Sir – Chris Gray (Judging the impact of an earlier decade, Weekend, December 31) touches upon the sociological and ethnographic work in Oxford of the late John Macfarland Mogey and might like to have provided readers with a source for his quotation from Professor Mogey on Barton and St Ebbe’s.

Before moving permanently to the USA, where he crowned his career by being appointed Professor of Sociology at Boston University, John Mogey had been a Reader in Geography at Reading and a lecturer in Sociology at Oxford, where he was a member of St Antony’s College.

He died on June 5, 2005, leaving the world a rich and extensive bibliography, which bridges the at times hostile disciplines of sociology and social anthropology/ ethnography. The work from which Chris Gray quotes is Mogey’s Family and Neighbourhood: Two Studies in Oxford (1956), based largely on extensive ethnographic interviews by Mogey and his researchers with people in Barton and St Ebbe’s and intended as a pilot study to what would become a sociological and ethnographic survey of Oxford.

Although that survey was never to be, in recent times respective studies by Angela Davis and Francis Moody have built on the kind of research into housing and identity which Mogey and his team pioneered; with Raymond Morris, Mogey also undertook a study of Berinsfield (The Sociology of Housing, 1998); and as the distinguished Oxford social anthropologist, Professor Peter Riviere (The Tale of Two museums, 2009) has recounted, Mogey was a prime mover in setting up the University of Reading’s Museum of English Rural Life.

John Macfarland Mogey’s death notice in the New York Times described him as a teacher, author, theoretician and poet. His work, in all its forms, deserves to be better known on this side of the Atlantic.

Bruce Ross-Smith, Oxford