The Economics of Everyday Life:

A Mass-Observation Project in Bolton

The background
'Mass-Observation' was a radical popular sociology organisation started in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings. It saw itself as an 'anthropology at home', but one which tried to engage the mass of people as subjects rather than objects of its study, as `observers', and thus as oppositional to mainstream social science of the time. Mass-Observation's existence and activity is becoming increasingly well-known among radical and social historians, largely because a number of its publications have recently been republished, such as Britain by Mass-Observation (Harrisson & Madge, 1939/1986), May 12: Mass-Observation Day Surveys (Mass-Observation, 1937/1987), The Pub and the People (Mass-Observation, 1943a/1987) and War Factory (Mass-Observation, 1943b/1987). In addition, collections of previously unpublished material have appeared, such as Speak For Yourself (Calder & Sheridan, 1984), Wartime Women (Sheridan, 1990), Mass-Observation at the Movies (Richards & Sheridan, 1987), and a collection of Humphrey Spender's (1982) photographs, Worktown People. And a research interest in Mass-Observation has gone hand-in-hand with this publishing renaissance (among others, see Calder, 1985; Finch, 1986, Gurney, 1988; Jeffrey, 1978; Mercer, 1989; Platt, 1986; N. Stanley, 1981; L. Stanley, 1988, 1990; Sheridan, 1984; Summerfield, 1984, 1985), offering diverse perspectives on Mass-Observation's spheres of activity, its methodological approach, its relationship with mainstream social science, and its transformation into the commercial survey organisation Mass-Observation Ltd. in 1949.

The overall impression of Mass-Observation's activities thus gained is firstly of a national operation based in London and involving some thousands of observers responding to directives (which asked for detailed responses to specific questions) and requests for day diaries, and co-ordinated by Charles Madge; and secondly a set of activities focussed on 'Worktown', Bolton in the north-west of England, co-ordinated by Tom Harrisson. The Harrisson-directed Worktown part of Mass-Observation's work remains better known; and accounts of it portray Harrisson as a galvanic presence energising other people - including some local working-class Boltonians as well as middle-class liberals from London and elsewhere - in the projects concerned with Worktown daily life (as in The Pub and the People) and its summer exodus to Blackpool.

However, in November 1938 Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson changed organisational places, with Madge then directing in Bolton a project concerned with 'the economics of everyday life'. This project stayed in existence and active until approximately early 1942 (although Madge's involvement tailed off in 1940/41), when war work overtook most of the organisation's activities. Thus for a considerable length of the original organisation's activities in Bolton it was Madge who directed that part of its work. The work carried out during this period, however, remains largely unknown.

My research on Mass-Observation has focussed on its organisational dynamics from its origin to its transformation into a commercial survey organisation, together with its methodological and epistemological stances. The substantive focus of my research has been in part on various methodological debates within the organisation, and in part upon the Bolton 'economics of everyday life' project.

This project was fundamentally different in its organisation and activity from anything else Mass-Observation had been concerned with. It brought Mass-Observation's concern with the minutiae of everyday life together with radical social science of the time's interest in the ways in which the best of sociology and economics could be combined to investigate, and hopefully help solve, the dire economic straits daily experienced by many working-class people.

In the following section of this paper I outline the research activities which composed the 'economics of everyday life' project and the contents of the planned book about it; and in the last section I discuss various of the methodological and epistemological innovations associated with it.

The economics of everyday life project
When Charles Madge went to Bolton to co-ordinate the economics of everyday life research, Harrisson had already recruited to it two researchers with a good deal of mainstream research experience. One was Gertrude Wagner, an Austrian who had worked on the fringes of the Marienthal project (Jahoda et al., 1933/1972). After her arrival in England, Wagner worked on the Men Without Work project funded by the Pilgrim Trust (1938), being responsible for its chapter concerned with women's unemployment in Blackburn. The other was Dennis Chapman, who had earlier worked with Seebohm Rowntree on his 1930s York poverty study and then with Oscar Oeser (1937, 1939), based at the University of St. Andrews but funded by the Pilgrim Trust to study unemployment among female and male ex-jute workers in Dundee. Madge, Wagner and Chapman were later joined by Geoffrey Thompson (who during the war worked in the government's Wartime Social Survey and after it became the director of its reincarnation as the Government Social Survey), Alec Hughes, Jack Cornforth and a floating group of other researchers.

An early memo (WT46.B) positions the study as one concerned with the Òfactors influencing spending and saving at the income levels which include the great majority of the people of EnglandÓ; and states that Mass-Observation's fifth book based on Bolton would be the 'Economics of Everyday Life', which would focus on the actual observation of economic behaviour in everyday activities. The first account of the proposed book's contents (WT46.B) outlines these as:

A

1. Money and everyday life
2. Social science on money
3. Industrial background

B

1. Standard of living in ordinary homes
2. The buying process
3. Special spending
4. Saving and gambling

C

1. Sex differences in the standard of living
2. Age differences
3. Town and country differences
4. Class and group differences

D

1. The week
2. The day
3. The year
4. Life cycle and economic behaviour

E

1. Factors for change
2. Education and standard of living
3. Space and time factors
4. Reactions to world change

F

1. Sum up direction of change in total orientation towards money

An important part of the research underpinning this planned book was concerned specifically with savings and spending (TC6.A - I; TC7.A - J; WT24.A - D) and was Madge's especial concern although much of the research was carried out by other researchers as well as him. This research included fairly conventional (now, but not then either for Mass-Observation or for mainstream social science) detailed structured interviews with savers and savings organisations. However, alongside the savings and spending work was a number of more typically Mass-Observation kinds of research, concerned with: clothes, including the social function of the suit (TC1.C); the effect of Lent on retail sales (TC6.E); household budgets (WT24.B, C); the Worktown stomach (WT24.D); the role of money (WT24.D), and the role of work (WT33.D), in Worktown. Even more unusually in both Mass-Observation and mainstream social science terms, these aspects of the project were combined with a 'special area study' (WT36.C, F, I).

The special area study focussed on a group of streets in the centre of working-class Bolton, a total of 630 adults (300 males and 331 females). As well as looking at the occupations, employment situation, household spending and saving patterns of these people, the special area study was also concerned with 'opinion forming'. Mass-Observation had come into existence as a study of public opinion in a time when few people, and certainly not the government or its agencies, were concerned with what the mass of people thought about anything; it pioneered public opinion studies although it did so using fundamentally anti-positivist means focussed on observation and 'overheards' rather than direct questioning. The special area study of opinion forming continued this Mass-Observation tradition, using what would now be called ethnographic and observational data. At the time, using Oeser's (1937) terminology, such an approach was referred to as the 'functional penetration' of an area, and was considered to be a seditious way of working in Britain. The special area study of opinion looked at the role of poster advertising, local and national newspapers, the church, and the local cinema and dance hall as well as the opinions of the people living within the special area.

It will be noted that there are a number of differences between the research which was actually carried out, just outlined, and the contents of the planned book, outlined earlier. The memo which outlined the book's proposed contents is undated, but is likely to have been written in 1938 before the main phase of the economics of everyday life research was even started, and to have been produced as an attempt by Harrisson to raise money to fund the research (e.g. WT46.A, letter to Ernest Simon).

However, there are also clear continuities between the proposed book and the research as evidenced by the completed pieces of writing from this project that exist within the Worktown archive material. Firstly, 'the everyday' remains central to the investigation, with the project researchers looking at topics which most researchers (now as well as then) would have considered too trivial to be worthy of research - for example, people's clothes and their social function, people's stomachs and the social functions of food consumption. Secondly, there is the way in which the researchers' observation of public behaviour is central, and the direct questioning of people as to their private behaviour and opinions is analytically secondary to this. And thirdly, work is seen as fundamental to social life, but work conceptualised so as to include domestic labour as well as work within the paid labour force.

The planned 'Economics of Everyday Life' book, whether in its original outline or in the form that the substantive research actually took, would have been a signal contribution to radical social science of the time, standing alongside of, for instance, Arthur Bowley's work (Bowley & Allen, 1931; Bowley & Burnett-Hurst, 1915; Bowley & Hogg, 1925) on poverty and household budgets and John Jewkes' work (Jewkes & Jewkes, 1938; Jewkes & Winterbottom, 1933a, 1933b) on juvenile unemployment and local economic dislocation, both particularly concerned with the north west. However, in a number of respects the research carried out and the planned publication were considerably more radical in a number of ways than their work; and it bears most comparison with Oeser's research as prefigured in those publications which actually appeared.

Neither the 'Economics of Everyday Life' nor Oeser's research have seen full publication to date. What prevented the appearance of both was the war and the changes attendant on it which, by 1945, had so transformed the face of research that the appearance of these publications was no longer possible. I discuss the methodological and epistemological innovations of this research and the changed conditions of research in the post-war period in the final section of the paper.

Economics of everyday life innovations
During the 1939-1945 war the British government required information of many and diverse kinds, and required it in bulk on a mass scale. As a consequence of wartime influences, social research became overwhelmingly sample survey research, quantified and later on also computerised. Ironically, Mass-Observation's last project before becoming a commercial survey organisation, its Sex Survey of 1949 known as 'little Kinsey', started as an observation-based survey but then, as the technology became available to do this, turned into a survey using computerised methods of analysis. The post-war period engendered several decades of high positivism in social research, as witnessed both by the flourishing of commercial survey organisations and also by the expansion of sociology legitimated as a survey-based technologically-proficient utilisation of positivist assumptions and techniques.

Within this post-war climate both Oeser's 'functional penetration' study of Dundee jute workers and also the Mass-Observation study of the economics of everyday life in Bolton were completely out of place, leftovers from a time when the possibilities for social science research had not hardened into a positivist quantified mainstream. Apart from the lack of sample survey-derived numbers, the economics of everyday life research encapsulates a number of other features which still look radically innovative.

The project combined a concern with investigating the everyday with an inductive theoretical analysis of its properties. On both counts it differed from the two main trajectories of 1930s British sociology: its dominant trajectory was a philosophical discussion of social structures and processes, dealing with huge periods of time and always in highly abstract terms; its minority trajectory was of empirical studies which lacked any theoretical awareness or analysis, collecting case-study based data for its own sake.

As the proposed book outline makes clear, the project was aware of gender as well as age, class, region as a social structural variable. It took gender seriously throughout its composite pieces of work, including by arguing that it is women who make the economic system work while receiving only a small minority of its resources. However, it also notes the fact that in Worktown the tradition is that women work within the paid labour force throughout the life-course as well as within the domestic sphere. Such an awareness of gender and its complexities was not to exist again in research terms until the renaissance of feminism from the 1970s on.

The research emphasised the role of money as an anonymous system of exchange binding together production and consumption; and the use of money, if not necessarily its generation or its control, was largely the prerogative of women. Here again the project was highly innovative, for in effect it refused to separate consumption and production, seeing both as completely symbiotic and this symbiosis demonstrated within everyday economics.

The above innovative features are concerned with methodological or theoretical aspects of the economics of everyday life project, although clearly they also have epistemological implications, for what counts as 'knowledge' about social and economic life is shifted in important ways within them. However, it also made direct epistemologically-innovative contributions.

The first of these was borrowed in part from American ethnographic work associated with Chicago school sociology of the 1930s, but more importantly from Oeser's research and writing, most probably through Dennis Chapman's familiarity with the Dundee research. 'Functional penetration' was premised on the argument that social life had to be experienced in order to be understood, that asking questions from the outside was insufficient. It differed from anthropology in that it required participation in some kind of functional role (within employment, for example) as the basis of fieldwork. Harrisson himself was considerably in sympathy with such views and during his time in Bolton had worked in a number of capacities in the local area. The economics of everyday life researchers, however, based their fieldwork on living in the area and thus knowing and observing it from the inside, rather than working in any employment other than research. Nonetheless they took it as axiomatic that research did indeed require such inside experience.

This was the basis of the project's second epistemologically-innovative aspect, one it shared with Mass-Observation generally. The observer was seen as central to the research, not merely as a collector of other people's information but as a 'subjective camera', one who necessarily interpreted what was seen and heard. Relatedly, 'objective' information was seen as an impossibility, all information treated as contingent upon those who researched as well as those who provided it; and within the economics of everyday life project the researchers were direct sources of information which was then analytically discussed by the same researchers who provided it. In doing so their stance was oppositional to the growing orthodoxy in mainstream social science concerning the strict objectivity and detachment of scientific research procedures.

Thirdly, the project, again as with Mass-Observation more generally, took observation very seriously, indeed made it the basis of its approach. That is, in mainstream research (both then and now) people's reports of their behaviours were used as the cornerstone of research, whereas the economics of everyday life researchers used observation of people's behaviours as their cornerstone and tied people's reports about their behaviour to this. Even now in the 1990s, mainstream social science fails to take observation and description of social behaviour as its central topic of investigation (although of course it relies on observation/description, it does so in an unexplicated way). Relatedly, the observed behaviour investigated in this research included overheard talk; and again Mass-Observation generally and in this project in particular took talk seriously and analytically long before mainstream social science did so.

What the above innovations in the economics of everyday life project add up to is a total re-casting of what social science knowledge looked like, how it was to be generated, and by whom. Mass-Observation's epistemological as well as social radicalism is only now being fully appreciated, and this is of course not nconnected to the critique of positivist assumptions and ways of working generated in the social sciences from the 1960s on.

The economics of everyday life project was never completed. However, much of its research was written up in draft form even though the projected book was never finished. The drafts that exist still make fascinating reading and will eventually be published as part of my reconstruction of the project and its part within Mass-Observation's activities.

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