I’ve been a sociologist as long as I can remember. So it was surprising to recall that I’ve spent as much of the last 25 years outside the mainstream of the discipline as I have in it.

I came to the subject relatively late. My sixth form did not offer sociology as an A-level option and in any case I was totally besotted with my main choices of history and economics. In both cases I think what attracted me to these was the search for patterns, for structure, for answers to big questions. I was always more interested in macroeconomics and found the simple logic of Keynesian demand management intuitively appealing. I still do.

I went to Cambridge to read history in 1985. I enjoyed it, but increasingly found myself getting swamped by the vast quantity of detail we were required to absorb. The only lecture course I regularly attended was a year-long series on political thought from Montaigne to Rousseau. This more schematic approach – and the imminent threat of studying medieval farming methods – led me to investigate the still novel Social and Political Sciences Tripos, and in my final year I switched over to this option. It was mostly political sociology really and very international, so I gained a solid appreciation of European, American and Soviet societies. In an early example of sociologists’ poor predictive record, I remember in 1988 our lecturer expressing much scepticism as to whether perestroika would get very far in liberalising the Soviet Union. Within two years the regime had collapsed.

After I finished my degree it never entered my head that I might become an academic. My overriding aim in life was to become a personnel manager in charge of industrial relations. After unsuccessful interviews with Pedigree Petfoods, Rank Hovis MacDougall and Nissan, I discovered that I was more likely to be optimising car parking space than sitting through the night averting strikes. But my enthusiasm for industrial relations remained undimmed and I took a short-term post teaching at the Manchester School of Management while doing a Master’s thesis in the subject.