Dorothy Wedderburn, who has died aged 87, was a social scientist with interests that came to centre on industrial sociology. She was also a socialist, university principal, enemy of all self-advertisement and an untypical member of the community of "the great and the good".

Born in Walthamstow, north-east London, she was the youngest child of Frederick Barnard, a class-conscious trade unionist carpenter and joiner, and his wife, Ethel, who had left school at 13 to earn her living in service. Both were the children of blacksmiths. Even in relatively meritocratic Britain, few 20th-century academics and administrators of distinction started life in such a working-class family. For both Dorothy and her brother George, an eventual president of the Royal Statistical Society, to graduate from Cambridge University before 1945 was yet more uncommon, though helped by school scholarships.