Fielding, Nigel G. 1950–

(Nigel Goodwin Fielding)

PERSONAL: Born January 29, 1950, in East Cowes, Isle of Wight, England; son of Peter G. (an aerospace engineer) and Myrtle (an artist) Fielding; married Jane Laura Coates (a lecturer in statistics), July 3, 1976; children: Jessica Lucy. Ethnicity: "White European." Education: University of Sussex, B.A., 1971; University of Kent at Canterbury, M.A., 1973; London School of Economics and Political Science, London, Ph.D., 1977. Politics: Socialist.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XH, England; fax: 01-483-689551. E-mail—n.fielding@surrey.ac.uk.

CAREER: Metropolitan Police College, London, England, lecturer in law, 1972–73; Lewes Technical College, Sussex, England, part-time lecturer in sociology, 1973–77; Ealing College of Higher Education, London, lecturer in criminology, 1977–78; University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, England, lecturer in criminology, 1978–89, senior lecturer, 1989–93, reader, 1993–95, professor of sociology, 1995–, director, Institute of Social Research, 1996–. University of Bremen, distinguished international visiting professor, 1999–. Consultant to Surrey Probation Service, Home Office, Economic and Social Research Council, and Police Training Council.

MEMBER: Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, British Society of Criminology, Howard League for Penal Reform.

AWARDS, HONORS: Overseas fellow of University of Nairobi, 1976.

WRITINGS:

The National Front, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London, England), 1981.

The Probation Practice, Gower (Aldershot, England), 1984.

Linking Data, Sage Publications (London, England), 1986.

Joining Forces, Routledge (New York, NY), 1988.

Actions and Structure, Sage Publications (London, England), 1988.

(With Sue Conroy and Jane Tunstill) Investigating Child Sexual Abuse: The Study of a Joint Initiative, Police Foundation (London, England), 1990.

The Police and Social Conflict, Athlone (London, England), 1990, 2nd edition, Marshall Cavendish (London, England), 2005.

Using Computers in Qualitative Research, Sage Publications (London, England), 1991.

Negotiating Nothing, Avebury (Aldershot, England), 1993.

Community Policing, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

Computer Analysis and Qualitative Research, Sage Publications (London, England), 1998.

(Editor, with Alan Clarke and Robert Witt) The Economic Dimensions of Crime, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor) Interviewing, four volumes, Sage Publications (London, England), 2001.

Courting Violence: Offence against the Person Cases at Court, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 2006.

Contributor to books, including Questionnaires, by Martin Bulmer, Sage Publications (London, England), 2004. Coeditor of the book series "New Technologies for Social Research," Sage Publications. Editor, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 1985–98.

SIDELIGHTS: Nigel G. Fielding once told CA: "The National Front is a racist, extreme-right group. My book about the group was based on doctoral research. I joined the party in order to study it 'from the inside.' I have since written on the techniques and ethics of covert observation. My book on probation arose from my skepticism about how probation officers could counsel people out of crime; I wrote about how they maintained the balance between care and control, coming to believe that control was care. Linking Data is a textbook about combining quantitative and qualitative data, and Joining Forces is a study of what happens to people when they join the police. Actions and Structure concerns a new development in microsociological theory. More recent books have dealt with aspects of policing and of computer software for qualitative data analysis. I coedited the first book in the world on the latter subject. Despite my publisher's initial reluctance it was a bestseller and as a result they have gotten into software distribution, on which I advise them.

"I got into sociology because, as an English child growing up in the United States, I always maintained a certain detachment from the culture I was growing up in. It would be fair to say that my first love is writing and that the reason I became an academic and stayed with it is because of the opportunity it gives me to write. However, I spend as much time these days on other aspects of writing: advising publishers, editing a book series and experimenting with the new information technologies which facilitate various parts of the writing process."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), January 19, 1981, review of The National Front.

Times Literary Supplement, March 27, 1981, Alan Ryan, review of The National Front, p. 352.