Life As A Sociologist
The poet Madge's early, vigorous output diminished after 1940 as the sociologist in him won out. A chance encounter with Tom Harrisson through the pages of the New Statesman in 1937 led to the pair's establishment of Mass-Observation, a unique social experiment to record the thoughts of 'ordinary' people on contemporary subjects. The wide-ranging and demanding work of this radical survey organisation triggered further studies conducted for other bodies, including the National Council for Social and Economic Research (1940–42) and Political & Economic Planning (1943). Madge became a director of Pilot Press in 1944 and published a quarterly magazine, Pilot Papers, with sociological essays by non-academics, copies of which are included in the Archive.
From 1947 Madge was Social Development Officer for Stevenage New Town, until in 1950 he took the first chair of sociology at the University of Birmingham. This he held until retirement in 1970, despite his lack of academic training and personal doubts about the validity of the discipline as it then stood. In the first decade of his tenure he worked for the United Nations' agencies in Asia and Africa. His documents of the time, and later recollections of the academic life contained within his papers, illuminate the volatility of the 1960s, including the student unrest of 1968.
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