ABSTRACT
The theme of this paper may be simply stated. It is that professional sociologists in Britain may have made virtually no contribution to the understanding of race relations problems in Britain, or, to put the matter more correctly, to the understanding of problems which are defined in the public mind as problems of race relations. The result of this has been that the task of analysing race relations and immigration problems has fallen to those whose subject-disciplinary commitment is far from clear, and who are mainly concerned to discuss administrative problems as they appear to those in government. Such research does, of course, have a long and not entirely dishonourable record in Britain. Where no major value-judgement has been in question it has been possible for a small administrative élite (commonly with degrees in history, classics or modern greats) to produce dispassionate work which throws light on crucial policy areas. The limitation of this type of work, however, lies in its inability to bring questions of value out into the open and to subject them to scrutiny. Moreover the social perspective of this élite is so much shared with those in higher echelons of government that it is quite impossible for its members to record the actions of government as open to enquiry and analysis on the same basis as the actions of ordinary people.
