School of Social and Political Science

Background

David McCrone is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, and co-founder of the University of Edinburgh's Institute of Governance in 1999. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He coordinated the research programme funded by The Leverhulme Trust on Constitutional Change and National Identity (1999-2005), and on National Identity, Citizenship and Social Inclusion (2006-2012). He was co-director of the ESRC-funded Scottish Election Study (1997), a principal investigator in the Scottish Parliamentary Election Study (1999), and has held a number of research grants over the years from ESRC, Leverhulme, Rowntree, and Nuffield. He has written extensively on the sociology and politics of Scotland, and the comparative study of nationalism. He was a member of the Expert Panel which devised procedures and standing orders for the Scottish Parliament, and was advisor to its Procedures Committee which reviewed the Parliament’s founding principles. He was professorial research fellow on Heat and the City, a multi-disciplinary research programme funded by the Research Councils UK.

His latest book Who Runs Edinburgh? was published in October 2022 by Edinburgh University Press. 

Qualifications

• MA (University of Edinburgh)
• MSc (University of Edinburgh)

Studying Nationalism at Edinburgh

In the early 1990s, we established Edinburgh as a major centre for research in the study of Scotland, and in the sociology of nationalism and national identity. Together with Tom Nairn, who died in early 2023, we established the postgraduate Master's degree in Nationalism Studies. This has always been a collaborative effort, and the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and National Identity Network (ENNIN) is keen to attract enthusiastic and skilled PhD students to work with us and to develop shared ideas and interests.

Biographical statement

My own research on the sociology of Scotland and the sociology of nationalism and national identity has benefited greatly from working with other people in a mutually supportive and enthusiastic research environment. More recently our work together has focused on national identity, and, in particular, the ways in which people construct and negotiate these and other identities for themselves. In this work, we have used large-scale surveys, ethnographies and qualitative interviews. Since 1999, we have been involved in a major programme of research on national identity in the context of constitutional change, funded by The Leverhulme Trust. This research has allowed us to explore, for example, the degree to which setting up the Scottish Parliament has had an impact on national identity, not only in Scotland but also in England, where there are interesting questions about the rise of nationalism in the context of the Brexit vote in 2016. 

I continue to work collaboratively, for example, with Michael Keating on issues of sovereignty in Scotland, using survey work on British Election Study, and Scottish Social Attitudes. we have published papers in The Political Quarterly together. 

I am pleased to write for our journal Scottish Affairs, which has recently celebrated its first 30 years under the editorship, first, of Lindsay Paterson, and currently, Michael Rosie. See, for example, 'What school did you go to? Education and status in Edinburgh', in Scottish Affairs, vol. 29(1), 2020; 

and 

'Changing places: comparing 1986 and 2019 elites in Scotland', Scottish Affairs, vol. 30(1), 2021.

Recent publications

In the first decade of this century, I published two books which I am especially proud of. Once more, they are the products of collaborative working, the essence of academic life.

The New Sociology of Scotland. London: Sage, 2017. (link) (Prologue) (Epilogue)

McCrone and Bechhofer Understanding National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. (link)

More recently, I published a book called Who Runs Edinburgh?, (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). it is an attempt to make sense of a city I came to as a student in the 1960s, and never left. Like many people who did so, I think of myself as an insider-outsider. The question, who runs the city, is an intriguing one. Read it, and see if you agree with my conclusions!

in the last few years I've published articles and papers on a range of topics such as:

'Declaring Arbroath: atque supra crepidam', in Klaus Peter Muller's edited collection 'Scotland and Arbroath, 1320-2020'. (2020);

'This land is our land: understanding energy nationalism', in Jan Webb and Faye Wade's edited handbook, Energy and Society (2022);

'The Question of the vis-a-vis: Scotland and others', in revue electronique d'etudes sur le mode anglophone (https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.13810). 

'Autonomous belonging: the politics of stateless nationalism', in The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Territorial Autonomies, edited by Brian Fong and Atsuko Achijo (2022).

'Who's European? Scotland and England compared', in The Political Quarterly, vol.90(3), 2019.

and with Michael Keating:

'Questions of sovereignty: redefining politics in Scotland?', in The Political Quarterly, vol.92(1), 2021;

and

'Exploring sovereignty in Scotland', in The Political Quarterly, vol.94(1), 2023.