British Class Structure Research Articles

Dress and Metaphors of Mobility in British Visual Culture

Abstract This essay traces the presence of mobility metaphors in the sartorial practices of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. While fashion is frequently deemed ephemeral and changeful, it is also often theorised with reference to the concept of mobility, either physical or metaphorical. In fact, it seems that it is in the realm of fashion that the notions of motion, mobility, change and transition all become linked through visual representation. Based on Cognitive Metaphor Theory as well as insightful research on visual metaphors by Charles Forceville, one may argue that the concept of mobility is mapped onto garments and attire, resulting in change of fashions, as it was the case with the twentieth-century development of women’s tennis wear. At the same time, oppositional styles adopted by a subculture such as Teddy Boys are frequently theorised as metaphorically communicating class mobility and hence viewed as expressing a protest against British class structure. A more recent example of a close relationship between mobility, migration and fashion can be found in the British debate over the Muslim veil, in which Muslim women’s choice not to wear a veil becomes a metaphor of their cultural mobility and readiness to embrace the British way of life.

The Pattern of Social Fluidity within the British Class Structure: A Topological Model

Summary It has previously been shown that, across three British birth cohorts, relative rates of intergenerational social class mobility have remained at an essentially constant level among men and also among women who have worked only full time. We establish the pattern of this prevailing level of social fluidity and its sources and determine whether it also persists over time, and we bring out its implications for inequalities in relative mobility chances. We develop a parsimonious model for the log-odds-ratios which express the associations between individuals’ class origins and destinations. This model is derived from a topological model that comprises three kinds of readily interpretable binary characteristics and eight effects in all, each of which does, or does not, apply to particular cells of the mobility table, i.e. effects of class hierarchy, class inheritance and status affinity. Results show that the pattern as well as the level of social fluidity are essentially unchanged across the cohorts, that gender differences in this prevailing pattern are limited and that marked differences in the degree of inequality in relative mobility chances arise with long-range transitions where inheritance effects are reinforced by hierarchy effects that are not offset by status affinity effects.

The Great British Class Fiasco: A Comment on Savage et al.

Savage et al. (2013) claim they have produced a new model of the British class structure. They stress the innovative use of an internet survey, the BBC’s Great British Class Survey (GBCS), but it plays no serious role in the generation of their class typology. What they do is a theory free (though Bourdieu inspired) data dredging exercise. What they derive is an arbitrary typology determined by a contingent fact – the size of their sample.

Repositioning Class: Social Inequality in Industrial Societies

Introduction Class and Class Analysis in the 1990s PART ONE: SOCIAL THEORY Distributional Struggle and Moral Order in a Market Society The Promising Future of Class Analysis A Response to Recent Critiques PART TWO: METHOD AND MEASUREMENT Classes in Britain Marxist and Official Social Class and Underclass in Britain and the USA Class, Gender and the Asymmetry Hypothesis PART THREE: SOCIAL MOBILITY Proletarianization in the British Class Structure? Intergenerational Social Mobility in Communist Russia Intergenerational Class Processes and the Asymmetry Hypothesis PART FOUR: SOCIAL JUSTICE Social Class and Social Justice Was Communism Good for Social Justice? A Comparative Analysis of the Two Germanies

The Family ManCharles Darwin: Voyaging. Janet Browne

Historians are now accustomed to treating Charles Darwin and his ideas in the light of Victorian social arrangements. Peter Bowler as well as Adrian Desmond and James Moore adopt this approach in their recent biographies of Darwin. Numerous scholarly books and articles have set out to demonstrate one way or another in which Darwin owed his success to the support of his family, his colleagues, the organization of science, and the British class structure. Janet Browne's new book, which describes Darwin's life and career to 1856, is no different in this respect. Browne repeatedly documents the ways in which networks of friends and associates from varied walks of life contributed to Darwin's earliest achievements and continued to do so as his career blossomed and flourished. Indeed, Browne confesses that at one point she feared the book should be entitled Darwin: Another Biography, meaning, presumably, a biography in which Darwin and his science appear yet again against the background of Victorian customs and mores. Fortunately, her fears were unjustified. Browne has done her research so well and treated her material in such a perceptive way that even familiar stories begin to look fresh, and stereotyped images of Darwin, his family, and his friends assume a more personal form. The overall framework of this book will be of no surprise to most historians of science, but the skill and persistence with which Browne has unearthed new, telling details about Darwin's life and the artfulness with which she illuminates well-known events allow us to understand Darwin better than we ever did before and to speak about his world with greater confidence that we really have it right. Take Darwin's family: in Browne's account Darwin's father, Robert, appears as the same prominent figure and formidable physician that we have come to know in other biographies-only not quite. As Browne explains, the sensitive Robert never felt entirely comfortable with the grimmer features of medical study. He had to be dragooned through his excellent medical education by a grief-stricken father who hoped he could somehow carry on the family profession in the place of a brilliant older brother who died young. Then, at the very moment he was ready to begin his practice, his disappointed father abandoned him financially and left him to prosper however he might. This story speaks volumes about Robert's patient attitude when Charles quailed before the awful side of medicine and his generous persistence in supporting Charles on a voyage around the world that initially appeared to Robert as "a wild scheme." Browne tells us exactly what the Beagle voyage cost Robert-about twice what it would have taken to maintain his son in England-and she explains that he bore the cost with only the most perfunctory grumbling.

Questions of Power: Electricity and Environment in Inter-war Britain by Bill Luckin

technology and culture Book Reviews 393 shape the content of these technologies and the overall direction of technical change. Westrum devotes an entire section to the users of technology, a group generally neglected by historians of technology. His discussion encompasses the nature of skills, the role of informal knowledge in the workplace, the modification of devices by end users, and the role of modern technology in increasing psychological distance between people. This section includes an excellent chapter on technological accidents, based around four brief case studies. I would have preferred to see Westrum pay more attention to the experiences of women and workers in his section on users. He briefly considers gender in his discussion of design, but he does not address women’s special role as the dominant users of domestic and office technologies. He does include a rather abstract discussion of factory work and deskilling in his chapter on Marx’s theory of technology, but deskilling deserves a more extended and concrete treatment. Al­ though he criticizes Harry Braverman’s analysis of deskilling, he does not cite Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent, an important contri­ bution to the deskilling debate and a useful corrective to Braverman’s rigid framework. On the other hand, Westrum maintains a strong ethical tone throughout the book, insisting on the need for responsible social control of technology. Such control has become absolutely critical given the global environmental consequences of contemporary tech­ nologies. The practice of technology assessment provides one method for controlling technology. Although Westrum recognizes that tech­ nology assessments cannot predict the future, he argues that the process can help control technical change by forcing the creators of technology to consider a wide range of possible consequences. Tech­ nology assessment should not become a professional specialty, con­ cludes Westrum, but rather a process that encourages the participa­ tion of all groups with an interest in the technology. Eric Schatzberg Dr. Schatzberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the History of Electrical Engineering, where he is working on a history of the electric streetcar. Questions of Power: Electricity and Environment in Inter-war Britain. By Bill Luckin. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press and St. Martin’s Press (distr.), 1990. Pp. viii + 200; figures, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95. The interwar diffusion of electrification encountered more oppo­ sition from established economic, social, and political interests than was previously realized. Bill Luckin explores the grand ideology and local politics of the British experience. Focusing on the “ambivalence 394 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and opposition to technological change ... at the heart of British social life” (p. 1), Luckin has written a book in three sections. First is a history of electrification propaganda, including the industry-funded promotional groups, the Electrical Development Association (EDA) and the Electrical Association for Women (EAW). The experience of Manchester and rural England constitutes the second part, followed by the heart of the book, a study of the opposition to specific large-scale Central Electricity Board projects. The contending forces were the technologically progressive and socially conservative ideology of “triumphalism,” supported by the power of the state, and traditionalism, grounded in “regressive romanticism.” The latter included traditionalists who favored an idyllic rural life over the actuality of urban life, architectural preser­ vationists, and rural residents who feared change. Luckin employs discourse analysis fruitfully to explore the ideological beliefs of triumphalists and traditionalists and display the social constraints and values guiding British interwar electrification. Struggles against power plants and transmission lines ended with the Central Electricity Board mostly successful, albeit not without cost. Luckin describes well the local nature of these political battles and the inability—and lack of interest—in creating regional or national coalitions against the march of the pylons. Viewing the diffusion of electrification through the prism of the British class structure, Luckin finds that the upper- and middle-class triumphalists promoted an electrification that incorporated their values. Electric energy had to overcome not only the image of danger, but also working-class connotations of an expensive, culturally alien, and elitist power supply. The persistence of gas owed much to this missed opportunity to transfer electric light and power to the majority of Britons. The...

Global capitalism and National decline: the Thatcher decade in perspective

Part 1 Long waves of class formation: class formation in the world system the temporal dimension of class formation class formation and the political articulation of class interests generations in the bourgeoisie. Part 2 The rise and fall of British hegemony: the making of the British Class structure Britain's imperial decline.

Errata: Proletarianization in the British Class Structure?

Errata: Proletarianization in the British Class Structure?

Proletarianization in the British Class Structure?

Four different versions of the currently fashionable thesis of proletarianization in the class structure are identified. The central propositions of the argument are then tested empirically with reference to the class mobility experiences of a representative sample of men and women in Britain. An appropriate shift share analysis confirms that, though there are some differences between the sexes, a net upgrading rather than a degrading of the class structure has occurred. On these grounds the thesis of proletarian. . * * * * . . . lZatlOn 1S reJected as lt app les ln t nlS country. Just as the thesis of embourgeoisement formed the lynchpin for debates in class analysis during the affluent years ofthe early 1960s so has the argument about proletarianization of the class structure come to hold centre-stage during the recessionary 1 980s. Although one process is primafacie the inverse of the other there are several close similarities in the arguments themselves. Both were taken up seriously by sociologists after first having been popularized by non-academics or by academics writing in semi-popular format for a non-specialist audience. Both, indeed, were already public issues by the time they entered the arena of sociological discussion. In the former case the various folk-theories were organized about the commonly-held belief that Western societies were witnessing the demise of the class system and emergence of a mass consumer society. Similarly, the harbinger of sociological debates about proletarianization was a popular belief that economic problems in the advanced industrial societies had created a newly-impoverished class of subemployed and unemployed marginal workers and welfare dependents, and a working class whose traditional skills and work-practices had been undermined by the organizational imperatives of standardized and automated production. The British Journal of Sociology Volume XXXIX Number 4 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.116 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 06:31:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Proletarianization in the British class structure? 499 Because they were rooted in such diffuse and often polemical origins, subsequent sociological discussions of embourgeoisement and proletarianization were generally multifarious and mostly confused, more or less from the outset. It was not until the late 1960s, and the publication of the AfWuent Worker Study, that the theoretical foundations of the embourgeoisement thesis were clarified and its core propositions subjected to systematic empirical scrutiny. A similar adjudication in the ongoing debate about proletarianization has yet to be attempted. The present paper offers a modest contribution towards that end. It reports some of the findings from a recent national survey of class processes in Britain. These seem to the authors to bear directly on the issue of proletarianization and so help to clarify the parameters of the debate. They also suggest that, while there are many matters yet to be resolved, the central premise of the thesis is clearly flawed: the changing British class structure does not reflect a process of so-called . . . pro etarlanlzatlon .

Skilled Workers in the Class Structure

List of tables, diagrams and models Acknowledgements Part I. Debates and Definitions: 1. Orientations to the analysis of class in Britain 2. The traditional working class 3. The labour aristocracy 4. Theoretical orientations to skill 5. Aspects of the social structure of Rochdale, 1856-1964 Part II. The Economic Structuration of Class: 6. The trade union structure in the Rochdale cotton and engineering industries 7. The course of wage differentials in Rochdale during the period 1856-1964 8. Skilled manual workers in the labour process Part III. The Social Structuration of Class: 9. Classes, strata and occupations 10. Class analysis and marital endogamy 11. Intermarriage in Rochdale: class endogamy of brides and grooms 12. Intermarriage in Rochdale: class endogamy of fathers of brides and fathers of grooms 13. Skilled manual workers in the British class structure Appendices Notes Bibliography Index.

Structural Transformations in the British Class Structure: A Log Linear Analysis of Marital Endogamy in Rochdale 1856-1964

This paper analyses data on marital endogamy by means of log-linear modelling in an attempt to specify changes in the British class structure between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The evidence on intermarriage was collected in Rochdale and involves five decennial periods over the hundred year span. A seven class model was used to categorize the data and a succession of log-linear models fitted. The hypotheses examined were taken from the sociological literature. Almost all postulated certain forms of structural transformation in class structures like Britain during this hundred year period. However, the model fitted did not require the inclusion of a term which incorporated changes in class structuration over time and these hypotheses were rejected. Nevertheless, the fitted model did indicate the persistence of a class structure over the period. Examination of the odds ratios and scaled residuals associated with the model fitting suggested that the main lines of class cleavage occurred between the bourgeoisie and the unskilled manual working class and the remainder of the class categories. Conventional dichotomies associated with notions of a middle class/working class axis of class cleavage or a nonmanual/manual axis were not relevant to an explanation of the data presented and this was presented as a problem requiring further research.

Chlorosis and Chronic Disease in 19th-Century Britain: The Social Constitution of Somatic Illness in a Capitalist Society

This paper is informed by the recent attempts to construct Marxist views of nature, by the lively historical work on 19th-century British class structure, and by the dedicated work of feminist historians of medicine. Using the common disease of adolescent girls, chlorosis, as an example of a real "physical" illness, I shall argue that disease is, in part, socially constructed. Not only is the social class of both doctor and patient an important determinant in the perception of illness, but so too is the relationship between the disease and the mode of production. Both the "existence" of chlorosis and the way it was understood served ideologically to conceal the growing importance of adolescent labor and the recognition of the social genesis of illness. In doing so, chlorosis was similar to other forms of chronic illness. In a time when the conditions of work were strikingly insalubrious, the etiological emphasis was on individual failure, not on physical or social conditions of work. I argue that notions of health and disease partake of the struggles and social relations of the society that sustains them, but in a way which hides that very social nature. In this sense, they are like Marx's concept of a commodity--and in being a commodity, diseases appear not to embody social relations, but rather to be part of nature. I suggest that we see this "nature" in part as a commodity fetish--something we construct as "other" for a reason--and that we rediscover the social in the natural.

The Deferential Dialectic

For more than a decade, the most decisive influence on the empirical study of the British class structure has been the three consecutive electoral victories of the Conservative Party during the 1950s. The widespread belief that these events reflected some underlying change in the stratification of British society stimulated a new examination of the political attitudes and behaviour of the working class. In sociology this led to the exploration of the ‘embourgeoisement’ thesis culminating in the ‘affluent worker’ study by Goldthorpe and his colleagues and it is, perhaps, a comment on the state of sociological research into the British class structure that this study, together with its associated papers, remains the centre around which much of the debate on social stratification in contemporary Britain continues to revolve. In political science, however, the investigation took a different track. Instead of seeking an explanation of the Conservative electoral successes in terms of the working class becoming more middle class, political scientists sought an explanation in terms of increased working-class ‘deference’. Bagehot was enthusiastically resurrected (a new edition of The English Constitution appeared in 1963), and a spate of studies attempted to assess the ‘deferential’ component of English political culture.

Elites in the British Class Structure

Elites in the British Class Structure

Affluence and the British Class Structure

Affluence and the British Class Structure