Reply to David McKay
| Author | Patrick Dunleavy |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1978.tb01317.x |
| Date | 01 December 1978 |
| Published date | 01 December 1978 |
| Subject Matter | Letter and Comment |
514
LETTERS
AND
COMMENTS
of
cross-national case studies. including my own, are now appearing. some
of
which signal
theoretical advances. but we still have a long way
to
go.
Taken in this context,
Dr.
Dunleavy’s claim that my book lacks a ‘developed theoretical
apparatus’
is
intellectually arrogant. Of course
it
may
be
(as
I
suspect) that the reviewer wants
comparative urban public policy research
to
rely on the theoretical perspectives of Marxist urban
sociology. Yet 1 challenge
Dr.
Dunleavy to cite one cross national study deriving from this
burgeoning sub discipline which
is
both theoretically interesting and empirically valid.
Perhaps Dr. Dunleavy hlmself is about to produce such a work. However, unless he does
I
strongly suggest that he takes greater care in any future comments on what is a complex and
so
far
embryonic area of political science.
DAVID MCKAY
University
of
Essex
REPLY
TO
DAVID McKAY
BOOK reviewers, like democrats, must take account of differential preference intensities.
Unfortunately it
is
notoriously difkult
to
balance one’s obligations to readers and the academic
community
on
the one hand and
to
authors on the other, especially in a book note of
250
words.
(Unlikeafbllbook
review,abooknotecanonlygivearea~nableprtcisofthebook’scontribution;it
cannot,
as
David McKay’s letter might
suggest,
discuss
in
intimate detail every claim that an author
puts forward for his work).
A
legitimate way to safeguard oneself against charges
of
unfair criticism is to assess the book in
terms of what
the
author himself claims to have done.
Thus
one applies different standards
to:
(a) a
critical literature review, perhaps intended for students, in which the author makes
only
a
limited
original contribution; and (b) a work which is put forward
as
making sieant theoretical
or
empirical advances at the cutting edge of research. My problem was, and is, that David McKay
made,
and makes here, very ambitious claims for
Housing
and
Race
in
Industrial
Sociery
(e.g.
‘a
fundamental
objective of the book is to place the administrative and judicial implementation of
civil
righta
laws in
their
roral
economic, political and social environments’), which were not
on
my reading
substantiated. Claiming to have written
in
mode (b) he has in fact written
in
mode (a).
Having made this defence,
I
would, however, like
to
emphasize that my note did not bring out
clearly enough my view that
Housing
und
Race
in
Industriaf
Sociery
is a worthwhile and well written
book as an example
of
mode (a). In addition. as the first paragraph
of
my note indicates, the book is
original
in
concepfion
and a significant departure in British political science in turning attention firmly
towards analysing policy outcomes.
For
the rest,
I
find that David McKay and
I
are talking at
cross
purposes. My worry about the
book, and my complaint about the lack
of
a theoretical framework and about the failure to be
genuinely comparative, was that the analyses
of
each society
independenrfy
did not Seem to me to be
adequate. The
use
of
comparative politics theory cannot compensate for
an
apparent decision
to
ignore the bodies
of
social and political theory available
for
analysing urban systems.
Nor
can the
focus on civil rights law implementation absolve one from placing housing conflicts in an adequate
social context. The narrow application of a practical criterion ofrelevance within such an analysiscan
lead to structural continuities between two different historical and social situations being lost, as
David McKay’s letter only
serves
to confirm.
For
example, the nondisussion
of
surburban
exclusion tactics
in
Britain makes it difficult for the reader to consider the extent
to
whch black
people in Britain and the U.S.A. suffer from class (rather than racial) segregation.
Perhaps
I
could end by emphasizing that
I
am in
no
sense an advocate
of
theoretical homogeneity
in social science research, as David McKay’s letter gratuitously suggests, and that
I
have never argued
for a reliance on neeMarxist urban sociology, although
I
have argued that this work presents some
valuable insights which political scientists cannot simply ignore. My position
on
this
is actually quite
well
summed
up in a
book
note by David McKay which
I
found two pages
on
from my own in the
same issue
of
Political Studies.
He writes:
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