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Summary
If social thinkers also possess a sense of history,… they know that any pattern of sociostructural relations is actually ongoing transformations and that the real object of sociological thinking is not only ‘sociostructures’ but also their historical movement.
Daniel Bertaux 1981This book attempts to explain the development of the economic structure of a particular occupational group and to understand the relation of this to individual and collective values and behaviour. It has drawn on the historian's usual range of written sources but the understanding of those sources was greatly enriched by the intervention of another source of evidence, that of life history interviews with people who experienced this particular place, occupation and time. Anyone who has worked with a number of interviews will appreciate just how much the informant's insights contribute to the final analysis. That is not written to avoid responsibility for the interpretation which follows but to acknowledge a debt and to make a methodological point:
The historian should start with the actor's interpretation of his situation, his actions in that situation, and the consequences of those actions for his interpretation in the future. Superimposed on this model, however, is that of the historical observer, who can see both the actor's ‘real’ situation (not necessarily coincident with the actor's interpretation of his situation) and the intended and unintended consequences of action in that situation.
My informants' accounts of their situation revealed the importance of historical experience in their response to contemporary ‘real’ situations.
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- Occupation and SocietyThe East Anglian Fishermen 1880-1914, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985