Mike Savage is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, where he is Director of the ESRC's Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC). He has written extensively on social change in Britain after 1945 notably in Class Analysis and Social Transformation (2000) and in Globalisation and Belonging (with Gaynor Bagnall and Brian Longhurst, 2005)

• Preface and acknowledgements ; Introduction ; 1. 2005 to 1938: Lifting social groups out of the landscape. ; ART I: TECHNICAL IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL CHANGE ; 2. 1938: The British intellectual and high-brow culture ; 3. 1954: The challenge of technical identity ; 4. 1950: The resurgence of gentlemanly expertise in post-war Britain. ; 5. 1962: The moment of sociology ; PART II: THE SOCIAL SCIENCE APPARATUS ; 6. 1956: The end of community: the quest for the English Middletown ; 7. 1951: The interview and the melodrama of social mobility ; 8. 1941: The sample survey and the modern rational nation ; PART III: TECHNIQUE AND EXPERTISE ; 9. 2009: The Politics of Method ; References ; Appendix: Details of Archival Sources consulted

Mike Savage is one of the UK's foremost historical sociologists and his recent exciting book provides a fascinating insight into the history of the social sciences and their role in the remaking of social class identities in Britain from the 1930s to the present daythis book provides a fascinating consideration of the role of expertise within British 20th-century history and its interaction within the creation of a specialised sociology as an academic subjectit will be of great use to historians and sociologists of post-war Britain.