Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    82/284 (page 70)
    a pernicious failure. When we handed it to workmen or to employers, in the course of our interviews, their glum looks or stony silence, as they turned over the pages of this formidable printed document, convinced us, to put it politely, that the value of our pearls was not appreciated; and that any further display of them would actually injure our credit as sociological adventurers. When the copies were circulated by post, the result, with a few exceptions, was nil; either they found their way into the waste- paper basket, or they were returned with no more useful answers than “No”, “Yes”, “Partly so”, “Sometimes one and sometimes the other”, “Not applicable to this trade”, or “Not possible to give instances”. Exceptionally intelligent trade union officials, anxious to be helpful, ignored our question¬ naire and posted to us their current rules and annual report: a valuable result, but one which we could have obtained more easily and more universally if we had merely asked for these documents, without troubling the official with any questions. But this was not the whole of our mistake. The very know¬ ledge and skill that we had put into the questions, about which we were so complacent, proved to be our undoing. It was naive of us to ask a trade union official to state in writing, concisely and yet ex¬ plicitly, whether the workshop committee exercised any control over the distribution of jobs, or over the conduct of the foreman; or under what circum¬ stances branches had refused or delayed to obey an executive ruling; or in what classes of jobs his