ABSTRACT
After the Second World War the development of industrial sociology in the United Kingdom had taken several twists and turns, guided both by some underlying constraints and opportunities generated by the wider political economy, and perhaps also by some more immediate considerations. In the phase of the development of industrial sociology, the late 1950s to the late 1960s, there is greater concern with academic and professional ambitions and a purer sociology begins to emerge, with less immediate ties to consultancy or policy. Labour has been weakened in relation to capital, the manufacturing base, so often the unproblematic site of the 'industry' studied by the 'industrial sociologist', has shrunk. The Labour Process Conference provides a forum for a whole number of the issues that industrial sociology had embraced hitherto. On reflection, however, the quite substantial absorption of 'the labour process' into the space previously occupied by British industrial sociology was not without irony either.
