Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity

Twenty-five years of a Scottish parliament presents the opportunity to take stock of a new Scotland, to be seen in the context of wider social, political and cultural changes occurring over the previous fifty years. The book draws upon a wealth of empirical material to enable us to ‘read’ this changing Scotland. The time-frame is crucial. We can now see that the transformative moment lay in the long decade of the late 1960s and 1970s, when social, economic and political processes began to transform Scotland in a radical way. Fifty years on, we live in a quite different country. Scotland sits at the nexus of three key concepts: civil society, nation and state. This book tells that story, explains how it came about and its legacy in understanding this new Scotland.

Table of Contents:
Dedication List of figures and tables Preface 1. Social Change in Scotland 2. What is Scotland? 3. Transformations 4. Demography 5. Materiality 6. National Identity: who have we become? 7. Politics in a Cold Country 8. The Cultural Turn 9. Where to now? Bibliography Index

About the Author :
David McCrone is emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh; a Fellow of the British Academy, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He co-founded the university’s Institute of Governance in 1999, and has written extensively on the sociology and politics of Scotland, and the comparative study of nationalism. His books include Who Runs Edinburgh? (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), The New Sociology of Scotland (Sage Publications, 2017), and The Sociology of Nationalism: tomorrow’s ancestors (Routledge, 1998). He coordinated a series of studies on national identity in Scotland and in England, funded by The Leverhulme Trust, which culminated in his co-authored book Understanding National Identity, published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press.

Review :
David McCrone is the pre-eminent sociologist of Scotland. For several decades, he has been investigating the transformation of Scotland from a fairly contented acceptance of its three-centuries-old partnership with the rest of the UK into an increasingly disgruntled ambivalence about that Union's future. McCrone's immense breadth of knowledge places Scotland in an international context that places this small nation's experience as symptomatic of the age. This account of Scotland since the Second World War is much more than a history. It is a theoretically. sophisticated and well evidenced account of the transformation of a nation through economic, social, cultural and political change. It demonstrates convincingly how common global trends are transformed as they encounter different national societies - and not just nation-states. A fitting testament to McCrone’s long-running interrogation of the sociology of Scotland. It is eminently readable, intellectually engaging and instructive, replete with carefully marshalled facts in support of his overarching thesis about the post-war trajectory of Scottish society, culture and politics.