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Telling Stories: Sociology, Journalism and the Informed Citizen 175

language and philosophy of those who know the price of everything and the
value of nothing.
But if there are dangers without, we cannot ignore the threats from within. The
first and not least of these is the retreat from public issues. The postwar bifurca-
tion of sociology and social policy and administration in British Higher
Education institutions was one of the most destructive, politically emasculating
and intellectually diminishing episodes in British social science.
Sociology suffers from the temptations of introspection, a theoreticism that is
not theory but a turning of our collective backs on the link between biography
and history that is sociology’s core concern. The ‘culture of contentment’ identi-
fied by J.K. Galbraith, which settles readily on the comfortable and successful in
a divided society, can so easily blunt the critical edge of sociology. Once again
Orwell’s warning of the irresponsibility of noncommitment – hiding, as he put
it, ‘inside the whale’ – should stand before us. If we lose sight of the mundane
cruelties of social structure the essential integrity of critical social research is
abandoned.
It now becomes urgent to rediscover the firmly-rooted concerns with such old-
fashioned nostrums as power and inequality if we are to recover the story-telling
potency of sociology. The questions we ask can so easily migrate into the inter-
nal world of the private and away from the pressing task of constructing, with
reasoned argument and credible evidence, the critique of public life.
Secondly, we face the temptations of grand design. Anxious to stand large on
the horizon of history we see new eras at every turn. The coming of postindus-
trialism, postmaterialism and most recently of postmodernism in our academic
discourses reflects this desperate premonition of cataclysm. We live in a time
dwarfed by a sense of transition, creating a ‘first past the post’ mentality. As the
millennium approaches we succumb readily to such rhetoric as that of the Club
of Rome: ‘We are in the early stages of forming a new world society ... dense
with information technology, confused about morals and ethics, and in social
and educational chaos’ (1972).
Thank goodness for the reassurance of British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd
that ‘history has not ended’. We are foolish to disagree. From fears of the new ice
age in the 1970s to global warming in the 1980s, and suggestions of the end of
history more recently, we have seen the dangers of being drawn into this game.
Rapid and dramatic shifts in the political order in eastern Europe and the third
world, environmental uncertainty, the globalization of production and the emer-
gence of a new international division of labour, all undoubtedly feed this
intimation of change. But we should be wary of hasty labelling.
With the help of my former research assistant Beckie Walker I have precisely
located the start of postmodernism in the middle of 1986. The term originates in
discussion of Latin American poetry in the 1930s (Osborne, 1992). But in the UK
before 1986 there were just 25 books or articles which referred to postmodernism
or postmodernity in their title. In the next three years there were nearly 300.
Obviously something happened in 1986. Far be it from me to suggest we would
learn more about the onset of postmodernism by assessing the marketing ploys
and methods of academic publishers, but I offer the finding freely. The tempta-
tions of era-labelling taunt us all, and must be resisted.