Developing a sociology for the twenty-first century: preference theory

I look forward to the day when a British female sociologist reads my research reports (Hakim, 1991, 199S, 1993a, 1993b, 1994, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c) before launching into a critique. Crompton and Harris certainly do not appear to have done so. Someone who straddlesjournalism and the academic world told me that Key Issues in Women's Work (Hakim 1996a) is an interesting and complex book too complex for journalists to handle, he warned. It appears that it is more complex than some academics have realized as well, and it does not reduce to the simplistic story that Crompton and Harris present and criticize. I am grateful to those book reviewers who did consider my arguments in full. Writing in Work, Employment and Society in September 1996, Professor Peter Elias concluded that it presents the most important synthesis of research on women's work for a decade and is a serious attempt to get to grips with conflicting arguments. Writing in the British Journal of Industrial Relations in March 1997, Odile Benoit-Guilbot of the CNRS concluded that it is a rich and important book. If Crompton and Harris had read the 1991 'Grateful slaves' article more carefully, they would have noticed that in the concluding section I repeatedly state that no women can be regarded as grateful slaves and that all women can be regarded as self-made women, in the sense of having chosen their particular lifestyle among the options currently available to women. The article was an attack on the victim feminism that is fashionable in academic circles and is reiterated by Crompton and Harris. Their misrepresentation of my article is unfortunately not unique (Phizacklea and Wolkowitz, 1995: 12; Fagan and Rubery, 1996: 227).1 If Crompton and Harris had read the 1991 'Grateful slaves' article, the 1996 'Labour mobility' article and the 1996 Key Issues book, they would have seen that they all present a three-fold typology of women's work preferences, work plans and employment profiles, not the twofold typology they criticize. The 1991 article shows clearly the large size and complex nature of the middle group of women, about half of the age cohort entering the labour market in the 1960s, which I previously labelled 'drifters' and 'unplanned careers' (Hakim 1991: 112) but would now describe under the more positive label of 'adaptives'. The 1996 'Labour mobility' article also presents a threefold typology of employment histories and again shows the middle