Ethnic and Racial Studies

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The place of theory: John Rex's contribution to the

sociological study of ethnicity and ‘race’

Richard Jenkins is Professor of Sociological Studies at the University of

Sheffield

To cite this article: Richard Jenkins is Professor of Sociological Studies at the University of
Sheffield (2005) The place of theory: John Rex's contribution to the sociological study of ethnicity
and ‘race’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28:2, 201-211, DOI: 10.1080/01419870420000315816

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Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 28 No. 2 March 2005 pp. 201
211 /

The place of theory: John Rex’s

contribution to the sociological study
of ethnicity and ‘race’

Richard Jenkins

On 5th March 2005, John Rex will be eighty, an age at which a

lifetime’s work may begin to be seen for what it is. As someone who
was given his first job by John, and who has learned much from him,1
it is my great pleasure to accept the editors’ invitation to write
something to mark this occasion. However, the commission poses a
question: what kind of ‘something’ should I write? There would be no
point in duplicating the tributes in his richly-deserved festschrift
(Martins 1993). Nor is there space for the kind of detailed critical
exploration of his work that an active career of fifty years, and a large
bibliography, warrants.
Instead, I will attempt something more personal and more pointed:
to identify what I think is John Rex’s enduring contribution to
sociology, and the sociology of ethnicity and ‘race’ in particular, and to
assess its continuing value at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Running through this discussion is the claim that, viewed from where
we are today, John Rex appears to be one of a very small number of
genuinely influential voices in twentieth-century British sociology, who
has made particularly compelling contributions to the development of
sociological theory and the emergence of a genuinely sociological
account of ‘race’ and ethnicity.2 That his contribution in this respect
may, at the moment, not be as widely acknowledged as it deserves, and
the reasons why that might be so, I will leave others to ponder.
South African by origin, John Rex was an undergraduate at Rhodes
University, Grahamstown, and spent a brief period in Southern
Rhodesia before coming to Britain in 1948, where he began teaching
in the Extra-Mural Department at Hull University, in a branch based
on Teesside. From there, he took a PhD in Sociology at the University
of Leeds, under the supervision of the philosopher Stephen Toulmin,
and held successive university appointments in sociology at the

# 2005 Taylor & Francis Ltd

ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 online
DOI: 10.1080/01419870420000315816
202 Richard Jenkins
Universities of Leeds, Birmingham, Durham, Warwick, Aston and
Warwick again; he effectively founded the sociology departments at
Durham and Warwick. He was Director of the SSRC Research Unit
on Ethnic Relations, which became the ESRC Centre for Research on
Ethnic Relations, from 1979 to 1984. Long retired, he is still
academically active, particularly on the international scene.
There is, of course, more to life than work, and it is worth briefly
mentioning John Rex’s involvement in politics here because, whatever
else, his sociology has always been intensely political, and his interest
in ‘race’ has always been more than academic. He was active in the
South African National Union of Students, and during the 1950s was
for a time, I believe, a Labour candidate in a North Yorkshire
constituency. During the 1950s, and in more metropolitan circles, he
was also a member of that network of Left intellectuals that included
Robin Blackburn and Stuart Hall, out of which came New Left
Review. His political voice is one of the threads that binds together his
career’s work.
Looking at that work, it seems to me that several closely inter-
related aspects of John Rex’s sociology are of enduring significance
and value and already look set to outlive the critical cultural studies
approaches that generated the most robust criticisms of his work
during the 1980s (e.g. Gilroy 1980; Lawrence 1982). In short order,
these are: first, the need to build a solid ontology of ‘the social’ as a
basis on which to do sociology, second, the central place of conflict at
the heart of human social life and, hence, of sociological analysis, and,
third, the need for empirical research to be informed by theory and
/

perhaps even more important
for theorizing to be grounded in real

/

word concerns and systematic evidence.

For John Rex, theory is not a self-referential intellectual domain
/

in other words, it is not mainly about theorists and what they say
/

but, rather, it is a conceptual lens through which to observe the

realities of human existence in groups. This doesn’t, however, mean we
should abandon our awareness of our intellectual genealogy: Rex’s
work is a lively testament to the foundational importance of the work
of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel, and the intellectual
departures that their development of systematic social theory encour-
aged and allowed.

Understanding the social

The key text here remains the most important thing John Rex has
written. Key Problems of Sociological Theory was published in 1961,
when British sociology was still dominated by the political arithmetic
tradition exemplified by David Glass at the LSE
which, in passing,
/

may explain why much of Rex’s argument in this text engages with
 John Rex’s contribution to sociology 203
social anthropology
and international social theory by functionalism
/

in one version or another. As can be gauged from many of the

contributions to his festschrift, it is difficult for subsequent generations
to imagine the importance and impact of this one book. Although
probably little read today, it is still full of lessons and challenges.
Offering a riposte to descriptive value-driven empiricism, on the one
hand, and the natural science delusions of positivism, on the other, the
return to first principles in Key Problems was arguably the first
distinctively British sociological contribution to general social theory.
For generations of students it was their introduction to ‘the action
frame of reference’, and it paved the way for the theorizing of the
discipline in Britain during the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Like
most theorists since the 1930s
and there are only a very few
/

exceptions to this rule, and probably none of them British
his work is
/

more synthesis than voyage of discovery, but this does not detract from
its significance.
Rex’s ontological starting point, which is also, necessarily, a
methodological injunction, betrays his most important theoretical
debts, to Weber and Simmel, in that the individual, in theoretical terms
the ‘hypothetical individual’, is the basis of any understanding of the
wider social world. Each individual exists in a social environment
composed of the expectations and expected actions of other significant
individuals, and it is these that are the social determinants of
behaviour. The subject matter of sociology is the observed behaviour
of individuals and the ‘participant theories’ about each other’s
behaviour that they hold and develop (to be distinguished from the
theories of sociologists, which are in principle subject to systematic
testing).
Sociology must distinguish between the social and other factors that
influence behaviour; in order to do so ‘the social’ must be adequately
defined in terms of observable realities. Although ‘interaction’ and
‘social relations’, the elementary building blocks of collectivity, are
theoretically complex, they need to be empirically grounded. Thus
interaction involves more than one party, some intersubjective under-
standing by the parties of what everyone is doing, and some
expectation on all parts of what to expect from the others. For a
social relation to exist, there must, in addition, be sufficient shared
interests and/or values to create the possibility of mutual approval (all
of which imply a degree of organized continuity). The empirical data
of sociological research consists of verifiable statements about all of
these aspects of behaviour and the behaviour itself.
Although he is a methodological individualist, Rex differs from the
more radical ‘rational actor’ individualism of Banton, for example, in
acknowledging the importance of the non-rational and the difficulty of
incorporating it into sociological analysis (1961, pp. 92, 178). He is
204 Richard Jenkins
also clear, unlike many methodological individualists, about the
empirical reality and theoretical importance of collectivities. Groups,
communities and societies
the consistently important collectivities
/

with which sociology concerns itself
emerge, as institutionalized

/

patterns, out of social relations. These, too, are complex theoretical

concepts and should not be taken for granted, the theorizing needs to
be made explicit. Of particular importance in this respect is the need to
go beyond everyday interaction and social relations between indivi-
duals if we are to understand the enduring reality of collectivities.
‘Other sustaining activities’, such as institutionalized systems of
production and exchange and education, are persistent aspects of
collective life that cannot be reduced to the interactional give and take
of the moment. Socialization is particularly important in Rex’s view
(1961, pp. 56
7) as a necessary precondition of the consistent
/

meaningful intersubjectivity that informs both interaction and social

relations. These considerations mean that he is also clear about the
importance of large-scale studies at a national
or even international
/

level of abstraction.
/

Whether tacitly or explicitly, the basic ontology outlined in Key

Problems has informed John Rex’s approach to sociology throughout
his career: his social world is made up of individuals, interaction and
established relations between individuals, and socially meaningful
collectivities and institutions. As he has made clear over and over
again in various theorizations of ethnicity and ‘race’
my scare
/

quotes, not his
in Race Relations in Sociological Theory (1970,

/

1983), Race and Ethnicity (1986) and Ethnic Minorities in the Modern
Nation State (1996), ethnic groups are real collectivities, as are the
states which are the institutional arenas within which he has been
sociologically interested in them.
‘Races’, however, are not real collectivities. This does not mean,
however, that in his view it is illegitimate to talk about ‘race relations’.
Quite the reverse in fact: relations between ethnic groups and their
individual members are often heavily influenced by participant
theories, whether formal or informal, about ‘races’, and exploitative
and discriminatory systems of production and exchange and education
are often organized in terms of the same local models. These are ‘race
relations’ situations and racism is one of their defining realities (Rex
1983, pp. 116
61).
/

However, recognizing perhaps that continuing to talk about ‘race

relations’ might contribute to legitimizing the notion of ‘race’, and in
the context of a Europe in which disadvantaged minorities often not
racialized, Rex’s more recent work (e.g. 1991, 1996) has focused on
ethnicity and culture, and the nature of and prospects for cultural
pluralism. Here we come to what may be his intellectual and political
Achilles heel. A career-long emphasis in his own research on ethnic
 John Rex’s contribution to sociology 205
minorities, combined with a gradual shift to an emphasis on culture
and ethnic mobilization, can be misinterpreted crudely as playing
down or ignoring the importance of racism, the exercise of power, and
majorities; this was the basis for accusations that his work supported
the status quo and ‘blamed the victim’ (e.g. Bourne and Sivanandan
1980; Gilroy 1980; Lawrence 1982). While it’s possible to understand
the source of these critiques, the thrust of Rex’s theoretical work
as
/

opposed to the relative emphases on minority and immigrant

populations in his substantive research (Rex and Moore 1967; Rex
and Tomlinson 1979)
points in another direction: away from
/

stability and social integration and towards a recognition of the

complexity of conflict and its necessary place at the heart of the social
world.

Understanding conflict
An important part of the argument of Key Problems (pp. 53
54, 115

/ /

155) was concerned with the place of conflict within sociological

theorizing. In the context of the time, Rex was writing against
Parsonian functionalism, with its excessive emphasis on normative
systemic integration, and its revision by theorists such as Lewis Coser
and Max Gluckman, who while recognizing the ubiquity of conflict
argued that it could best be regarded as integrative in that it
contributed to the overall maintenance of social equilibrium (this
latter an argument that resonated subsequently in the work of theorists
of ‘cultural reproduction’ such as Bourdieu and Bowles and Gintis).
Drawing on Marx, and to a lesser degree Weber and Simmel, Rex
offered two significant corrections to these views. First, addressing
Parsons, he argued that ‘perfect conflict’ and ‘perfect cooperation’
were, at best, ideal types and that real social situations were somewhere
on a continuum between these poles and necessarily involved both
conflict and cooperation. Conflicts of interest and of values are only to
be expected. In other words, conflict, far from being a disruption of
normal life, is a fundamental part of normal life: social integration is
not the norm. Second, addressing Coser and Gluckman, Rex is clear
that conflict may be disruptive of existing social arrangements, and
often is. To summarize his argument in 1961, Rex suggested that rather
than being organized around value consensus, it was in fact points of
conflict that provided collectivities with their ‘shape’ and character.
These points of conflict usually tended to produce plural societies and
unequal power balances, always vulnerable to challenge ‘from below’.
This is a model of the social world in which conflict, diversity and
competitive politics are the routine state of affairs.
It is a model that Rex elaborated in further detail twenty years later
in what is his least acknowledged important theoretical work (perhaps
206 Richard Jenkins
because it was published in an introductory textbook series). Social
Conflict (1981) is a masterpiece of concise argumentation that
manages to avoid talking down to its intended readership while being
appropriately accessible. Starting from a viewpoint grounded in
methodological individualism and a Weberian model of social action
Rex aims to provide a coherent sociological perspective on conflict
that includes, at one end of the spectrum, dyadic relationships between
individuals and, at the other, conflict between collectivities, with states
as the defining type. Whereas Parsons defined the core focus of
sociology as ‘the problem of order’, Rex insists that, in fact, this is
more realistically and helpfully understood as the ‘problem of
conflict’. Furthermore, where Parsons treats a degree of normative
and cognitive consensus as axiomatic and the ultimate guarantor of
order, Rex argues that it is conflicts of ideology and values and of
‘rational’ interests that characterize relationships between individuals
and collectivities. What’s more the affective, psychological dimension
of conflict is also important (and certainly more important than
sociology at that time was able to acknowledge). Stable social
arrangements, whether small or large scale, are always the outcome

however uneasy
of the balance of forces and powers that are in
/ /

conflict at a particular place and time.

So far so good; and interesting and useful, too. For the purposes of
this discussion, however, two aspects of Rex’s approach to conflict
require more attention. First, in Key Problems and Social Conflict he
consistently accords pre-eminence to class as the most important,
indeed definitive, source of collective conflict in modern societies. This
materialist approach is not based on a Marxian model of class, in
which the propertied and the property-less confront each other in the
labour market, the crucible of class consciousness and conflict, but,
rather in a Weberian understanding of class as an emergent structure
of collective identification that derives from the operation of various
competitive markets, which is in close and complex, but not necessarily
mutually reinforcing, relationships to status distinctions and politics.
In Social Conflict he explicitly describes class as superseding ancient
primordial ties of ethnicity and the compulsory associations of
nationhood, as a consequence of the development of capitalism and
the bourgeois political revolutions that were attendant upon that
development. Immigrant workers, in this model, may become an
underclass. His use of Northern Ireland as an example gives a good
flavour of his thinking on this point: the primary fact of the Northern
Irish situation is, apparently, ‘the exploitation and oppression of the
Catholic working class by a bourgeoisie with foreign ties’ (1981, p.
118). Despite his immediate modification of the crudity of this
analysis, it’s reductionist and, even if it were correct
and I’d have
/

to say that it’s not
it’s an over-simplification.

/
 John Rex’s contribution to sociology 207
Reductionism aside, however, viewed from today’s vantage point
this perspective isn’t persuasive anyway (although it should perhaps be
remembered that the 1980s resonated to many confident assertions of
the demise of nationalism, not least from Hobsbawm and Gellner).
Ethnicity is not definitively primordial, any more than national
identity and nationalism are always compulsory. Neither shows signs
of withering away in the face of class. Nor is class any longer the self-
evident core source of collective identification and conflict within
modern nation-states that sociology once took it to be (which isn’t to
subscribe to a current, no less erroneous, view, that class doesn’t
matter any more). In his earlier writings, and particularly in his
empirical study of Handsworth, Birmingham (Rex and Tomlinson
1979), this led to a situation in which Rex was vulnerable to criticism
from the same set of critics to whom I have already referred, but from
two different directions. On the one hand, in emphasizing class he
wasn’t allowing ‘race’, and particularly racism, sufficient autonomy as
the major source of systematic disadvantage and oppression, while, on
the other, in talking about ‘race relations’ he was focusing upon black
people at the expense of looking at the structures of white domination.
Heads they won, tails Rex lost. Addressing his discussion of the
potential emergence of an ethnic underclass, these two strands
converged in the accusation that he was, in some senses, writing black
people out of society and the possibility of political action and
blaming the victims.
While not all of these criticisms are borne out by an open-minded
reading of what Rex actually said
and even the most plausible
/

require some qualification
it is nonetheless possible to appreciate

/

where they were coming from. The theoretical and substantive

emphasis on class relations was an attempt to understand the realities
of a new situation within an earlier theoretical framework that was no
longer wholly appropriate. In his recent writings on ethnic mobiliza-
tion and the possible futures for multiculturalism (Rex 1991, 1996), we
find a more nuanced and less reductionist approach to these issues.
There are a number of aspects to this. For example, ethnic and
immigrant groups are seen either as ‘quasi-classes’ or as status groups
in their own right, or indeed both. Class conflict and class-based
affiliations
in the labour movement for example
are no longer seen
/ /

as fundamental or the most appropriate arena for collective action.

The importance of ethnic differentiation within the ‘black’ or
‘immigrant’ population is acknowledged, with all that this entails for
political mobilization and integration.
Even within this more flexible approach, however, John Rex still
appears to see the market, and class relations, as historically corrosive
of ethnic attachments. In the pursuit of their own interests people
apparently ‘grow up’ out of the ‘cocoon’ of ethnicity (1996, p. 191).
208 Richard Jenkins
This remains an approach within which he has difficulty taking ethnic
attachments at their own face value.
The second dimension of Rex’s approach to conflict that requires
further exploration pretty much follows on from the above: his
argument for ‘egalitarian multiculturalism’ (1996) seems to be in
interesting tension with his long-standing views on society as a system
of conflict
in the best case, balanced and managed conflict
rather
/ /

than cooperation. In talking about an ideal of egalitarian multi-

culturalism, he draws upon a recent thread in European social theory
that is concerned with the emergence in modern societies of a public
sphere as a space of common participation that can hold complexity
and heterogeneity together. In his ideal world of egalitarian multi-
culturalism, the public domain of national politics and culture would
be open to all on the same terms, while various different communities
or ethnies, with their own cultures, would each have their private
spheres or domains in which to go about their everyday lives and invest
in the continuity of their customs and values.
This is another point of view
which, it has to be remembered, Rex
/

self-consciously offers as an ideal
that fits at best uncomfortably

/

with the present times. The French affair of the headscarves is merely
symptomatic of a wider problem that appears in two aspects. The first
is the necessarily ethnic/cultural character of the public sphere in
modern nation-states: majorities are ethnics too, which means that
there is no ethnically neutral civic-national culture. It is a contra-
diction in terms. The second is the difficulty in reconciling universalist,
actually Western, discourses of human rights with the particularities of
local and ethnic ways of life with which they may conflict.
In terms of Rex’s long-standing theoretical scheme of things, this
isn’t the heart of the problem, however, and it is precisely here that
revisiting his core theoretical work, as I have done in this brief
discussion, pays dividends. Put simply, Rex’s understanding of the
place of conflict in society, as elaborated in Key Problems and Social
Conflict, doesn’t throw into doubt the possibility of multiculturalism;
indeed it could be said to recognize the plural and heterogeneous
nature of all enduring social arrangements. What it does instead,
however, is to suggest the utter implausibility of peacefully co-existent
(egalitarian) multiculturalism. As an ideal it is remote and, arguably, a
political distraction. Some sort of balance of forces is imaginable, but
probably nothing else.

Empirical sociology
Unlike most of us, John Rex has written at least two genuinely
magnificent books. After Key Problems, the other is Race, Community
and Conflict, the study of Sparkbrook in Birmingham that he did
 John Rex’s contribution to sociology 209
with Robert Moore in the early 1960s. An account of complex
relations between the local English and the immigrant Irish, Afro-
Caribbeans and South Asians, its split focus on housing, voluntary
associations and religion, combined with an exploration of genera-
tional change in the migrant communities, makes for a rich and many-
layered text.
Its impact, too, was enormous, at first political and subsequently
sociological. As Stuart Hall wrote when reviewing it for The Listener:

They bring us close in to a familiar, recognisable part of our large

industrial cities and the detailed character of life there. At the same
time, they give us theoretical tools with which to understand the
social processes by which . . . such places come to exist at all.3

Hall gets to the heart of this book’s qualities. If Key Problems was the
first British social theory, Race, Community and Conflict was among
the first properly theorized works of empirical sociology in Britain.
However, it wore that theory
derived in part from the Chicago
/

school and in part from Key Problems
lightly and remains an object
/

lesson in how to write a properly sociological research report without

having the theoretical tail wag the substantive dog. For this reason if
no other
and there are others
it still has a huge amount to teach
/ /

any apprentice sociological researcher. It is also a powerful confirma-

tion that theory is the servant of systematic empirical inquiry, rather
than an end in itself.
But something else also distinguishes Race, Community and Con-
flict. It is a very personal book. It is clear from Robert Moore’s
reflections (Moore 1977) that doing the research was a powerful
/

indeed, formative
experience for both authors, each in their different

/

way. I think I am correct in saying that for each of them it was their
first serious field study, and the excitement, enthusiasm and vigour of
novices at work shows through. What’s more, the combination of
participant observation with local survey data enables the account to
work at different levels, and brings to life the situation in Sparkbrook
at the time. By comparison, Rex’s subsequent research in Birmingham,
Colonial Immigrants in a British City (Rex and Tomlinson 1979),
confined itself to interviewing and a large sample survey, and reflects
sociologically different times. A valuable enough study in its own right

which isn’t damnation by faint praise
it is the product of a
/ /

discipline that, in its research practices at least, had by then become a

thoroughly routinized ‘normal science’.
The increasingly respectable world of institutionalized sociology and
higher education has, one suspects, never been particularly comfor-
table for John Rex. The intellectual and personal fire that illuminated
the pages of Key Problems and Race, Community and Conflict has, to
210 Richard Jenkins
his great credit, never actually gone out. In a world of committees,
academic and other politics, and ever more difficult issues of resource
management, that fiery spirit has often made him an awkward
customer. That he chose to work in the particularly demanding and
conflictual arena of ‘race’ and ethnicity
although given his /

background in South Africa ‘chose’ is probably a poor choice of

word here
did not make matters easier. Those of us with more than a
/

passing interest in sociology and the study of ethnicity and ‘race’ have,
however, a host of reasons to be grateful that he did.

Notes
1. One consequence of writing this piece, and the re-reading of John Rex’s work that it has
required, has been to realize just how much I learned, particularly from Key Problems. If, for
example, I were writing Foundations of Sociology (Palgrave, 2002) today, I would be obliged
to acknowledge that debt explicitly.
2. Bringing these two things together, John Rex’s belief in the need to approach ‘race’ and
ethnic relations from a social theoretical point of view
/ and the balance that he has tried to
strike between his own very definite theoretical position and his equally definite under-
standing of the need for theoretical pluralism
/ is exemplified by the edited collection
Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations (Rex and Mason 1986).
3. I do not have the reference for this review because I have taken it from the cover of the
paperback edition (and therefore have to trust that the quotation is accurate).

References
BOURNE, J. and SIVANANDAN, A. 1980 ‘Cheer-leaders and Ombudsmen: The sociology
of race relations in Britain’, Race and Class, vol. xxi, no. 4, pp. 331
/52
GILROY, P. 1980 ‘Managing the ‘‘Underclass’’: A further note on the sociology of race
relations in Britain’, Race and Class, vol. xxii, no. 1, pp. 47
/62
LAWRENCE, E. 1982 ‘In the abundance of water the fool is thirsty: Sociology and black
‘‘pathology’’, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race
and Racism in 70s Britain , London: Hutchinson
MARTINS, H. (ed.) 1993 Knowledge and Passion: Essays in Honour of John Rex , London: I.
B. Tauris
MOORE, R. 1977 ‘Becoming a sociologist in Sparkbrook’, in C. Bell and H. Newby (eds),
Doing Sociological Research , London: George Allen and Unwin
REX, JOHN 1961 Key Problems of Sociological Theory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
______ 1970 Race Relations in Sociological Theory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
______ 1981 Social Conflict , London: Longman
______ 1983 Race Relations in Sociological Theory, 2nd edn, London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul
______ 1986 Race and Ethnicity, Milton Keynes: Open University Press
______ 1991 Ethnic Identity and Ethnic Mobilisation in Britain , Warwick: Centre for
Research in Ethnic Relations
______ 1996 Ethnic Minorities in the Modern Nation State, Basingstoke: Macmillan
______ and MASON, D. (eds) 1986 Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
______ and MOORE, ROBERT 1967 Race, Community and Conflict: A Study of
Sparkbrook , Oxford: Oxford University Press
 John Rex’s contribution to sociology 211
______ and TOMLINSON, SALLY 1979 Colonial Immigrants in a British City: A Class
Analysis, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

RICHARD JENKINS is Professor of Sociological Studies at the

University of Sheffield.
ADDRESS: Department of Sociological Studies, University of Shef-
field, Elmfield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield S10 2TU, UK.
Email: Br.p.jenkins@sheffield.ac.uk
/ /