Conference programme - Session 4

Mike Savage

‘Transactional data and the coming crisis of empirical sociology’

Biography
Mike was trained initially as a historian (BA at York and MA at Lancaster). He then became a sociologist in part by design, since he was interested in the grand theoretical questions which sociologists tend to pose, and part by luck (the Department of Sociology at Lancaster happened to have a PhD grant available!). His doctoral work, which became his first book, was on the history of the local Labour movement in Preston, Lancashire between 1880 and 1940. This study was a specific case study, but contains many issues of enduring interest to him: the changing role of place, space, locality; the significance of time; and social inequality and social movements. He has been unable to shake off an enduring enthusiasm for geography (his favourite subject at school) and history. Much of his research tries to develop a sociology of stratification which is adequate to 21st century complexities and fluidities. This has involved him in thinking about the sociology of the middle classes which make up a large proportion of the labour force; in exploring the nature of changing gender relations; in thinking about how people’s sense of attachment to place and locale is being reconfigured; and in thinking about new and under-utilised conceptual and methodological tools for understanding social inequality, social protest and social mobility. He has pursued these interests through jobs at the Universities of Lancaster, Sussex, Surrey, Keele, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and since 1995 he has been at Manchester University (where he was Head of Department between 1999-2001). His concerns have become crystallized since 2004 in his role as Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), which brings together anthropologists, media researchers, geographers, historians, political economists, and sociologists.