According to A. Giddens “Sociological research has practical applications in terms of assessing the results of policy initiatives” A programme of practical reform may simply fail to achieve what it designs to do, or bring in unintended consequences. For instance, in the years following the Second World War, large public housing blocks were built in City Centres in many countries. Some were built, just up the road in Hulme. They were planned to provide high standards of accommodation for low-income groups from slum areas, and offered shopping amenities and other civic services close at hand. However, research showed that many of those that moved from their previous dwellings to large apartment blocks felt isolated and unhappy. High rise buildings and shopping malls often rapidly became rundown, and provided a place for crime and drug exchanges. Today many of these blocks have been demolished, including Hulme, and new attempts to solve Working class problems, with issues such as crime, to provided betting housing and living have been developed. In Hulme itself, a project called “Hulme City Challenge” was invested to improve the living of accommodation. Millions was planted in to improve the surrounding areas of Hulme. It was a great success.
Much sociological research has been simulated by the social policies of governments of local authorities. Sociologists have often investigated the consequences of social policy decisions to see if these policies have achieved their objectives, for example J Fords study of a comprehensive school in London titled “Social class and the Comprehensive school” claimed to do this. Also Ford, in her analysis of Cherry Dale Comprehensive set out to see if comprehensive education was achieving all the objections that the government had hoped. After a careful positivistic (scientific) study she concluded that comprehensive schooling tended to reproduce many of the shortcomings of the old tripartite system of education. She concluded that this was largely due to streaming. She also said that Comprehensive education as a social policy had failed either to bridge the gap in academic achievement between the social classes or produce social mixing between blue collar and white-collar pupils.
Besides Education, government policies of urban redevelopment – especially their influence upon family structure – have been a significant stimulus to research. This relationship caused Willmott and Young to do a study in East London, titled ‘Family and Kinship in East London’. They investigated the influence of social policies of urban redevelopment on the family by examining the changes in family life from the traditional working class area of the East End to new council estates in Essex. Willmott and Young concluded that urban redevelopment had weakened the extended family whilst strengthening the nuclear, and had also caused a change in conjugal roles with a movement from segregates to joint.
The link between sociology and social policy is evident, however Marxists argue that this relationship may have a negative or sinister side. Horowitz has stated that it has been mainly powerful middle class groups who have benefited from sociological research in Western capitalist societies. Governments and private companies from the West have been able to use the services of sociologists to introduce social policies that serve their vested interests. Sociologists hiding behind the principle of value freedom and ethical non-responsibility have allowed themselves to be manipulated by the powerful class, the bourgeoisie, for example, in the mid 1960s the Pentagon, USA, recruited sociologists in large numbers for a research programme in Latin America called Project Camelot. This was designed to formulate social policies to prevent left wing revolutions thereby supporting right wing capitalist’s ideas.
In politics, Marxists have argued that in the field of social policy, sociologists have allowed themselves to be used to confirm the views of reality that are convenient to powerful middle class groups or capitalists governments. This has been the case on the issue of education. For example, sociologists employed in Project Headstart, which was funded by the US government went to a good deal of trouble to explain the poor educational performance of Working Class children (especially boys) in terms of their home backgrounds, e.g. lack of parental interest; dysfunctional family structure; etc. It was then suggested that this process could be halted by a social policy of compensatory education. These findings could be seen as a deliberate attempt by powerful middle class groups to use sociologists as a ‘smokescreen’ to hide the real source of academic inequality i.e. the White Middle class bias in school knowledge. In this way, sociologists have provided the evidence and suggested social policies that merely supported the interests of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Therefore being a prop to the capitalist status quo by producing politically safe decisions.
The connection between sociology and social policy is an important and reciprocal one. For this reason therefore the link between these two areas is an interesting and meaningful field of enquiry.
