Ray Pahl

From 1959 to 1965 Ray Pahl was a tutor for the Cambridge University Board of Extra-Mural Studies whilst also enrolled for a PhD at the London School of Economics. His thesis on Hertfordshire villages was published as Urbs in Rure (1965). His early research for Managers and their Wives (1971) was also begun at Cambridge. These two studies established a life-long interest in localities, work and family life.

For some thirty years from 1965, Ray Pahl was at the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he was appointed to a personal chair in sociology in 1972. Initially he did much to reinvigorate teaching and research in urban sociology and he was elected President of Research Committee 21 of the International Sociological Association in the 1970s. Patterns of Urban Life (1970) and Whose City? (1970, revised Penguin edition 1976) had a wide national and international impact.

Between 1978 and 1988 Ray Pahl developed a series of quantitative and qualitative studies about the Isle of Sheppey in Kent and his classic study Divisions of Labour, based on these, was published in 1984. A number of articles focusing on all forms of work followed. His analysis of the process of social polarisation between those households engaging in all forms of work and those unable to participate in both formal employment and informal work was widely influential.

Throughout his career Ray Pahl was committed to developing a significant public sociology by working with government planners, writing for and lecturing to wider professional audiences, and editing the Penguin Sociology series. He was a member of the Archbishop’s Commission that produced the controversial report Faith in the City.

In the late 1980s Ray Pahl began his association with the University of Essex, helping with David Rose and others to set up the British Household Panel Study. Then, in the mid 1990s, he moved to the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Essex where he continued his active research career. On Friendship (2000) reflected a shift in his interests. After Success: Fin de Siècle Anxiety and Identity (1995) and Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today (with Liz Spencer, 2006) were both based on qualitative fieldwork, the latter being particularly influential.