On Being a Comparative Europeanist

1.1 It is nearly 40 years ago now that I realized that my schoolboy training in other European languages gave me what marketing people would call my product differentiation among British sociologists (indeed, among the British population). And so I decided to specialize in the study of Western European societies. A very early opportunity came in 1973 when Alessandro Pizzorno came to Nuffield College, Oxford where I was completing my doctorate on British industrial conflict in search of someone to help him organize a project on the resurgence of class conflict in Western Europe. I became his assistant, which immediately introduced me to young Belgian, French, German, Italian and Dutch researchers whom I might never otherwise have met. There was not much comparative European empirical sociology around in those days, and what there was had mainly been written by Americans. So we were inventing a field. Also, both there and in later projects in the 1970s and 1980s, English had not quite become the academic lingua franca; we got along in a halting mixture of English, French and German, and gradually tried to add other languages to our repertoires.