Transcript Social Class and inequality

Social Class and inequality
• Subjective class -This generally consists
of the vague notions upper, middle and
working class and most people would
identify themselves as belonging to one of
these groups.
• Objective class - This refers to our
occupations, education, possessions and
our wealth. It can be measured in the data
put out by the Office of Population,
Censuses and Surveys such as mortality
lists.
Occupation and class
Traditionally this has been one of the main measures
used for a number of reasons
1. Sociologists and the government have easy access to
this data/information
2. Occupation is often linked to or a good predictor a
persons lifestyle
3. Occupations correlate with life chance issues such as
health/death/family size
4. People themselves often link their class identity to their
job
We must be aware that although its commonly used it is
not in any way a perfect measure of class
The registrar general scale
1
Professional
2
Intermediate
3
Skilled non-manual
4
Skilled manual
5
Unskilled manuel
Office of National statistics
A new system created in 2001 census based on
the type of work contract a person has and their
occupational group NS-SEC
Two other factors are also seen as important
• The market situation (Status ie employee
employed manager and the amount of money
you get
• The Work situation (Degree of authority the
person has)
• Which theory does this remind you of ??
Office of national statistics
1
Higher managers and professionals
2
Lower managers and professionals
3
Intermediate eg secretary
4
Small employers and self employed
5
5supervisory craft related
6
Semi routine eg hairdresser cook
7
Routine eg binman waiter
8
Long term unemployed
Will Hutton (1995)
• One of the most recent attempts to define the class
system in a new and radical way was by Will Hutton
(1995). Hutton is a critic of the New Right. He argues
that social inequality, in the form of low wages, low skill
and high unemployment, has resulted in a clearly divided
and economically unstable society. Hutton has put
forward the 30-30-40 thesis to show the three-way split
in contemporary British class relations. He says our
society can now be seen to consist of: 30% unemployed, low paid, insecure work; 30% with some
job security and quality of life; 40% - privileged workers
in secure and regular employment.
Fat Cats !!
• Recent work by Adonis and Pollard (1998)
stresses the significance of the upper class in
modern British society and they consider that
there is an emerging 'superclass' that consist of
an elite of extremely high paid managers and
professionals. According to Adonis and Pollard,
this new superclass is linked financially to the
City of London, a male and upper class world
that has many links with the traditions and
heritage of public school and Oxbridge elites of
the past. Any criticisms ?
Guys in the middle !
• C Wright Mills (1956) and others have seen the middle
classes as divided into two groups. The higher
professions have the potential for high earnings and who
are self-employed or employed by large corporations.
These are people such as judges, accountants, lawyers,
dentists, doctors. These people tend to control entry into
their occupations. The lower professions are often,
though not exclusively, feminised and work in the public
sector. They have limited access to high earnings and
include teachers, nurses, and social workers.
• The lower middle classes have become more like the
working class according to the Marxist, Braverman
(1974) who points out that many of the professions, such
as architects, have become vulnerable to redundancies.
The Workers !
• Working class work may require high levels of
skill and effort: however, because it is manual
work, it is not generally well paid and often is of
relatively low status. In addition, although years
of on-the-job training may be involved in such
work, people will not have been to university or
college. Hairdressing, for example, is one of the
worst paid occupations on average. Unskilled
work is very low value, low status work and there
are few openings for people who have no
educational qualifications.
Social mobility
• It is useful to look at intergenerational
mobility
• We are interested in how fixed the
boundaries are in a culture and mainly in
Britain over the last 50years
• Comparisons are made using samples
from different times and measuring
mobility. (mainly they use jobs to do this)
Check Key Terms
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Subjective class
Objective class
NS-SEC
30-30-40 Thesis
Social mobility
Intergenerational mobility studies
Iser study for the institute of social and
economic research Ermisch and
Francesconi 2002
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Inter generational mobility
Studied 2400 men sons
2300 women daughters
Found those with parents in high occupational careers
were more likely to also be in a high earning occupation
and to marry someone in one. They say cultural capital
plays a big part.
• They also found that downward drift from the top was far
more unlikely than upward mobility from the bottom
• They claim that the middle classes descended from the
working classes during the grammar school era are
blocking the way for working class children holding on to
their places (possibly through helicopter parenting)
• Give some examples of the ways they may do this
Evaluation
• There are problems when trying to do this
because there are changes in the
classifications of jobs/occupations and this
makes valid comparison difficult
• Also parents and children changing their
jobs make it hard to classify people and
families
• Housewives and the long term
unemployed are very hard to classify
• Problems aside it is concluded by researchers
from the Nuffield study that class origins play a
key role in determining achievement / class
destination
• Peter Saunders 96 disagrees with such
conclusions claiming that britain is very close to
a true meritocracy but in the sociological world
he is a minority.
• Indeed in recent times it seems that the gap
between the very rich and the very poor is
bigger than its ever been
Growing Middle Classes?
• In the 197Os, it was commonly believed
by many commentators that the working
class were becoming more middle class
as their incomes were higher than
previously earned by the working class.
This theory was known as the affluent
worker thesis or embourgeoisement and
was supported by Galbraith
Evaluation
• This theory was disproved by Goldthorpe,
Lockwood, Bechofer and Platt (1968) who
conducted detailed research on car
workers in Dagenham. They found that
that the workers worked longer hours and
had different attitudes to work from middle
class management.
The Underclass
• New Left
• In the early 1970s, the term was used
sympathetically by Giddens and other
members of the developing New Left
(1973) to describe those who faced
massive deprivation and social inequality
with working conditions and income levels
below even those of the working class.
The Underclass
• The New Right
• At the same time, other social
commentators from the New Right were
using the term underclass negatively to
describe a class of people who have little
self-sufficiency but rely on social security
benefits to survive. The term 'dole
scrounger' was widely used in the press to
describe those who lived on benefit.
Check understanding so far
• Answer question 1-8 in your booklets
Changes in Social Class
• Marx predicted an increasing class
consciousness amongst working classes
that would eventually serve to overthrow
capitalism – This hasn’t happened but
other changes have taken place instead.
• Proletarianisation – is the process through
which middle classes increasingly identify
themselves as working class.
Neo-Marxists Wright and
Braverman
• They argue that de-skilling amongst
traditionally middle-class jobs has lead to
proletarianisation of white-collar
occupations.
• Wright cites examples of university
lecturers as once very middle-class and
autonomous in their work are now subject
to greater scrutiny about how they spend
their time (no different to factory workers).
Evaluation
• Rosemary Crompton states females are
particularly prone to proletarianisation in
the workplace.
• Marshall et al argue that research shows
skills and autonomy amongst white-collar
workers had not diminished but where
they had workers were mostly female.
• How could we apply a marxist or Weberian
view to call-centre workers?
What do Post-Modernists say?
• They see class as being an out-dated
concept and focus instead on how identity
is gained through consumption via the
media.
• They see identities as fragmented and
fluid.
• How does Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of
cultural capital fit into this idea ?
• How does a Weberian view compare?
Check understanding
• Complete questions 23 to end in booklets.