Kmflett's Blog

Prof Laurie Taylor is 89 & forever young. A memoir…featuring craft beer

Prof Laurie Taylor who a long time ago taught at York and wrote some important sociological works, for example Escape Attempts (with Stanley Cohen) and more recently presented the Radio 4 programme on new sociological research, Thinking Allowed.

I occasionally filled in for Taylor’s Times Higher Column (a satirical take on higher education) when he was on holiday and even more occasionally encountered him at social occasions. I recall him asking with some degree of surprise that I was still employed by anyone..

By profession (well one of them anyway) I was a sociology teacher, or would be if the Tories had not long since abolished such things on most school curriculums after Mrs Thatcher took Office.

Perhaps that’s why my ears pricked up when I heard that Professor Laurie Taylor was discussing microbreweries on his Radio 4 Thinking Allowed programme (in 2015!)

I have seen the Professor drinking wine but I have no doubt that he is an imbiber of beer, although I suspect mainly of the ‘twig’ variety.

The Radio4 programme showcases new research in sociology and the specific focus here was a paper by Tom Thurnell Read (Coventry) titled ‘craft, tangibility and affect in the microbrewery’.

What does that mean you might ask? The answer is don’t worry about it, it’s just a wording to warn off non-academics that they could possibly have any useful thoughts on the matter.

Laurie Taylor referenced probably the most important recent text on the issue of craft Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman (2008) which focuses on why people enjoy doing things well just for the sake of doing so without thought to money, time etc. Despite the title, women can also do this.

55 years ago the Professor was a Trotskyist so he put a frame of the Marxist theory of alienation around Read’s discussion of craft beer.

Essentially alienation occurs when a worker can’t really see the fruits of their labour and instead simply gets some money in return for it. An example might be a worker in a widget factory that is producing a small part for a machine that they rarely if ever appreciate the end result of.

The analogy works well for Read’s paper however. His point was that in microbreweries (not all of them clearly but I can think of many examples) the worker/brewer gets to decide what beer is to be brewed, what ingredients go in it etc. There is a high degree of control over the labour process.

Read also noted that thanks to social media, and also just visiting pubs where their product was sold, microbrewers could get a lot of direct feedback about the beer, tweak it to customer tastes if they felt it appropriate and so on. Generally therefore pride in their work was high, another key indicator of craft.
Taylor did try to get Read to opine on the difference between real ale and craft beer but he sensibly declined.

The point being made here is not about the beer as such but about the process used to make it, and how those making it relate to their conditions of work. Here craft- pride in doing something well that you have a lot of control over- is a lot more to the fore than in a mega-brewery.

Anyway, happy birthday Comrade Taylor, forever young at 89 clearly