ABSTRACT
First, it has grown very much larger, and its range of activities has grown too. This growth means that it has been essential to have a larger office staff with greater division of labour, and for the organisation to operate in a more formal way. What was originally very much a London-based body, centred on the LSE, has now become a national one as higher education, and sociology, have expanded and spread. When the discipline was small, and a high proportion of its members had also been educated in the same places, everyone could know almost everyone. Inevitably, expansion changed that, and its speed and the pattern of recruitment from other backgrounds which that made necessary created a much more scattered and divided disciplinary community. The rapidly changing demographics of academic sociology have been of overwhelming importance in the development of the discipline, and in consequence for the BSA's membership and development. However, the generational cleavages so marked before the 1980s no longer seem of much significance.
