Mass Observation

The U.K. Mass Observation (M-O) Project began in 1937 and still continues over seventy years later. Its central methodological tenet was to “observe,” to watch and record people's behavior and conversations. It has been suggested that M-O is an enigma (Hubble 2010), and there is ongoing discussion as to whether it was a research project or a social movement (Summerfield 1985). M-O was indeed founded by three young intellectuals: Tom Harrison, a self-taught anthropologist; Charles Madge, a poet and journalist (later to become a Professor of Sociology at the University of Birmingham); and Humphrey Jennings, a painter poet, writer, and filmmaker. They came together through the pages of the New Statesman. To date, M-O represents an important data resource for understanding the everyday lives of British people, including their leisure practices, patterns, and understandings of consumption. It laid important foundations for market research but has been underused by researchers in the field of consumption. The M-O studies contained within the project provide potentially instructive sociohistorical insights into the emergence and trajectories of consumer culture.

M-O members used a blend of anthropology, socio logy (influenced by Robert and Helen Lynd's [Page 908]studies of “Middletown,” also known as Muncie, Indiana, in the 1920s), and psychoanalysis and set out to tap into the British social consciousness through the use of images as well as words. Part of the impetus for M-O was dissatisfaction with the media coverage of the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936, and the founders set out to document the feelings of the people about this and other events. M-O developed in the context of, and indeed encapsulated, “the social division between modernity and tradition which was laid bare by the abdication crisis” (Hubble 2010, 5). The key to the early work was the team's use of images as “social facts.” Image in this modernist sense meant the coming together of the intellectual and emotional in a specific moment. This idea brought merged ideas from imagist poetry and the exploration of everyday lives with the intention of exploring meanings generated without dominant narratives. M-O was critical of what its members described as the “obsession with statistics” and held to the view that without qualitative work “sociologists will never be able to look further than the day after tomorrow” (Madge and Harrisson 1937, 6).

Between 1937 and 1939, Harrison, with a team of investigators, subjected Bolton (Worktown) to “scientific” scrutiny—a team of paid investigators looked into a variety of public situations: meetings, religious occasions, sporting and leisure activities, in the street and at work, and recorded people's behavior and conversation in as much detail as possible. Perhaps the most famous documentation of this project was edited by Harrison and published as The Pub and the People in 1943 based on observer's accounts of patterns of behavior and widely ranging activities in Bolton's public houses. The data demonstrate the role of the pub as an important public, political, and educational space as well as a place to relax and meet friends and provide a useful insight into M-O's value in offering an insight into what Hubble describes as a “possibly short-lived 1930s inclusive cultural consciousness” (2010, 6).

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