From Loose to Tight and Tight to Loose: How Old Concepts Provide New Insights

In 1965 I became lecturer in the social psychology of education in the Department of Education at the University of Manchester. Eric Hoyle had been appointed as the lecturer in the sociology of education some months earlier. One of the justifications for our appointment was the urgent need to train college of education lecturers in the basic disciplines of education (psychology, sociology, philosophy and history) that would become the backbone of the newly established BEd degrees in the drive to create an all graduate teaching profession.

Eric and I soon planned courses for these ‘students’, as well as practising teachers pursuing advanced diplomas and masters degrees. Every Friday evening – what a time of the week!– they listened in huge numbers to an hour of Eric on sociology and then an hour from me on social psychology. Then everyone staggered home or into the local pub. It was easy for the two of us to divide the terrain: Eric was fairly ‘macro’ in orientation and I was naturally ‘micro’. Some of the common ground between us was the school as an organization. Eric played a major role in developing this field within the sociology of education, of course, and perhaps even more so in the adjacent field of the sociology of innovation and its diffusion. My interests, since I was just preparing for publication my ethnographic study of a secondary modern school, were symbolic interactionist rather than functionalist: Goffman’s Asylums, with obvious parallels to schools, was one of my favourite books.