association Reminiscence Group, 136 Archaeological Investigations Project, 101, 104, 105 archaeology, 3, 4, 8, 12, 42, 95–109 Architectural and Archaeological Society of the County of Buckingham, 113 Arditi, Jorge, 17, 18 Arendt, H., 235, 241 Armytage, W.H.G., 249, 260 associations, see societies Astin, Alexander W., 256, 260 Aston, Lord, 111 astronomy, 2, 3, 8, 23–35 astrophysics, 9 Aubrey, John, 96 audiences, 8–9, 65–78, 209–10, 252 constructing audiences, 74–5 and popularisation, 66–7 at Royal Institution, 67–74 women in, 73–4 see also lectures Aughton, Peter, 35 Austin, G.E., 160, 162 Austoker, J., 80, 83, 90 authorisation of research, see regulation of research; validation of knowledge/research Avonmouth Genealogy Group, 137 Babington, Charles Cardale, 42 Bahn, P.G., 96, 108 Bailey, J.E., 35 Baillie, S.R., 158, 159, 163, 164 Baker, Samuel, 76 Ballance, D.K., 152, 163 Banks, A.N., 155, 163 278

Index 279 Baptist Missionary Society, 55 Barabási, A., 224, 227 Barff, Charles, 56 Barger, Jorn, 215 Barnett, Anthony, 199, 200–1, 211 Barnett, Ronald, xiv, 10, 12, 13, 16, 248, 257, 258, 260, 263–77 Barrett, J.C., 102, 108 Barth, Fredrik, 17 Bateman, Thomas, 96–7 Bauman, Zygmunt, 172, 177, 179, 255, 260, 270, 277 BBC, 234, 236, 237, 241, 254 Beckensall, Stan, 107 Becker, B.H., 73, 77 Beenham History Group, 136 Bence Jones, Henry, 68, 77 Bender, Thomas, 253, 260 Bengali Asiatic Society, 55 Berman, Jerry, 198, 211 Berman, M., 42, 48, 67, 77 Besbeas, P., 159, 163 Bibby, C.J., 154, 160, 163 Biddle, Martin, 100, 102, 108 ‘big science’, 3, 8, 15 biogeography, 3 biography, 3 biology, 55 biotechnology, 246, 256 Birmingham and District Local History Association, 121 Bishop, M., 102, 108 black studies, 9 Blackburn, T.M., 157, 164 Blackstone, Baroness, 105, 108 Bland, R., 107, 108 Bland, R.L., 160, 163 Bligh, D., 15, 17 blogosphere, see blogs, blogging blogs, blogging, 4, 13, 149, 210, 212–28, 236, 259 see also Internet; publishing Blood, R., 215, 227 Bloome, D., 147 Bok, Derek, 248, 260 Bompas, G.C., 69, 77 books, 11, 231, 232, 233 see also libraries; print Booth, Wayne, 6, 17

Bortnick, S., 190, 196 botany, 2, 3, 4, 11, 36–49, 55, 56 Bouchet, Jean-Venaut, 54 Bournemouth University, 106 Bowden, M., 104, 108 Boxgrove History Group, 137 Boyce, A., 190, 196 Boym, Michal Piotr, 56 Bracknell and District Historical Society, 137 Brady, Mark, xiv, 13, 149, 212–28, 259 Brady, Meg, xiv Brahe, Tycho, 23, 24, 26 Breeze, Beth, 174–5, 176, 179 Briggs, Charles, xiv British Archaeological Association, 96–7 British Association for Local History, 121 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 152 British Library, 166 British Museum, 111 British Ornithologists’ Club, 153 British Telecom, 254 British Trust for Ornithology, 152–65, 266 Broad, R., 140, 149 broadcast media, 9 broadcasting organisations, 2 see also under individual names Brookings Institution, 170, 172 Brooks, S.P., 159, 163 Brown, George, 56 Brown, Ian, 137 Brown, J.S., 17, 219, 227 Browne, S.G., 60, 62 Bryder, L., 80, 83, 90 BTO, see British Trust for Ornithology Bulmer, Martin, 247, 260 Burke, Peter, 9, 10, 17 Burroughs Wellcome, 84 Burrows, R., 192, 197 business research, 5, 166 see also commerce and research; industrial research Butchart, A., 60, 61 Bute, Earl of, 38 Bytheway, B., 148, 149

280 Index Caillard, Emily, 74, 76 Calder, A., 144, 150 Cambrian Archaeological Association, 97 Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, 114–18 Camden, William, 96 Camenietzki, C.Z., 54, 62 Campbell, John, 53, 62 Cannizzo, J., 57, 62 Carey, John, 251, 260 Carey, William, 55, 58 Carroll, James D., 168, 169, 179 Carter, Ian, 249, 261 Carter, N., 160, 164 cartography, 2, 52–3 Carver, M.O.H., 102, 108 Casanovas, J.K., 54, 62 Cassidy, Fay, 136 Castells, Manuel, 1, 17, 183, 196, 198, 211, 259, 261 Catholic University, Dublin, 98 CBA, see Council for British Archaeology CEC, see Commission of the European Communities Centre for Studies in Social Policy, 171 Chamberlain, D.E., 157, 158, 159, 163 Channel 4, 254, 256 Chapman, Allan, 3, 8, 17, 23–35, 50 charities, 2, 4, 16, 101, 102, 106, 160 see also under individual charities Charman, Suw, 214, 222, 223, 224, 225 chatrooms, 201 Chemical Engineering Laboratory, 86 Chemical Research Laboratory, 82 chemistry, 82, 86, 87, 246 Childe, V. Gordon, 98 Chloride Electrical Storage Company, 86 Chocolate N’ Vodka, 214 church law, 2 Church Missionary Society, 57 Church of Latter Day Saints, 120–1 CIA, see Council for Independent Archaeology citations, 14, 216, 217, 219

Civitas, 174 Clacton VCH Group, 113, 121 Clark, Burton R., 255, 261 Clark, J.A., 154, 163 Clarke, W.E., 152, 163 clergy, as researchers, 44, 113 Clerke, Agnes, 74 Clifford, J., 57, 62 Cline, R., 192, 196 clubs, see societies Coates, T., 215, 216, 227 Codrington, Robert, 58 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 183, 196 Colinton Local History Society, 125, 127–8, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136 College of Antiquaries, 96 Collini, Stefan, 167, 179 Collins, Richard, xiii Comaroff, Jean and John, 51, 62 commerce and research, 12, 16, 185 see also business research; financial support; firms; industrial research Commission of the European Communities, 183–4, 196 communication, 11–14, 66–7, 88–9, 119–20, 147, 259–60 see also Internet; lectures; publishing community-based research, 14, 106 community history, 4, 8, 11, 124–37 see also local history conservation, 47, 98, 99–100, 104, 106, 158–60, 161 consultancies, 2, 270 contemporary history, see current history Cook, Yvonne, xiii Cooper, Jacqueline, 120, 121, 134, 136 Cooter, Roger, 66, 77 Copernicus, Nicholas, 23, 27, 34 Cotton Research Association, 82, 87 Coulson, J.C., 160 Council for British Archaeology, 99, 100, 104, 106–7, 108 Council for Independent Archaeology, 104, 105, 108 Countryside Agency, 106 Cowling, Jamie, 178 Crabtree, William, 26–35

Index 281 Crawford, O.G.S., 99 Crick, H.Q.P., 155, 163 criteria, see validation of knowledge/ research Crosfields, 84 Croumbie, John, 54 Crowther, Samuel Ajayi, 59 Cummings, Dolan, 8, 13, 166–79 Cunnington, William, 96–7 Curran, James, 206, 210, 211 current history, 2, 9 see also blogs, blogging Curwen, E. Cecil, 69, 77 D301, DA301 (Open University courses), 118–19, 121 dance studies, 9 Dandy, J.E., 46, 48 Daniel, G., 96, 108 Daniel, Henry, 37 Darvill, T., 101, 102, 103, 105, 108, 109 Darwin, Charles, 65 Davidson, Alistair, 136 Davidson, Andrew, 60 Davie, G.E., 249, 261 Davies, Sue, 128, 137 Davies, William, 9, 13, 185, 229–42, 274 Davis, J.A., 80, 90 de Beer, Gavin, 65, 77 de Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri, 53 Defence of Britain project, 106 Delamothe, T., 192, 197 Delanty, Gerard, 17, 261 demography, 114–17 Demos, 172 Denham, Andrew, 170, 172, 174, 176, 179 Denison, S., 106, 109 Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, 79–91 Derakhshan, Hossein, 199, 211 Derrida, J., 275, 277 Desmond, Adrian, 69, 71, 76, 77 Deveson, Alison M., 134, 136 Devonshire, Duke of, 111 Dewar, James, 74 Diaz, Manuel, 53

Dick, Thomas, 52, 62 Dickens, P., 148, 150 digital divide, 185–96 Dillen, Johann Jacob (Dillenius), 41 disciplines, academic, 7, 8–9, 14, 16, 74, 98, 100, 168–9, 176, 210, 255, 256 see also interdisciplinary research; Mode 1/Mode 2 knowledge Disney, Charles, 98 domestic research, 4, 16 Drake, Michael, xiii, 4, 8, 110–23, 134, 248 Driver, F., 55, 62 Drymen and District Local History Society, 137 DSIR, see Department of Scientific and Industrial Research du Chaillu, Paul, 76 Duffield, John and Brigid, xiv Duguid, P., 17, 219, 227 Dutta-Bergman, M.J., 193, 196 e-Living project, 185–96 East Bergholt Society, 136 ecology, 157–8 Economist, The, 221, 227, 256, 261 Edgerton, David, 84–8, 90, 246, 261 Edkins, Joseph, 56 Egerton, F.N., 46, 48 electronics, 256 Eliot, T.S., 258 Ellis, William, 57 Elton, G.R., 131, 136 email, 147, 201, 207, 210, 230, 233, 234, 239 see also Internet Endfield, G.H., 54, 62, 63 endorsement of research, see recognition / non-recognition of research; validation of knowledge/ research engineering, 87, 246 English (language), 38–9, 44, 209 Enlightenment, 7, 54, 231, 241 entomology, 2, 43 environment, 54 see also conservation Eraut, Michael, 5, 17, 274, 277

282 Index ethnography, 56, 57–8 Ethnological Society, 58, 74 ethnology, 57 see also anthropology ethnomusicology, 9 ethology, 3 evaluation, see quality control; validation of knowledge/research ‘everyday research’, 183–97 FACHRS, see Family and Community Historical Research Society Family and Community Historical Research Society, 119–20, 121, 134 family history, 3, 4, 8, 11, 110–23, 128, 248 Family Records Centre, 4 Fan, F.-T., 56, 62 Fang, Weigui, 199, 211 Faraday, Michael, 68, 70–2, 73, 75, 76 Farley, M., 104, 109 Farquhar, John Nicol, 59 Faulkner, L., 118, 122 Fausset, Bryan, 96–7 Federation of Family History Societies, 4, 121 feminist approaches, 7 Ferris, T., 3, 6, 17 Fewster, R.M., 159, 163 field sciences, 3, 56 see also under individual subjects financial support, 3, 4, 14, 15, 16, 23–4, 34, 41–2, 61, 95, 97, 101–3, 106, 113–14, 133, 141–3, 160, 162, 209, 211 commercial, 8, 23, 79–91, 101–3, 107 governmental/state, 23, 41, 79–91 Finch, J., 144, 150 Finnegan, Ruth, 1–19, 61, 118, 122, 135, 277 Fircroft College, 250 Firefox browser, 4 firms, 2, 3, 4, 12, 79–91, 246 see also under individual names Fison, Lorimer, 57 Flamsteed, John, 27, 34, 35 Fleming, S., 140, 149

Fleury, M., 116, 122 Flinn, Sybil, 136 folklore, 3, 8, 58 Food Investigation Board, 83 food research, 83, 87 Forbes, Edward, 76 Ford, 256 forestry, 3 Forgan, Sophie, 6, 65–78, 175 Forster, E.M., 251 Foucault, M., 60 Fowler, Simon, 120, 122 Fox, S., 192, 197 Frazer, James G., 57 Freeman, R., 156, 163, 190, 191, 197 Friday, James, 71, 77 Fuel Research Station, 83 Fuller, R.J., 156, 157, 158, 163, 164 Fuller, Steve, 2, 14, 17 Furedi, Frank, 168, 179 Furness, R.W., 159, 164 Galileo Galilei, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27–9, 34, 54 Gallup Europe, 186, 197 Gamlin, Brenda, 136 Garfield, S., 140, 150 Garnett, Mark, 170, 172, 174, 176, 179 Gascoigne, William, 26–35 Gassendi, Pierre, 25, 26 Gaston, K.J., 157, 164 Gaudillière, J.-P., 5, 18 Gautier, E., 116, 122 Geikie, A., 69, 75, 76, 77, 78 Gellner, Ernest, 272, 277 gender, 3, 39, 52, 67, 73–4, 126, 140–1, 147, 162, 190–1, 192–4 as exclusionary, 3, 7, 67, 73–4 genealogy, 125, 248 see also family history genetics, 3 geography, 3, 52–6 Geological Survey, 42 geology, 3, 36 geophysics, 3 Gibbons, D.W., 156, 164 Gibbons, Michael, 7, 18, 254, 256, 261, 266, 267, 277 Giddens, Anthony, 259, 261

Index 283 Gieryn, T.F., 6, 18 Girardot, N.J., 58, 62 glass research, 87 Golby, J., 118, 122 Good, C.M., 60, 62 Goodyer, John, 37 Google, 201, 240 Gould, P., 74, 77 government and research, 2, 12, 15, 16, 79–91, 98, 101–2, 104–5, 185 see also financial support; local authorities/government; regulation of research Granovetter, M.S., 190, 197 Grayling, A.C., 120, 122 Greatheed, Samuel, 57 Greenwell, William, 96–7 Greenwood, Jeremy J.D., 4, 8, 11, 47, 116, 134, 139, 152–65, 247 Gregory, R.D., 159, 164 Gresham College, London, 25, 26 Gross, Ronald and Beatrice, 6, 15, 16, 18 Grove, R.H., 54, 62 Grove, W.R., 70 Gulick, A., 62 Gulick, John T., 55, 62 Gunson, N., 56, 58, 63 Gunther, R.T., 37, 48 Habermas, J., 235, 236, 237, 241 hacker, 6, 10, 235–7, 272 Haddington Remembered Group, 132, 137 Haddon, Alfred C., 57 Haggett, Peter, 61 Halsey, A.H., 253, 261 Hardy, W.B., 83 Harriot, Thomas, 25, 27 Harris, L.M., 143, 150 Harris, S.J., 52, 63 Harrison Ports, S., 190, 196 Harrison, K., 148, 150 Harrisson, Thomas Harnett (Tom), 138–43, 150, 154 Harvard University, 248 Harvey, A.D., 9, 18 Harvey, J., 37, 48 Hastings, A., 59, 63

Hatch, R.A., 53, 63 Haughey, M., 221, 227 Hawkes, Christopher, 98, 100, 109 Haynes, K., 192, 196 Hays, J.N., 77 HCSB, 254 health research, 184, 186–9, 192–4 HEFCE, see Higher Education Funding Council for England Heimann, J.M., 139, 150 Helm, Judy, 128, 137 Helmore, Holloway, 54 Henderson, I.G., 158, 164 Henry, Louis, 116, 122 Herbert, Alicia, 136 Heritage Foundation, 254 Heritage Lottery Fund, 106, 113, 133 heritage organisations, 102, 110, 254 Hevelius, 33, 35 Hickling, Ronald, 154, 164 Higher Education Funding Council for England, 5, 18 Hilditch, Percy, 86 Himanen, P., 6, 18 history, 3, 47, 247 see also community history; current history; family history; local history; micro history; natural history; oral history; population history; public history Ho, Karen, xiii Hoare, Richard Colt, 96–7 Hobsbawm, E.J., 120, 122 Hobson, Benjamin, 56, 60 Holland, M., 120, 122 Hollom, P.A.D., 154 Hooke, Robert, 24 Hooker, William J., 40 Hopkins, Peter, 137 Horrigan, J.B., 186, 197 Horrocks, Jeremiah, 26–35 Horrocks, S., 84, 85, 87, 88, 90 Horsley, John, 96–7 Houston, T.K., 193, 197 Hudson, Alan, 177, 179 Hudson, D., 71, 77 Hudson, K., 97, 101, 109 Hudson, P., 132, 136 Huggins, P., 104, 109

284 Index Huggins, William, 76 Hunt, Alexander J., 4, 8, 42, 44, 95–109, 134 Hurst History Study Group, 137 Hutchinson, E., 82, 90 Huxley, T.H., 69, 70–1, 74, 76, 138 Huygens, Christiaan, 33, 35 Ichigo, K., 274, 277 ICI, 86, 87, 88 ICT(s), see information and communication technology/ies Ilford’s, 86 Imperial College, 86, 257 independent researchers, 2–7, 16 and passim associations of, 4, 15, 17 characteristics of, 6–7, 125–30, 138, 140–2, 145–8, 160–2, 186–96 collaboration/interaction with academics, 2–3, 4, 12, 15; see also universities, and extra-university interaction disadvantages, 15, 248 motivations of, 6–7, 127–30, 141–2, 145–6, 161, 222–7 numbers of, 4, 48, 114, 135–6, 146–7, 153, 160, 162 occupations/backgrounds of, 11, 23, 26, 39, 42, 44, 50, 73–4, 97, 124–7, 138, 140–1, 145–8, 162, 204, 251, 256; see also clergy, as researchers; ‘everyday research’; gender; medical practitioners, as researchers; missionaries qualifications of, 11, 126–7, 161; see also training and independent researchers see also amateurs; intellectuals; volunteers see also under specific examples Independent, The, 254 industrial research, 5, 16, 79–91, 246, 256 information and communication technology/ies, 183–97, 230, 232–3 see also Internet

information society, see knowledge society Inkster, Ian, 77 Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr), 171, 177, 254 Institute of Archaeology, 98 Institute of Brewing, 88 Institute of Economic Affairs, 170 Institute of Field Archaeologists, 102 Institute of Historical Research, 113 Institute of Ideas, 178 intellectual authority, see validation of knowledge/research intellectuals, 172–3, 166–79 passim see also independent researchers interdisciplinary research, 169, 173, 178, 271 Internet, 3, 4, 11, 12, 15, 149, 183–241 passim, 254, 270, 273–4 flexibility of, 230–4, 237, 239 as interactive, 199–200, 203, 204–6, 208, 212–27 see also blogs, blogging; digital divide; posts, on Internet; public realm; publishing ippr, see Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) Jacoby, Russell, 9, 18, 252, 261 Jadad, A.R., 192, 197 James, Frank A.J.L., 67, 70, 77 James, Louis, 251, 261 Janes, Denise, xiii Jankovic, V., 54, 63 Jarvis, Peter, 15, 18 Jennings, Humphrey, 138, 139, 141, 142, 150 Jesuits, 52, 53, 54 Jewsbury, Geraldine, 73 job research, 184, 185, 186–92 John, M., 119, 122 Johns Hopkins University, 246 journals, 55, 88–9, 119, 121, 133–4, 161, 202, 204, 233, 236, 274 Jowett, Benjamin, 8 Kant, Immanuel, 235–7, 238, 241 Kay, E.A., 55, 63 Kent, D.H., 45, 48

Index 285 Kepler, Johannes, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27–32, 34 Keynes, J. Maynard, 143 Kidd, Samuel, 59 Kintbury Volunteer Group, 136 Kitson-Clark, G., 131–2, 136 knowledge accumulation and storage, 134–5, 147–8, 218–19, 223, 259, 260 conceptualisations of, 1, 5–10, 50, 167–8, 263–77 contested, 250–1, 270–1, 272 demarcations of, 6, 7–10, 16, 50, 248, 252, 263–77 as dialogic, 7, 12, 198–211, 212–27, 270, 274 distributed, 212, 216–21, 270 evaluative term, 8, 252, 264, 272 as plural, 7, 14, 250–1, 256, 266–8, 270, 271–2 restricted, 1, 3, 7–10, 12, 14, 16, 84, 88, 176, 199, 209–10, 251–2 social history of, 7, 8–10 as socially shaped, 5–10, 252–3 theoretical, 148, 257–60 see also Mode 1/Mode 2 knowledge; public realm; research; validation of knowledge/ research; universities knowledge ethic, 13, 16, 273–7 knowledge society, 1, 2, 14–17, 65, 121, 148–9, 167–8, 183–6, 210, 226, 245–62, 269 Kochhar, R.K., 54, 63 Kohler, R.E., 3, 18 Kress, G., 271, 277 Kuhn, P., 190, 191, 197 Kuklick, H., 3, 18 Kushner, T., 148, 150 laboratory science, 3, 79 Lack, P.C., 156, 164 Lambrick, G., 104, 109 Lane, Celia, 137 Langhamer, C., 148, 150 language, academic, 8–9, 209–10, 252, 274 see also English (language); Latin languages research, 2, 3, 11, 56–9

Larsen, Solana, 208–9 Laslett, Peter, 114 Last, Nella, 140 Latin, 8, 26, 32, 37–8, 39, 44 Leadbeater, Charles, 4, 6, 18 learning age, 1, 15 lectures, 11, 65–78, 104, 125, 233 at Royal Institution, 67–74 see also audiences Legge, James, 58, 59 legitimation of research, see validation of knowledge/research Leicester University College, 112 Leiper, J.G., 137 leisure, ‘serious’, 6–7 Leland, John, 95–6 Leslie, Larry, 258, 261 Lester, J., 225, 227 Lever’s, 86 Levien, Roger E., 169, 179 LHI, see Local Heritage Initiative Li Shanlan, 56 libraries, 26, 29, 37, 97, 118, 131, 133, 134, 166 life history, 8 lifelong learning, 15 Lindley, John, 56 linguistics, see languages research Linnaeus, 38 Linnean Society, 4–5, 55, 67 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 72, 73, 74 Linux, 3–4, 5, 225 literary analysis/criticism, 3, 247 Livingstone, David, 52, 54, 55, 57, 63 Livingstone, David N., 7, 13, 50–64, 247 LMS, see London Missionary Society local authorities/government, 101–2, 106, 113 see also parish councils Local Heritage Initiative, 106, 109 local history, 2, 110–23 and national history, 114–15, 117, 132–5 see also community history Local Population Studies Society, 121 Lockyer, Norman, 76 Lodge, Oliver, 76, 77

286 Index London Missionary Society, 53, 56, 57, 58, 60 London School of Economics, 172 Longobardi, Nicolo, 53 Loomis, Elias, 56 Lousley, J.E., 46, 48 Low Temperature Research Station, 83 Löwy, I., 5 Luffingham, John, 137 Lunar Society, 3 Lyell, Charles, 70 Lyell, Katharine M., 77 Lyotard, Jean-François, 255, 261, 270 Lyson, Samuel, 96 McCarthy, E.D., 17, 18 Mace, J., 148, 150 McEwan, C., 52, 63 McGhee, D., 148, 150 McKay, John H., 4, 8, 10, 119, 124–37 McKay, T.M., 57, 63 McLennan, Gregor, 172, 176, 177, 179 MacLeod, R.M., 80, 81, 82, 90 McNair, S., 2, 18 McNicol, Diane, 125, 137 Madge, Charles M., 138–43, 150, 247 Maggs, B.W., 53, 63 Main, I.G., 160, 164 Malthus, 120 Manning, Cardinal, 76 Manpower Services Commission, 101 Marchant, J.H., 153, 156, 164 market and research, 273, 274–5, 276 Marlow, C., 218, 227 Marsden, B.M., 96, 109 Marshall, J.D., 110, 122 Mass-Observation, 2, 129, 136, 138–51, 153, 247–8, 266 Matthias, P., 80, 90 Mayhew, Robert, 61 mechanics institutes, 65, 66 Medawar, P., 156, 164 medical practitioners, as researchers, 44 medical science, 36, 37, 54, 56, 59–61 Melville, Caspar, 12, 13, 173, 198–211, 259, 274 Merholz, Peter, 215 Merton Historical Society, 137

Metal Detectorists, 8, 105, 107 National Council for, 107 meteorology, 2, 11, 53–6 metrics, 13, 14, 224 Metropolitan Vickers, 86, 88 micro history, 132 micrometer, 28, 30–2 microscopy, 2, 41 Microsoft, 225, 246 military research, 84–5, 87 Miller, D.P., 38, 48 Miller, Paul, 4, 6, 18 Mims, Forrest M. III, 6, 18 Ministry of Information, 143 Ministry of Munitions, 85 missionaries, 2, 11, 13, 50–64 MIT, 246 Mitchell, Liz, 136 Mode 1/Mode 2 knowledge, 7, 256, 266–8, 271 Moffat, Robert, 54 Monserrate, Anthony, 53 Moore, Jonas, 33, 34 Moore, Michael, 208 More, A.G., 152, 165 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 58 Morris, R., 102, 109 Morrison, Robert, 58 Mortimer, J.R., 96–7 Mosaic, 214–15 Moseley, R., 80, 90 Mukherjee, S., 55, 63 Müller, Max, 58 multimodal, 9, 213, 271 Munby, Arthur, 71 Murchison, Roderick, 55, 75, 76 Murray, David, xiv Museum of London, 101 museums, 42, 57, 101, 102, 111, 152 Myers, J.N.L., 98–9, 102, 109 Nash, D.J., 54, 62, 63 National Council for Social and Economic Research, 143 National Institute for Social and Economic Research, 170 National Physical Laboratory, 80, 81, 82 National Trust, 102

Index 287 Nationwide Building Society, 106 natural history, 4, 36, 44, 55–6, 139, 152 see also under individual subjects Naughton, John, xiii Needham, J., 54, 63 Nelson, Ian, 137 Nettleton, S., 192, 197 New Economics Foundation, 177 New Politics Network, 177 newspapers, 2, 161, 234 Newton, Isaac, 30, 54 NGO, see non-governmental organisations Nicholson, Harold, 251 Nicholson, Max, 139, 153–4 Nobel’s, 84 Noble, D.G., 156, 165 non-governmental organisations, 185, 204 see also under individual names Nonaka, I., 274, 277 Nowotny, H., 7, 17, 18, 266, 277 NPL, see National Physical Laboratory Nussbaum, Martha, 252, 261 oceanography, 3 Office for National Statistics, 247 open source movement, 3–4, 25, 226 Open University, xiii, xiv, 117–19, 126, 127, 128, 135 openDemocracy, 13, 198–211, 259 oral history, 8, 9, 131–2, 147 Oral History Society, 133 Ordnance Survey, 99, 111 Orlans, Harold, 168, 169, 179 ornithology, 3, 4, 8, 43, 47, 139, 152–65, 248 Orwell, George, 252 Osborne, Thomas, 172, 176, 177, 179 Owen, George, 59 Owen, Richard, 70, 76 Oxford Archaeology, 106, 109 Oxford English Dictionary, 3 palaeontology, 3 Palfreyman, D., 10, 19 Panton, James, 178 Paradis, E., 153, 165

parish councils, 133 participation as uneven, 183–97 in knowledge society, 2, 14–17, 65, 183–96, 198–211, 226 and passim and global democracy, 198–211 Pashby, B.S., 152, 165 patronage, see financial support Patteson, John, 58 Pattison, Mark, 65, 77 Peach, W.J., 160, 165 Peel, J.D.Y. (John), 51, 59, 63 peer review, 12, 14, 133, 195, 206, 222, 231, 241 Percy, J.R., 3, 6, 18 Perring, F.H., 47, 48 Peters, M., 271, 277 Pew Internet, 186, 192, 218, 219, 227 Pfizer, 256 pharmaceutical research, 87, 246, 274 philology, 3, 56–9 philosophy, 3 Phipps, Alison, 277 Photographic Research Association, 86 physical sciences, 3 Phythian-Adams, C., 111, 122 Piggott, Stuart, 100, 109 Pigholls, Nathan, 33 Pitt-Rivers, Augustus, 98 Plessey factory, 124–5 Pocock, D.F., 145 Policy Studies Institute, 171 Political and Economic Planning, 154, 170, 171 political science, 247 Pollock, Frederick, 70, 71, 77, 111 Pollock, Juliet, 72 Pontefract and District Archaeological Society, 105–6, 109 Poole, Reginald L., 111 Pooley, C.G., 115–16, 122 Popper, Karl, 267, 277 Poppleton History Society, 137 popular music, 9 popularity, as validation, 13, 177, 217, 224, 237 population history, 114–17 Porter, Andrew, 51, 57, 63, 64

288 Index Porter, Sir George, 71, 77 Postan, M.M., 112 posts, on Internet, 11, 200, 202, 204, 208–9, 212–27 see also blogs, blogging Powell, Baden, 76 Powell, F. York, 111 power and research, 272–3, 274–5, 276 Power, Henry, 27 practitioner research, 5, 13, 246 Prichard, James, 57 Priestley, J.B., 252 print, 9, 11 challenged by Internet, 233–41 see also publishing pro-am, 4, 6 professional associations, see societies see also under specific names professionalisation, 4, 6 in archaeology, 95–109 in botany, 47 in ornithology, 160 in science, 74 Pryce, W.T.R., 118, 122 public health, 3, 60–1 public history, 3 public realm, 216–21, 227, 231, 232, 234–41, 273–4 see also publishing public scholarship, 14, 166–7, 176–8 publics, see audiences publishing, 11, 12, 44, 82, 88–9, 104, 116, 118–19, 125, 133–5, 136–7, 141, 148, 161, 176, 198–211, 230–41 amateurisation of, 215–16 entry costs to, 43–4, 198–200, 215–16 gate-keeping to, 199, 215–16, 231, 234, 240 and Internet, 125, 148, 161, 198–211, 212–27, 231–41 see also books; communication; journals; lectures; print; public realm Pumfrey, Stephen, 66, 77 Pycraft, W.P., 152 Pyenson, L., 54, 64

quality control, 83–4, 102–3, 161, 274 see also peer review; regulation of research; validation of knowledge/research RAE, see Research Assessment Exercise Rainie, L., 186, 190, 192, 196, 197 RAND Corporation, 170 Ranger, T., 61, 64 Rawcliffe, C., 37, 48 Rawlinson, Henry, 76 Ray, John, 41, 43 Razzell, P.E., 115, 122 Readings, Bill, 257, 261 recognition / non-recognition of research, xii, 6–7, 10–14, 15, 16, 110, 248, 264–9 see also validation of knowledge/ research record offices, 3, 118, 131, 134 see also libraries Rees, William Hopkyn, 59 regulation of research, 11, 230–2, 240, 274–5 in archaeology, 98, 102–3, 104–5, 107 self-regulation, 13, 105, 208–9 see also quality control; validation of knowledge/research religion and science, 7, 33–4, 50–64 Renaissance, scientific revolution of, 23–5 reputation, as endorsement of knowledge, 238–40 Rescue, 101 research as collaborative/ collective, 10–11, 47, 142, 148, 155, 161, 212–27 as communicated, 11–14; see also publishing definitions of, 1, 7, 8, 16, 83–4, 110, 130–4, 141, 143–5, 148–9, 167–8, 184–5, 195, 201–2, 218–19, 223, 230, 257–9, 260, 264–77; see also knowledge, conceptualisations of, demarcations of as evaluative term, 8, 172–5, 253 as practice-based, 5, 13, 80

Index 289 see also ‘everyday research’; independent researchers; knowledge; practitioner research; recognition / non-recognition of research; universities see also under specific research topics Research Assessment Exercise, 2, 8, 97, 117, 169, 203, 246, 256 research institutes, 2, 4, 82–3, 89, 246 see also under individual names Ricci, Matteo, 53 Rice, E.P., 59 Richards, Evelleen, 72, 74, 77 Richmond, Ian, 98 Rigaud, S.J., 35 Rivers, W.H.R., 58 Roberts, Gareth, 2, 18 Roberts, Gerrylyn, xiii Robinson, R.A., 158, 159 Roebuck, Neville, 137 Roell, M., 223, 227 Rogers, A., 112, 117, 122 Romanes, George John, 55 Rose, Jonathan, 251, 261 Rose, R., 191, 197 Rowe, Peter, 137 Royal Archaeological Institute, 97 Royal Commission, 2, 265 Royal Gardens, Kew, 40 Royal Geographical Society, 55, 56, 111 Royal Institute of International Affairs, 170 Royal Institution, London, 65, 67–78 Royal Polytechnic Institution, 71 Royal School of Mines, 76 Royal Society, 27, 33, 34, 67 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, 159 RSPB, see Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Rucker, A.W., 76 Rudé, G., 120, 121 Rupke, Nicolaas, 61 Ruskin College, 250 Ruskin, John, 76 Russell, B., 101, 102, 103, 105, 109

Salam Pax, 220–1 Sampson, John, 57, 64 Sanderson, M., 84, 85, 86, 87, 90 Sanneh, Lamin, 58, 64 Schofield, R.S., 114, 115, 116, 122 Schumacher, E.F., 258 Schürer, K., 119, 122 Schutz, Alfred, 258 science, see knowledge see also professionalisation; religion and science; and under specific branches Scientific American, 3 Scott, Peter, 2, 10, 17, 18, 254, 261, 266, 277 Scottish Local History Forum, 134 Secord, A., 18, 39, 48 Secord, James A., 66, 76, 78 Sedgwick, Adam, 70, 75 seismology, 2 Selkirk, A., 99, 101, 109 Selwyn, George Augustus, 58 Sennet, R. 71, 78 Shakerley, Jeremy, 32 Sharrock, J.T.R., 156, 165 Shaw, J., 148, 150 Shell, 86, 254 Shereburnes, 27, 34 Sheridan, Dorothy, 8, 10, 129, 138–51, 154, 248 Shils, Edward, 259, 261 Shinn, C.H., 83, 90 Shirky, C., 224, 227 Shirley Institute, 82 Shirley, John, 35 Shteir, A.B., 39, 48, 49 Simpson, J., 95, 109 sinology, 58–9 Siriwardena, G.M., 158, 159, 165 Sivasundaram, S., 52, 65 Skinner, H., 193, 194, 197 Skuterud, M., 190, 191, 197 Slate Magazine, 221, 227 Slatter, Bernard, 137 Slaughter, Sheila, 258, 261 Smith, Carrie, 112–13, 122 Smith, Frederick Porter, 56, 64 Snow, C.P., 75 Social Market Foundation, 174

290 Index societies, 12, 16, 66, 121, 133, 148 archaeology, 12, 96–7, 99, 100, 104–5 botany, 45, 46, 47 family and local history, 4, 110, 121, 133–4 of independent scholars, 4, 15, 17 industrial research associations, 81, 86–8 learned, 65, 66 natural history, 4 see also under individual society names Society of Antiquaries of London, 96, 109 of Newcastle, 97 of Scotland, 96 Society of Chemical Industry, 12, 89 socio-economic inquiry, 246, 256 sociology, 144–5, 247 Sohmer, S., 58, 64 Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society, 97 Somerville, Mary, 3, 73 space-probe data, 3 Spadaro, R., 193, 194, 197 Sparks, T.H., 155, 163 Speke, James, 76 Stafford, R.A., 55, 64 Stanley, B., 51, 64 Stanley, Liz, 142, 144, 150 Stanley, N.S., 144–5, 151 Stansel, Valentin, 54 statistical services, 247 Stebbins, Robert A., 6–7, 18 Stenhouse, John, 50, 61, 64 Stocking, G.W., 57, 58, 64 Strand, K., 17, 18 Street, B.V., 147, 150 Stukeley, William, 96 Sunstein, Cass, 205, 211 survey organisations, 2, 247 Swanwick, Anna, 73 Swidler, Ann, 17, 18 Thane, P., 148, 151 theology, 2, 3 think tanks, 2, 3, 13, 16, 154, 166–79, 185, 204, 234, 254, 270 Thomas, J., 148, 151

Thomas, Keith, 17, 18 Thomas, N., 51, 64 Thomson, Wyville, 56 Timbrell, Ruth, 137 Towneley family, 33–4 Charles, 27; Christopher, 27, 32, 34; Richard, 27, 32 training and independent researchers, 11, 110, 117–19, 134, 161 translation, 56, 58 Trebilcock, R., 84, 90 Tully-Jackson, Jack, 137 Tuomi, I., 5, 19 Turnbull, J., 115–16, 122 Tutton, Audrey A., 132, 137 Tylor, Edward B., 58 Tyndall, John, 70, 72, 76 Uglow, Jenny, 3, 19 universities, 12, 234, 245–62, 263–77 and archaeology, 8, 12, 95–109 as central to knowledge production/ recognition, 1–2, 13–14, 16, 185, 245, 253, 257, 271 and extra-university interaction, 2–3, 12, 59, 60, 61, 82, 83, 86, 89, 95–109, 110–23, 127–8, 133–4, 148–9, 160, 202–3, 204, 208, 209–10 and family and local history, 110–23 history and diversities of, 14, 246, 248–57 and industrial research, 12, 79–91 and knowledge society, 245–62 postmodern, 253–7 and shifting/fluid boundaries, 8–10, 14, 98–9, 100, 113, 117–18, 246, 248, 252, 253–7, 270, 271–3 and theoretical knowledge, 257–60 see also under individual universities Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, 61 University College London, 86, 98, 250, 257 University Grants Committee, 91 University of Birmingham, 145, 249, 250 University of Bristol, 172, 250 University of California, 255

Index 291 University of Cambridge, 26, 83, 86, 98, 111, 112, 119, 246, 248–9, 251, 257 University of Edinburgh, 98, 250 University of Lancaster, 115 University of Leeds, 86 University of Liverpool, 86, 249 University of London, 113, 251 University of Manchester, 86, 249 University of Nottingham, 117 University of Oxford, 8, 41, 98, 111, 153, 246, 248–9, 250, 251, 257 University of St Andrews, 255 University of Sussex, 144, 145, 148, 149 Vaidhyanathan, Siva, 199, 203, 210, 211 validation of knowledge/research, 1–2, 11–14, 52, 54, 88–9, 97, 133–4, 195, 202, 203, 206–9, 222, 230–2, 233–41, 248, 254–7, 263–4, 268–72, 274–5 and blogging, 222–5 as collaborative, 222–5 criteria for, 12–14, 89, 173–5, 177, 202, 206–9, 217, 224–5, 230, 236, 237–41, 248, 254–6, 263–77 in family/local/community history, 13, 114–17, 119–20, 134 as multiple, 13–14 and think tanks, 166–79 see also knowledge ethic; metrics; peer review; popularity, as validation; public realm; quality control; recognition / non-recognition of research; regulation of research; reputation, as endorsement of knowledge van Gent, Robert, 35 van Wyhe, John, 76 Varcoe, I., 81, 82, 90, 91 VCH, see Victoria History of the Counties of England Venus, transit of, 32 Verbiest, Ferdinand, 53 Vernon, Keith, 13, 79–91, 246

Vickery, J.A., 158, 165 Victoria History of the Counties of England, 111–14, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123 volunteers in archaeology, 101, 104, 106, 107 in family and local history, 114–17, 248 in Mass-Observation, 138–52, 247–8 in ornithology, 154, 160–2 see also amateurs; independent researchers von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 246 von Krogh, G., 274, 277 Wallace, D.I.M., 154, 165 Wallis, John, 35 Walls, A.F., 59, 64 Walters, M., 160, 165 Walters, S.M., 47, 48 war, as research subject, 125, 132 in blogging, 219–21 Ward, William, 59 Wardley, Peter, 120, 123 Warminster History Society, 137 Warner, A.G., 137 Warner, D., 10, 19 Washington Post, 223, 227 Watson, Hewett Cottrell, 43, 46, 152 Watson, Sophie, xiii Weaver, R. Kent, 172, 179 web, see Internet weblogs, see blogs, blogging Webster, Frank, xiv, 2, 9, 14, 16, 17, 19, 245–62 Weizman, Eyal, 203 Welham, K., 106 Wells, Gordon, 15, 19 Wells, H.G., 252 Wernham, C., 153, 154, 165 West, Patrick, 174–5, 179 Wheeler, Mortimer, 99 White, Alexander, 56 White, Pauline, 120, 123, 137 Whitley, Richard, 17, 19 Whitmee, S.J., 56 wiki, Wikipedia, 225 Wilby, Thelma, 137

292 Index Williamson, Alexander, 56 Willughby, Francis, 41 Wilson, Andrew, 68, 71, 74, 78 Wilson, G., 76, 78 Wilson, J.B., 3, 6, 18 Winchester, Simon, 3, 19 Wing, Sandra Koa, 147 Winkfield History Project Group, 137 Wiseman, Cardinal, 76 Witherby, H.F., 152–3, 165 women’s studies, 9 Wood, Anthony, 95 Wood, J.D., 152, 154, 165

Woolf, Virginia, 251 Woolgar, Steve, xiii Worboys, M., 60, 64 Workers’ Educational Association, 112 Wrigley, E.A. (Tony), 114–16, 123 Wu, Y.-L., 60, 64 Yates, S., 119, 123 Yee, C.D.K., 53, 64 York Archaeological Trust, 106 Zielonko, Helen, 137 zoology, 3, 36, 42