ABSTRACT
As a very obvious illustration, we may notice what an enormous proportion of all social research is conducted on populations of relatively powerless people. It is factory workers, criminals and juvenile delinquents as opposed to their bosses or victims who fill the pages of social science texts. Doubtless this is partly because members of powerful elites often refuse to submit to the probing of researchers – their time is valuable, their privacy jealously guarded. But it is also because a lot of social research is directly inspired by the need to understand and sometimes even to contain ‘social problems’ – the threats (such as crime or industrial disruption) that powerless groups are felt to pose to powerful ones.
