The post-Second World War period provided new opportunities for those with social-scientific training to participate in ‘planning’: from individual housing developments and slum clearance, to entirely ‘new’ towns. At the same time, commercial interests began to use these methods to identify new consumer bases and product demand. At the centre of this was a research process known as the 'social survey' which Mark Abrams defined as 'a process by which quantitative facts are collected about the social aspects of a community's composition and activities' (Social Surveys and Social Action, p. 1). These methods also gave rise to the opinion poll and various forms of market research. Given its integral nature to post-war planning (and the fact that Mass-Observation, which we met in the previous week, was eventually sold off to a market research company), in this week's seminar we will engage with these issues to see where this planning emerged from and what happened to it.

Readings

Laura Dumond Beers, ‘Whose opinion? Changing attitudes towards opinion polling in British politics, 1937-1964’, Twentieth Century British History, 17:2 (2006), pp. 177-205

Matthew Hollow, 'Governmentality on the Park Hill Estate: the rationality of public housing', Urban History, 37:1 (2010), pp. 117-135

Joe Moran, 'Mass-Observation, market research, and the birth of the focus group, 1937–1997', Journal of British Studies, 47 (2008), pp. 827-851

Daniel O'Neill, '"People love Player's": cigarette advertising and the teenage consumer in post-war Britain', Twentieth Century British History, 28:3 (2017), pp. 414-439

Guy Ortolano, Thatcher's Progress: from social democracy to market liberalism through an English New Town (Cambridge: CUP, 2019), chapter 4, 'Community', pp. 143-183

Mike Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method (Oxford: OUP, 2010), chapter 8, '1941: the sample survey and the modern rational nation', pp. 187-212

Seminar questions

• What were the main research interests of post-war market research?

• Where did market research emerge from?

• How did age, gender and class factor into post-war analyses of consumption, leisure and housing?

• How far were opinion polls/social surveys/market research measuring social reality and to what extent were they actively constructing it?

Further reading

Vernon Bogdanor and Robert Skidelsky (eds), The Age of Affluence, 1951-1964 (London: Macmillan, 1970)

Christine Grandy, 'Cultural history's absent audience', Cultural and Social History, 16:5 (2019), pp. 643-663

Stuart Middleton, '"Affluence" and the left in Britain, c.1958-1974', English Historical Review, 536 (2014), pp. 107-138

Frank Mort, 'Boys own? Masculinity, style and popular culture', in Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (eds), Male Order: unwrapping masculinity (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), pp. 193-224

Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: masculinities and social space in late twentieth-century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996)

Sean Nixon, ‘Mrs Housewife and the Ad Men: advertising, market research, and mass consumption in postwar Britain’, in Hartmut Berghoff, Philip Scranton and Uwe Spiekermann (eds), The Rise of Marketing and Market Research (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 93-194.

Billy Smart, 'The BBC Television Audience Research Reports, 1957-1979: recorded opinions and invisible expectations', Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television , 34:3 (2014), pp. 452-462

Melanie Tebbutt, 'Listening to youth? BBC youth broadcasts during the 1930s and the Second World War', History Workshop, 84 (2017), pp. 214-233

Selina Todd and Hilary Young, 'Baby-boomers to "beanstalkers": making the modern teenager in post-war Britain', Cultural and Social History, 9:3 (2012), pp. 451-467

Sam Wetherell, Foundations: how the built environment made twentieth-century Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)

Top: Early concept for 'Bucks New Town' (what would become Milton Keynes). See: Guy Ortolano, Thatcher's Progress, p. 36.

Bottom: Park Hill estate, Sheffield (see Hollow reading).