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This book tells a story of sociocultural change in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. It does so not by invoking familiar motifs about epochal change and social transformation, or about how the ‘swinging sixties’ led to a liberation from the traditional hidebound conformism of post-war austerity Britain. Rather, I examine how social science sampling methods – associated with letter writing, questionnaires, interviews, and surveys – mined down to reveal mundane, ordinary life, in miniature, and how such research was implicated in a broader process of building a modern, rational, post-imperial nation. This is therefore not a story of the emergence of popular culture welling up from below, so much as a study of the remaking of relations between intellectualism, skill, and technique, which repudiated the cultural elitism associated with gentlemen intellectuals and which embraced a more earthy technical orientation. I examine the remarkable new role for social scientific expertise in these years. I show how the deployment of new research techniques involved the remaking of politics and culture, notably as the arts and the humanities were increasingly demarcated away from the everyday. I show how new understandings of time, change, space, class, and gender were all refashioned as part of this intensification, through the deployment of myriad classifications, social aggregates, and abstracted territorial entities, in ways which endure into the twenty-first century. This book is therefore both a contribution to our historical understanding of social change in post-war Britain, but also a reflection about the nature of social sciences themselves, both how they have been in the past and – perhaps more importantly – how they should be in the present.
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