ABSTRACT

CARTER: Philip invited me to be on the editorial board of the Journal of Industrial Economics. That is where I first knew him. And he did that I think because of the work for the Science and Industry Committee. We shared among ourselves the refereeing of papers, and I used to meet him when he was with Elizabeth Brunner in Oxford, and that is where I really got to know him. It always seemed to me for all the oddities of what he did, Philip Andrews had very much in mind studying what people actually do, and not what some theoretical economists think they might do. TRIBE: The work of Warren Young and Fred Lee7 has revealed quite a lot of animus against Philip Andrews in Oxford-essentially on the grounds that he was not really an economist, that he was just concerned with the nuts and bolts. Second, if you look at the Journal of Industrial Economics in the 1950s and 1960s, it seems to be by contemporary standards a fairly untheoretical, or descriptive, approach to business organisation compared with, say, American literature of the same time. CARTER: Yes. I think Philip probably held the view that a great deal of description had to go on before you were really ready to theorise very far. I mean that there was a gap in real knowledge of what was actually going on and you needed to try to fill that. On the other hand, I was rather disappointed sometimes by the solid quality of the things which got submitted to the Journal. I don’t think the people working in the field at that time were terribly impressive. TRIBE: But what I was struck by in the Journal of Industrial Economics was the relentlessness of non-algebraic, non-graphical, non-theorised articles; most of the articles at that time were case studies. CARTER: I think that is true, yes. Well, that fitted in with Philip’s predilections very much, I think. TRIBE: You made a point earlier about Belfast being a springboard. How did the move to Manchester come about? CARTER: Well, we had been in Belfast for eight years and I got an approach from Harry Johnson, who had held the Chair there and was just about to move, asking whether I would be prepared to be considered. I wasn’t wildly anxious to move from Belfast, because it was a wonderful place to live and a great place to bring up children. But I was really only interested in opportunities which were plainly those of advancement. I sound rather bad in putting it that way, but I did apply for one Chair in Edinburgh and… TRIBE: That would be the one that Peacock got? CARTER: Yes. They discerned quite rightly that I wasn’t a Scot, and I didn’t get anywhere! But the Stanley Jevons Chair at Manchester had great prestige and it seemed to me it was something you didn’t turn down. So it was by invitation essentially. And I thought after eight years in Belfast it was about time

to move. And so we went to Manchester. I was rather overwhelmed in Manchester by all the other things I did. In fact I have a feeling I rather neglected my students. At least I hope I didn’t, but I spent an awful lot of time on the train to London! TRIBE: At that time it was a very prestigious department. Lewis had left by that time, and Johnson was leaving. But what is striking, and Dennis Coppock8

brought my attention to this, is that no one ever stayed very long; and although it was actually a prominent department, it didn’t seem to attract people who stayed for a particularly long period of time. Someone like Prest, for example, who seemed quite committed to the place, then eventually went to the LSE as well. CARTER: Yes. Quite. I think there were faults in Manchester. Maybe a problem of size, or of structure. To start with, there was the Faculty of Economic and Social Studies, which really consisted of a set of warring departments. I mean the economists and the sociologists felt they were both competing for the same pot of gold; and there wasn’t very much sense of Faculty unity, and certainly not very much output from the cross-fertilisation that there probably ought to have been. Among the economists, well, you see in Belfast we had a department which had two Chairs of Economics. Shortly before I left Stanley Dennison joined us, and that was quite a good move, but the holders of the Chairs, provided they agreed with each other, were in a position to exercise a position of leadership and draw the whole thing together. Manchester was very difficult to get hold of indeed. This was true of the University as a whole actually. I mean it had rapidly become apparent to me that the machinery of the University and the Senate and all that had absolutely no connection with what actually happened! Everything was cut and dried before it got to the Senate. Where it was cut and dried nobody knew! But it was. And it was true in the department that there was a lack of sense of community. We were a lot of individuals beavering away. I think probably a lot of us were spending our time on the train to London, and we didn’t exploit our advantages anything like to the extent we should have done. I think I only realised that really after I had left. TRIBE: You were appointed Vice-Chancellor of the new University of Lancaster.9 How did you see the role of a new university then? CARTER: Well, there were a number of basic ideas, but one of the important ones in the early years was to make undergraduate degrees less specialised. That arose partly from my Belfast experience, where the undergraduate degree had been made up in a very large number of different ways. But in Belfast it was just a question of adding units which had nothing actually to do with each other. We thought we ought to allow people to do combinations of subjects,

but in a way which enabled them to see the inter-relations better. We also were concerned to try and find ways in which students of the arts and social sciences could have some idea of the processes of thought of the natural sciences, and vice versa. That is always a very difficult one, but we did quite a bit on it. We also wanted to establish a reputation in fields which would be of direct interest to employers, but which had not appeared in the university field before; the first of which was Operational Research, and we had the first Chair of Operational Research in the country. That approach to business studies was really important. TRIBE: So did you start off across the board, from the sciences, the humanities and the social sciences? CARTER: Yes. We had a wide spread of subjects, in contrast to Essex, for instance, which had quite a narrow one to begin with, I think. We had Biology, Chemistry and Physics. We had Engineering quite early on. We had a whole range of arts subjects, including some like Classics which were regarded as terribly old-fashioned. And we had business subjects, Operational Research and Marketing, others which were really labour relations and had got a fancy name; and we actually regarded it as important to have all these. I mean it is no good saying things will interact if they were not there, and we were anxious to have a big range. So we were always anxious to grow as fast as possible and, well of course, all things seemed to be possible in the early 1960s, but we got a bit frustrated with not getting enough money out of the UGC. But nevertheless, we did grow quite fast and have gone on growing since.