In 1968 the sociologist John Eldridge, who has died aged 86, produced his book Industrial Disputes. When he joined Glasgow University four years later it provided a foundation for an investigation of bias in this area as part of a wider study of television news.
John was Glasgow’s first professor of sociology, becoming part of a department in which I was already a lecturer. He quickly became a founder member of the Glasgow University Media Group, and his knowledge of the patterns and causes of industrial conflict underpinned its studies of how strikes were represented. The skills of the media group – including also Greg Philo, Brian Winston, Howard Davis and Peter Beharrell – covered television production as well as social science. They analysed videos of how speech and images were used in news reports and interviews.
The new technology of video recording enabled them to follow entire news stories as they developed over the months. This brought out the hierarchy that existed in different groups’ access to television interviewers: in the Glasgow dustcart dispute of 1975, for example, not a single striking worker was interviewed nationally. Even more tellingly, there was an absence of any historical perspective or context to aid the understanding of workers in conflict.
The group’s resulting book, Bad News (1976), detailed the disparities in media portrayals of managements and workers, showing how they failed to meet their declared aims of impartiality and balance. As a professor, John received a lot of flak when the book appeared: he recalled being at the end of extraordinary hostility, as when representatives of the BBC and ITV attended a lecture he gave at Warwick University: “One of them jumped up and said: ‘We heard you yesterday and you said exactly the same thing at the University of Newcastle,’ to which he replied: ‘Well, truth doesn’t alter either side of the Pennines, you know!’”
When Glasgow’s principal, Alwyn Williams, required him to answer the BBC’s complaints, he refused to dilute or recant the group’s conclusions. In later publications, such as Getting the Message: News, Truth and Power (1993), John put the group’s findings into a theoretical context. These publications are now a staple of media studies internationally.
Born in Southampton, John was the only child of Hetty (nee Bartlett), a nurse, and Edo (Thomas) Eldridge, a supervisor in a bottling factory. John was nearly killed twice during the second world war blitz that Southampton endured and had to move frequently, attending several primary schools.
At Taunton’s school, one of the city’s grammars, he enjoyed English, history and football, and became the English junior chess champion. From there, in 1954 he went to University College, Leicester, to take a BSc (Econ) awarded by London University, then, as Leicester became a full university in 1957, a master’s (1959). In the sociology department he was taught by three notable exiles, Ilya Neustadt, Norbert Elias and Ernest Gellner.
After his master’s, he became a research assistant studying conflict resolution in the Consett steelworks, Co Durham, while also teaching extramural classes. A prolific writer of published works throughout his life, in 1964 he was appointed a lecturer at York University, and in 1969 a professor at Bradford.
In addition to the media studies that followed his arrival at Glasgow, in 1978 he founded the Centre for Research in Industrial Democracy and Participation. “People spoke glowingly about industrial democracy,” he later observed in an interview about its work, “but then there was an evaporation of enthusiasm … they didn’t do anything about it.” With John MacInnes and Peter Cressey he published Just Managing: Authority and Democracy in Industry (1985), advocating workplace democracy, or, at least, effective co-determination.
His lucid 1983 study of the US sociologist C Wright Mills examined Mills’s own concern with the distorted media representation of “the masses” in his book The Power Elite (1956), as well as sources of resistance to such an elite. He also published Recent British Sociology (1981) and, with his elder daughter, Lizzie, wrote Raymond Williams: Making Connections (1994), an illuminating analysis of this pioneer of British cultural studies and communications theory.
John’s term as president of the British Sociological Association (1979-81) coincided with Margaret Thatcher’s first two years as prime minister. He saw her as “the enemy of sociology”, keen to abolish the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). John led the resistance, which was successful, at the cost of the body being renamed the Economic and Social Research Council. In 2018 he received the associations’s distinguished service award and an honorary doctorate from Edinburgh University.
A commitment to the critique of what he called “nomad capitalism” and to social justice was central to John’s innovations in departmental democracy and student assessment. It also guided his establishment of the Ethnic Minorities Law Centre in Glasgow in 1989 and his work for the Iona Community. Immensely sympathetic and generous, John was throughout his life a Methodist lay preacher. Indeed, it was this dissenting tradition that informed his reading of Karl Marx, Max Weber, RH Tawney, Mills and Williams.
In 1960 he married Rosemary North; she died in 1997. In 2006 he married Christine Reid, and she survives him, along with his children, Paul, Lizzie and Alison, from his first marriage, two granddaughters and a grandson.
• John Eric Thomas Eldridge, sociologist, born 17 May 1936; died 24 December 2022
