Professor Roger Penn
We are sorry to announce that Professor Roger Penn has passed away. The following obituary is courtesy of his family
Professor Roger Penn, passed away on July 12th aged 77 years, at home in Silverdale, Lancashire.
He was born in Lytham Hospital, the family living in Preston as his father was an engineer working for the Atomic Energy Authority. The family moved to Bristol in 1953, and following a further move to Bedford in 1960 he attended Stratton Grammar school Biggleswade. From there, he went to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1968 to read History, then switching to Social and Political Sciences and graduating in 1972. Whilst there he was an active sportsman in rugby, football, hockey and rowing.
He took up a Fulbright Scholarship at Brown University, USA, obtaining an MA in Sociology in 1973. He returned to do a PhD in Sociology at Trinity Hall Cambridge, awarded in 1982 and published in 1985 by Cambridge University Press as Skilled Workers in the Class Structure.
Roger was an economic sociologist, working at Lancaster University 1977-2012, becoming a Professor in Economic Sociology and Statistics in 1998. He moved to Queens University Belfast in 2012 until his retirement in 2016, continuing as Emeritus Professor. He was elected to the Academy of the Social Sciences in 2003, had sabbaticals at Berkeley University and UCLA in the 1980s and was visiting professor at the Catholic University of Milan 2015. During his academic career Roger published 10 books, 120 articles and 27 papers.
Roger was an inquisitive sociologist and liked to challenge convention. He described himself as influenced by neo-Ricardian economics, Weberian sociology and the historical insights of the ‘Annales’ school in France. Uncommonly for the time, he maintained a strong focus on empirical research throughout his career, and worked variously with large- and small-scale survey datasets and different forms of qualitative data.
He was involved in several research collaborations including the ESRC’s Social Change and Economic Life initiative, 1985-88. He was instrumental in developing work and life history grids in survey data for detailed quantitative longitudinal analysis of residential and work movements over the life course. His work in this consortium used the town of Rochdale as a case study – a location that Roger returned to as a research site throughout his career, pursuing numerous significant projects related to Rochdale’s development and decline of the textile industry and its ethnic minority population.
He developed his statistical skills through collaboration with the social statisticians at Lancaster University’s Centre for Applied Statistics. Also, with his brother-in-law David Dawkins, he was an early adopter of the statistical technique of log linear analysis in sociology and applied it to the historical analysis of the role of intermarriage in class mobility. First published in the journal Sociology in 1983, their work was republished in 2013 as one of 80 seminal articles in social statistics in the Sage Benchmarks in Social Research Methods series.
Roger was the British co-ordinator of a unique comparative international study of migrants, in Britain, France and Germany 1998-2000. This was published in 2009 as Children of International Migrants in Europe, comparative perspectives, [co-edited with Paul Lambert], and examined processes of migrant assimilation and cultural and religious identities.
Latterly, he developed an interest in visual research methodology and published several methodology papers in the SAGE Social Research Qualitative Dataset series and Sage Research Methods. A keen follower of football and a life-long Spurs fan, Roger spent the last decade focussing his research on the sociology of sport and football graffiti.
He is survived by wife Brenda, sister Alison, son Michael and daughters Sarah and Madeleine and by grandson Dylan and granddaughter Adelina.