Remembering Mike Rose

With Mike Rose’s death, British economic sociology has lost one of its most knowledgeable and loveable characters. Mike had a mastery of the history and literature of the discipline that few could rival – not only of Anglo-Saxon research but also of the French tradition of ‘sociologie du travail’. He made an important personal contribution to the research literature through his writings over the decades on work values and attitudes. He had a wonderful sense of fun, a mordant wit and an amused and benevolent perspective on the rival intel-lectual currents of the day. Trained in Cambridge as an economist and social anthropologist, his engagement with sociology started when he was recruited in 1962 by John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood as one of the main interviewers on the Affluent Worker project in the early 1960s – the leading project in British indus-trial sociology and social stratification of its day. Mike’s skill at getting people to speak about their lives frequently led to the interviews stretching out for three hours or more, causing him to miss the last train back. (The project bud-get had not anticipated the resulting toll in taxi fares!) He moved on to become the research officer of the project – taking an active part in the discussions about the analysis and interpretation of the data. The experience of this research programme, with its advocacy of an ‘action approach ’ in sociology and its emphasis upon the central importance of work orientations in understanding employees ’ reactions to their work experiences, forged a research agenda that was to lie at the heart of his work for the rest of his academic life. After leav-ing Cambridge, he taught at the University of Salford (1965–8), before moving to his long-term home at the University of Bath, where he was to climb steadily up the ranks and continue as a very active researcher for years after his official retirement. His first major book – Industrial Behaviour – published in 1975, regularly reprinted and reissued in a new extensively revised edition in 1988, became the classic textbook on the subject for a generation. As he characteristically put it, it was an effort to understand ‘by looking sympathetically but unsentimentally’. It was in fact rather more than a textbook. It combined an impressive historical narrative of the evolution of the different perspectives in industrial sociology