Painters have their Retrospective Exhibitions, poets their Selected
Poems, chess masters their Best Games, singers their Greatest Hits.
But a researcher? It seems bold, even vainglorious, to present my
Greatest Hits and Best Games. So much of social science is
collaborative, so much depends on organisations, networks, shared
ideas and shared excitement. This book is not an autobiography, but
it is a collection of work by one researcher over forty years. I
hope to show by example how intellectual projects can develop, how
different lines of thought can meet and weave. The collection is
arranged in five sections, concerned with class structure, gender
relations, the making of masculinities, the social dimension of
education, and the global economy of knowledge. It includes some of
my best-known writing and allows me to raise questions about
change. These fields all involve questions of social justice. When
I started out, I assumed that accurate knowledge and good
understanding would support action for social justice. Sometimes
that assumption was battered — at other times I could be more
optimistic. Choosing the articles wasn't easy. It wasn't a matter
of picking favourites. I wanted texts that would say something
relevant to readers now, and texts that would show the development
of a field through time. Unexpectedly, that meant a tilt towards
theory. I mostly do theoretical work close to empirical studies,
whether fieldwork or archival; I try to think in the presence of
the data, so to speak. So here it is. It may or may not be my Best
Games or Greatest Hits, but it is the best collection of my work. I
hope it will be useful to anyone interested in how ideas develop,
how social science is built, and what directions we might take
intellectual work in the near future.
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