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Michael Banton was connected with the immediate post-war generation of British sociology from which so many of the founding professors in the discipline in the UK were drawn. Fourth, Michael was prone to send the editors of I ERS i his latest written thoughts on the field of sociology, where we relied on the cream of international reviewers to keep him in check. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on sociologists W.E.B Du Bois and Robert Ezra Park. Topics discussed include racism in U.S., American sociology and history of sociology. Other topics which includes psychology, race relations and activism are also discussed. In addition, black consciousness and black culture are also discussed.

This article discusses the theory and method in recent British sociology. Sociology is an academic discipline that combines a commitment to the empirical investigation of social reality with the aim of comprehending the nature of society theoretically and framing general statements about social structure and process. This twin aims have been pursued in parallel more or less since the subject first came into existence in the late nineteenth century. Yet there has been an enduring tension between them. Over a generation ago, T. H. Marshall, in his LSE inaugural lecture of 1946, called for an effort to overcome the gap which separated the general or theoretical sociologist who becomes a slave to his concepts and on the other the passionately empirical sociologist who may become a slave to his methods. Instead he advocated the pursuit of what he called stepping stones to the middle distance. Others at various times have restated this view. Robert Merton is one of the best known, in two essays dissecting the two-way relationship between sociology theory and empirical research. Edward Shils has suggested that no sociological theorist, however abstract their interests, can carry on their work without feeling that empirical researchers are looking over their shoulder and that ultimately they have to answer them.

Discusses the conflict between freedom of the press and personal privacy. Problems in the introduction and development of the law in relation to right to privacy; Prediction that press intrusions is likely to continue, if not intensify.

This article comments on the increase in the effectiveness of royal commissions in Great Britain. The royal commissions presents the authoritative views of distinguished ex-chairmen of royal commissions. The structure, organization and impact of royal commissions and major departmental committees remains a topic of considerable interest. This note includes some further suggestions for increasing the effectiveness of royal commissions, drawing on the experience of a number of those who have been involved in commission work.

This article comments on the ethics of covert methods. Misinformation, dissimulation, deception and lying are features of a range of social relationship to a greater or lesser extent. The issue raised by covert participant observation is not whether lying is ever justified, for in some specified circumstances it may be. Behaviour in the research situation is professional behaviour as well as individual behaviour. The pretence of role playing and the individual moral consequences of doing so are bound up together. If the researcher employs a dishonest representation of his interests and indeed of his identity, he does so as a sociologist in a professional role as well as an individual in his role as citizen. A different objection to the use of deception in research is that it constitutes a betrayal of trust. Covert participant observation, looked at from the point of view of the individual subject, may clearly also be a gross invasion of personal privacy. Another pragmatic argument is simply that covert methods are often not necessary, and that the same objectives can be achieved by overt or open observational studies.

The article describes some neglected technical and procedural problems of the Sociological research. An alternative error is to confuse "research methods" with instruction in the necessary skills of social statistics. More generally, methods of research appear to be of secondary interest because their integral connections to problems, theories, and general methodology are insufficiently appreciated. The increasingly esoteric nature of certain methodological writing apart, worrying questions arise about the problems which the drive for new analytic techniques leave on one side. One major lacuna, to which most of the books under review are addressed, concerns the validity of the data which sociologists gather. Derek Phillips' "Knowledge From What?" concerned with sources of invalidity and bias arising from the social nature of sociological research. Irwin Deutscher's What We Say/ What We Do considers the problems raised by discrepancies between verbal statements and overt behaviour, strongly recommended for teaching purposes..