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brief seems merely to act as the bearers of bad tidings, while others crow the
good news and get the plaudits. It is not surprising that media social researchers
frequently succumb sheepishly to the charge that they fail to be fans in their
quest to be critics.
The corrective can be simple. I have often hankered after the example of
Auguste Comte, the 19th-century French writer who gave sociology its name.
Comte would demand that his manservant wake him each morning by shaking
him briskly by the shoulders and admonishing him: ‘Wake master, you have
great things to do.’ Sadly, my own household has not remotely matched this
performance.
But the tradition is an honourable one. It may have been the stench of urban
poverty and the fear of destructive social disorder that drove the development
of the blue books, the social surveys and urban anthropology of Victorian
England. Still, the legacy it created, that of engaged documentary, survived in
the work of Booth and later of Rowntree, and in the 20th century in the film mak-
ing of John Grierson, the heroic journalism of Picture Post, and the ambitious if
flawed social narratives of Mass Observation. Their aims were simple: to tell the
truth and make things better. We lose that simple objective at our peril.
Dangers to our enterprise remain, however, and the dangers are both external
and internal. In Britain we face a culture as sublimely anti-intellectual as any
in Europe. As our Prime Minister observed recently: ‘We should understand a
little less and condemn a little more.’ He has managed both with commendable
skill, but it is a credo to bring the hairs on one’s nape to attention.
The industrialization of higher education confronts so much of our ambition.
Over three-quarters of a century ago two books appeared which should stand on
the shelf of every higher education civil servant in the country. In The Higher
Education in America the great sociologist Thorstein Veblen shrewdly and ironi-
cally surveys the intrusion of business culture into academic life. He writes:

The underlying business-like presumption accordingly appears to be that
learning is a merchantable commodity, to be produced on a piece-rate plan,
bought and sold by standard units, counted and reduced to staple equiva-
lence by impersonal mechanised tests. ... So far as this salesmanlike effi-
ciency goes freely into effect it leads to a substitution of salesmanlike
efficiency ... in the place of scientific capacity and addiction to study. This
process ... [produces] the stale routine of futility (Veblen, 1965/1918: 221–2).

This fear was even more dramatically highlighted in Upton Sinclair’s magnifi-
cent polemic The Goose Step (Sinclair, 1923) which, just a few years after Veblen’s
essay, railed against the ‘New Department Stores’, which he observed the
American universities to have become. [...]
This is the onward march of those whom George Orwell labelled the ‘striped
trousered ones’ – threatening what he called ‘a bureaucratic tyranny’ (Orwell,
1961: 323). The shadow of the ‘striped trousered’ looms large over sociology.
Their language, of total quality management, audit, throughput and efficiency, is
not our language. Their stories are not our stories, and the telling of our tales
must resist the diverting and tempting rhetoric of the market-place. This is the