COMMUNITY AND OCCUPATION IN THE HULL FISHING INDUSTRY.

The article addresses the interrelationships of community and occupation in the fishing industry at Hull, and in particular their relevance to the practical problems of recruitment and planned urban redevelopment as well as to the wider theoretical issues in these fields of industrial and urban sociology. Industrial sociologists have so far confined their attention to the more basic industries, notably coal-mining and steel, and fishing has remained sociologically unexplored. By comparison with the industries mentioned above, fishing occupies only a minor part of the economy. Thus in 1951, fishermen accounted for only 0.1 per cent of the total male working population of England and Wales. Even in Hull, the port which lands the most fish, the proportion of the working force so engaged was only 2.8 per cent, though fishing is the largest single industry in the city. A research project was initiated, in April 1954, by the Social Studies Department of the University of Hull. The project was broadly conceived as a community study, rather than as a study in industrial sociology. This conception of the project was based on what is common knowledge in Hull--that the fisherman inhabit a particular area of the city, and that they constitute to some extent a separate community.