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The article presents a list of the books received by the journal "The Sociological Review." Some of the books in the list are: "Movement and Institution", "Culture and Environment", "Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times", "Social Stratification and Mobility in the Netherlands", "Pre-Trial Justice: A Study of Case Settlement in Magistrates' Courts", "Comparative industrial Relations: An Introduction to Cross-National Perspectives", "Health and Disease: A Reader", "Solving Costly Organizational Conflicts", "Architects and Firms: A Sociological Perspective on Architectural Practice", "The challenge of Social change", "A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste", "Education and the Labour Market: Work and Unemployment Among Recent Cohorts of Irish School Leavers", "Psychological and Social Structures", "Introduction to Social Administration in Britain", "Positivism in Social Theory and Research", "Sociological Research Methods: An Introduction", and "The Chicago School of Sociology."

This article serves as a reply to comments made by E.G. Dunning and E.I. Hopper on the author's paper on social stratification in industrial society. Dunning and Hopper state that his paper 'explicitly sets out to explore' the problem of convergence. This, the author is afraid, is to claim too much for it. The author also wants to correct the statement made on the notion of one-way convergence. He wants also to explain that he does not think that American work on the subject of convergence as monolithic. He also explains that claim made that he regards national culture, political ideology and political organization as 'fixed and unalterable constraints on the effects of economic organization and technology'. Dunning and Hopper apparently fail to realise that the argument of Leach's to which they refer can equally be directed against the making of comparisons of a superficial kind. Certainly the existence of `generalised structural patterns' may be masked by differences in their specific manifestations in particular cases; but at the same time it is also implied by Leach's analogy that apparent similarities in social structures may be deceptive and may conceal underlying differences which it is the task of sociological analysis to expose.

This paper introduces the Great British Class Survey and describes how it came to be, providing an insight into the work that has led to this special issue on the contemporary British elite. We discuss initial work with the BBC Lab UK team, the construction of the web survey and its launch. We also consider the response rate and how an additional face-to-face nationally representative survey was then commissioned to deal with sample skew. The way in which subsequent analysis addresses this challenge is also addressed, along with how this 'problem' has provided rich, granular data on the most privileged and powerful inUKsociety. Wereflect on a piece of research which enjoyed considerable attention, and how we might interpret this in terms of public engagement. We also acknowledge some of the immediate academic responses to this innovative collaborative adventure. Finally, we indicate how the GBCS team will be developing this work in the future, before outlining how the papers in this special issue offer insights into the anatomy of power and privilege in modern Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how understandings of community and belonging have shifted in relation to rapid deindustrialization and subsequent waves of redevelopment in East Manchester. Drawing on ethnographic research, it focuses on two social settings which are under threat of closure - a coffee morning and a market place. In these settings, long-standing residents make community, paradoxically, by sharing narratives about the loss of social ties. Drawing on relational approaches to place, the discussion sheds light on the disruption between place and identity in post-industrial localities which have been reshaped by drastic physical regeneration. The paper argues that in order to understand the apparent contradiction between narratives of social decline and observations of abundant social relations, it is necessary to extend existing sociological and anthropological approaches to community and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British public view asylum-seekers in generally negative terms. Yet whilst there are an abundance of reports and opinion polls that measure levels of hostility in order to fuel political ‘debate’ very little is known about how asylum seekers are spoken about in more quotidian contexts. Based on an ethnographic study of racism in Southend-on-Sea, Essex this paper identifies two kinds of narrative (abstract truths and context-dependent stories) commonly used by established members of the community to speak about asylum-seekers. The paper then seeks to explain why more affluent, suburban residents of the town tend to draw upon the abstract narrative while less wealthy, centrally located residents are more likely to regale context-dependent stories about asylum seekers. An explanation for this sociospatial phenomenon is constructed around a Bourdieusian theory of practice that unravels local class relations and maps out a field for local symbolic prestige. Finally this microanalysis is used as a springboard to consider the wider relationship between racist narratives and social and cultural reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the preliminary results from a ESRC project which examined National Curriculum assessment in mathematics for 10-11 and 13-14 year old children in relation to class, gender and ability. The paper examines the ways in which children from different sociocultural backgrounds approach assessment items which embed mathematics in supposedly "realistic" contexts. Early data from the Key Stage 2 sample of 10-11 year olds will be presented which shows that there does seem be a social class effect in the response of children to "realistic" items, one which leads to some working class children failing to demonstrate competencies they have. The paper uses quantitative and qualitative methods, relating its findings to Basil Bernstein's account of sociocultural codes -- in particular his theorizing of the social distribution of recognition and realization rules for reading educational contexts. Until fairly recently, in England and elsewhere, success in primary school mathematics was achieved by demonstrating a capacity to memorize, reproduce and use relatively simple algorithms. However, in recent years, there has been considerable change in primary school mathematics with an increasing stress being laid, at least rhetorically, on understanding, investigation and the application of mathematics in "realistic" settings.

In the past decade the Nuffield class schema has become the established way of operationalising social class measures in survey analyses. This paper carries out secondary analysis of the 1987 British General Election Survey to analyse the relationship between voting patterns and middle-class groups. It argues that the Nuffield class schema actually obstructs a proper understanding of the relationship between class and politics, and that in order to develop an adequate account of middle-class politics it is necessary to develop an alternative theoretical perspective drawing on the new sociology of the professions, and on the sociology of state formation. The paper concludes with some tentative remarks on the changing characteristics of middle-class politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the relationship between working-class participation in higher education ( HE) in England and social and cultural mobility. It argues that embarking on a university education for working-class people has been construed in governmental discourses as an instrumental means of achieving upward mobility, or of aspiring to 'become middle class'. Education in this sense is thus not only understood as having the potential to confer value on individuals, as they pursue different 'forms of capital', or symbolic 'mastery' ( Bourdieu, 1986), but as incurring a form of debt to society. In this sense, the university can be understood as a type of 'creditor' to whom the working-class participants are symbolically indebted, while the middle classes pass through unencumbered. Through the analysis of empirical research conducted with staff from working-class backgrounds employed on a university Widening Participation project in England, the article examines resistance to dominant educational discourses, which understand working-class culture as 'deficient' and working-class participation in HE as an instrumental means of securing upward mobility. Challenging the problematic notion of 'escape' implicit in mobility discourses, this paper concludes by positing the alternative concept of 'fugitivity', to contest the accepted relationship in HE between creditor and debtor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs a Bourdieusian conception of class and attempts to illustrate the power of such an approach via an analysis of the contemporary Brazilian case. Initially, the paper describes the main dilemmas and disputes in the field of class analysis in Brazilian sociology. Then, the paper presents an empirical investigation on the role of culture in the shaping of class relations in Brazil, based on the analysis of survey data containing information on social agents' cultural participation and uses of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the salience of class in Britain in relation to the experiment of the BBC-academic partnership of the Great British Class Survey (GBCS). It addresses the claimed inauguration of a third phase in class analysis in the UK sparked by the experiment. This is done by considering three main issues. First, the GBCS experiment is situated in the context of various explorations of cultural class analyses, and chiefly in relation to the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) project (ESRC funded 2003-6). Secondly, the focus is on the influence of the academic turn to big data for the procedures and claims of the project, and some implications of the methodological choices. Thirdly, attention is turned to the deleterious effects of commercial and institutional pressures on the current research culture in which the experiment exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an enduring, indeed increasing awareness of the role of spatial location in defining and reinforcing inequality in this country and beyond. In the UK, much of the debate around these issues has focussed on the established trope of a longstanding 'north-south divide', a divide which appears to have deepened in recent decades with the inexorable de-industrialisation of northern Britain presented in stark counterpoint to the burgeoning concentration of wealth in London and the south-east, driven by the financial and ancillary services sectors. Due to a lack of available data, such debates have tended to focus solely on economic inequalities between places, and until now there was little understanding of how these disparities played out in the social and cultural domains. This paper significantly advances our understanding of the true meaning of spatial inequality in the UK by broadening that definition to encompass not only the economic, but also the social and cultural arenas, using data available from the BBC's Great British Class Survey experiment. We argue that these data shine a light not only on the economic inequalities between different parts of the country which existing debates have already uncovered but to understand how these are both reinforced and mediated across the social and cultural dimensions. Fundamentally, we concur with a great many others in seeing London and the south-east as a vortex for economic accumulation but it is also much more than that; it is a space where the coming together of intense economic, social and cultural resources enables the crystallisation of particular and nuanced forms of elite social class formations, formations in which place is not incidental but integral to their very existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intentions in this paper are two-fold—to analyse the ideals of English children between the ages of eight and 18 years, taking into account such factors as age, sex, social class, educational background and political party identification; and to test for the relationship between political efficacy and the types of ideals chosen. The ideals which concern in this paper are those which relate closely to the child's picture of himself. In particular, the interest is in the children's exemplars—those adult figures who serve as models for children's values and conduct. The literature on the formation of idealized self-images has tended to concentrate on the significance of selecting figures from the child's immediate environment as models. Much less attention has been paid to the significance of selecting exemplars from the wider environment and yet the sell-image of the mature individual is dependent upon both early primitive identification and later significant persons. The adoption of such figures may have consequences both at the level of the political system and also at the level of individual political behaviour.

This paper engages with the subjective experience of 'doing' aspiration, teasing out the psychic and social costs that accompany this as a classed process. It draws on a qualitative study of young women located in further education and contemplating their futures under New Labour, locating how the political rhetoric of aspiration gets institutionalized within school practices; how it intersects with maternal expectations and practices of involvement; and how these are lived and managed by subjects located in different positions in class-inflected social space. In attending to the tangled web of institutional, intergenerational and affective practices which shape young women's aspirations, the paper seeks to interrupt the celebratory and simplistic rhetoric of aspiration that characterizes the contemporary socio-political register of neoliberalism. As these ideals become further entrenched by the current Coalition government, there is an even greater urgency for such sociological enquiries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on domestically violent men typically takes an oppositional logic of gender. While the significance of class in researching domestically violent men is identified, class and gender are often treated as separate entities that do not complicate each other. Drawing upon group observations and in-depth interviews, this paper identifies how intersections of class and gender manifest in the counselling experiences of domestically violent Taiwanese men. From a Bourdieusian feminist analysis, the authors analyse (1) how class distinctions serve to (re)produce gendered hierarchy; (2) how contradictory experiences of gender reveal a relational understanding of class; and (3) how the gendered nature of domestically violent men is inscribed with a meaning of (working) class specificity for maintaining middle-class 'purity'. In analysing men's multiple and conflicting experiences, this paper contributes to research on domestically violent men by showing how class and gender are actively constructed and not produced in a monolithic/invariant way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the ways in which parents talk about choosing secondary schools in three areas of Greater Manchester. It argues that this can be a moment when parents are considering their own attitudes to, and shaping their children's experiences of, multiculture. Multiculture is taken as the everyday experience of living with difference. The paper argues that multiculture needs to be understood as shaped not only by racialized, ethnic or religious difference (as it is commonly understood) but also by other differences which parents may consider important, particularly class and approaches to parenting. We stress the need to examine what parents say about schooling in the context in which they are talking, which is shaped by local areas and the experiences of their children in primary schools. Based on interviews with an ethnically mixed groups of parents from different schools, we show how perceptions of the racialized and class demographics of schools can influence parents' choice of secondary schools. The paper also argues that attention needs to be paid to the ways in which terms such as 'multicultural' and 'mix' are applied uniformly to very different contexts, be they particular schools or local areas, suggesting there is a paucity of language in Britain when talking about multiculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociological tradition of thinking about the middle class has made a very significant contribution to the understanding of politics in advanced contemporary societies. This paper approaches the case of Spain within a conceptual and empirical framework derived from that work. Its point of departure is that most analysis of social class in sociology and political science to date has relied on class schemes that attempt to explain single subjects or dimensions of particular phenomena. Political sociology, for example, has produced numerous single-dimension studies on issues such as voting, political participation, and political values or attitudes. These kinds of study tend to produce neat and unambiguous conclusions. A more nuanced picture emerges from the present study, which adopts an alternative, multidimensional analysis. The study compares the behaviour of social classes, and above all of fractions of the middle class, in each of the four areas of voting, political ideology, political participation, and political values. Doing so, the results present a much more complex picture of middle-class politics than has traditionally been available. The significance of these results is twofold. First, we see that an accurate description of the political behaviour of the middle class cannot be reduced to a dichotomous unitary versus heterogeneous dilemma, or to conservative versus leftist views, since the political stand of this social class is essentially 'ambivalent'. Secondly, these results strongly suggest that theoretical work on this and similar types of phenomena should more frequently take into account the complexity of actually observed behaviour, rather than relying on the often thinner or simpler patterns from which sociological knowledge has too often been derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a series of ethnographic encounters collected while hanging around at a seafood stand in east London, the following article aims to explore the relationship between individual expressions of distaste and the production of class, ethnic and generational forms of distinction. Starting with the visceral expressions of distaste directed towards a seafood stand, the following paragraphs draw on a combination of historical and ethnographic data rendered through a matrix of anthropological, sociological and psychoanalytic theory, to explore the role of everyday ambient experiences and the stratifying processes that cut across the lives of the city's inhabitants. Arguing against purely biological explanations of disgust, the paper explores how social histories and cultural experience inflect gut responses to the sensoria that suffuse urban environments. Moving the focus beyond the social construction of urban sensibilities, the paper goes on to develop an account of culturally inflected forms of distaste, shaping the city and the lives of its inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between cultural socialisation, educational attainment and intergenerational social mobility. Picking up on debates about the transmission of cultural capital and social advantage, we use data from the Taking Part Survey of England to analyse how far socialisation into cultural activities and encouragement play a role in educational attainment, intergenerational mobility and in the reproduction of class. This survey has unprecedented data on whether respondents had been taken to museums/art galleries, theatre/dance/classical music performances, sites of historic interest, and libraries when they were growing up. This is buttressed by information on how much parents or other adults encouraged the respondents to read books or to be creatively active in different domains of the arts, literature and music. Using these rich measures of childhood socialisation, we can show that part of the effect of parental class on educational attainment is due to the transmission of this kind of cultural capital. Moreover, this transmission also has a direct effect on the level of educational attainment. In a similar fashion, respondents who have experienced a higher intensity of cultural socialisation are more likely to be upwardly mobile, and likewise, cultural transmission has a positive effect on the prevention of downward mobility among service class children. These results are discussed in the light of current issues in British mobility research and its treatment of cultural aspects of class and mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the French Revolution constituted the basic metaphor through which Pierre Bourdieu perceived and analyzed gender hierarchies; that the class structure of the ancien régime and the mechanisms of its legitimation were the major metaphors he used through his scathing critiques on the order of the sexes; and that the ideals of liberté, égalité and fraternité were always his reformatory aims for a just, gender-neutral society. The paper shows how this preoccupation with the Revolution of 1789 structured Bourdieu's analysis of gender relations and sexual identities in contemporary society. It exposes the ways in which he identified men with the nobility and women with the third estate; it presents his analyses of the role that traditional ideologies and state bureaucracies play in legitimating this arbitrary order of masculine domination; and it analyzes his proposals for a sexual revolution while exposing the counter-revolutionary forces that persistently negate attempts to reform gender hierarchies. Fundamentally, this new reading of Bourdieu's exegeses on gender suggests that he was working with a ready-made interpretive scheme, a model of society that he was inclined to see as always reproducing itself: the ancien régime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of social class and ethnic group background in determining individuals' social class destinations. It explores the extent to which these background factors are mediated by educational achievement, and the role of educational qualifications in enabling intergenerational class mobility. To do this, it uses the ONS Longitudinal Study. These data allow us to observe parents' characteristics during childhood for a group of children of different ethnic groups growing up in England and Wales in the same period and who had reached adulthood by 2001. Results show that the influence of class background on these children's subsequent social class position varied with ethnicity: it was important for the majority, even after taking account of educational qualifications, but had a much smaller role to play for the minority groups. The minority groups made use of education to achieve upward mobility, but to greater effect for some groups than for others. Among those without educational qualifications, minority groups suffered an ‘ethnic penalty’ in relation to higher class outcomes; but for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, this penalty persisted at all levels of education. These findings challenge the notion that a more equal society can be achieved simply through promoting equality of opportunity through education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to make a contribution to debates on ‘class analysis’, as well as exploring the role of the family in class reproduction. A broad distinction is drawn between primarily ‘economic’ and primarily ‘culturalist’ accounts of class reproduction. It is argued that despite their differences, these accounts also share many similarities. In particular, both approaches identify the role of the family as central to the reproduction of class. However, economic and cultural accounts cannot be integrated into a single ‘theory’, one reason being that the mechanisms whereby economic and cultural capital are transmitted are different. Nevertheless, economic and cultural approaches may be (and should be) used in combination with each other in order to develop a full account of the reproduction of class inequalities. In developing these arguments, a critique is offered of current theories of ‘individualisation’ in relation to class and the family. The argument is illustrated by two ‘worked examples’; teenage motherhood, and the patterning of mothers’ employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive mobility between class of origin and class of destination has been a characteristic feature of societies in Europe and North America since the middle of the twentieth century. Most mobility has been upward, and most of that has been explicable by occupational change – by the rise in the proportion of the labour force which works in service-class jobs and the decline in the proportion in manual jobs. This pattern may now be changing, because parents of younger cohorts (people born since the 1960s) have themselves benefited from upward mobility and so there is less scope for further upward movement by their offspring. The paper uses a large new data source for Scotland to investigate these topics. It finds that there is still a great deal of mobility, and that, although upward mobility still predominates, its amount is lower in younger cohorts than in older. Nevertheless, relative mobility has not changed as upward mobility has declined, just as in earlier studies it was found not to have changed as upward mobility rose. These patterns are similar for men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class theorists ask for research on the‘paradox of class’– the fact that while class appears to be materially just as important as ever, it hardly features as part of a self-conscious social identity. At the same time mothering is usually seen as a classless activity. This paper describes class based differences in how mothers combine employment and caring for their children, how they divide labour with their partners, and how they choose childcare. These are not simple structural divisions between working class and middle class, but instead refer to more nuanced social identities. These class based differences in mothering present different mixes of choice and constraint, or of‘rationality’ and‘preference’ in choosing alternative courses of action. However, theories focusing on classless individualised preference (Hakim) and class–based rationality (Goldthorpe) do not go far beyond a tautological description of these alternatives. Rather, the paper shows how preference and rationality are socially and culturally created through the development of career as an identity, through biographical experience, through relations with partners, and through the development of normative views in social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emphasis in class research remains on the structural aspects of class, class processes are neglected. This paper focuses upon some relational and normative aspects of class through an examination of social divisions produced and constructed within middle class families’ choices of childcare. Working with data from two contrasting settings in London (Battersea and Stoke Newington) three issues are addressed in the paper; the extent to which childcare arrangements both substantively and structurally position children differently within long term educational careers; the ways in which the use of choice in a market system of child care and education, works to produce patterns of social closure that quietly discriminate via the collectivist criterion of class and racial membership; and the ways in which child care choices also point-up and perpetuate subtle distinctions and tensions of values and lifestyle within the middle class, between class factions. Concepts drawn from the work of Bourdieu are deployed throughout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the influence of the burgeoning global 'super-rich' on contemporary sociospatialization processes in London in the light of a contemporary re-reading of Pahl's classic volume, Whose City? It explores if a turn to 'big data' - in the form of commercial geodemographic classifications - can offer any additional insights to a sociological approach to the study of the 'super-rich' that extends the 'spatialization of class' thesis further 'up' the class structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Official representations of transformed landscapes and people's memories of these landscapes are usually set into a contrast. This article analyses the relationship between workers' nostalgic memories and an optimistic official representation of a transformed industrial landscape by considering both as elements of social knowledge. This is achieved by analysing official texts and biographic narratives of workers. All too often class is considered as irrelevant, but this article carves out the relevance of class for workers' memories and their feelings of nostalgia. Against the backdrop of concepts of social knowledge and social memory, this article focuses on the interrelations and demonstrates that official representations leave an imprint on the workers' emotions that are related to class. Correspondingly, this paper clarifies why the retired workers are so nostalgic even if they climbed the social ladder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights a number of strong indications of important changes in the work and labour market experiences of professionals and managers, the core of the 'new middle class' (nmc) in most contemporary class theories. Following an outline of some of these changes, it is argued that several central theoretical strategies shared by class theorists -- notably a residual 'functional essentialism' and the choice of microfoundations -- prevent them from adequately theorising these changes. The paper offers an alternative approach to theorising the contemporary nmc that avoids the reductionism of many existing approaches, and that is grounded in microfoundations focused on the relation of narratively constructed identities to social action. On this basis, an account of the contemporary emergence of a new segment of the nmc, the 'nmc bricoleur', is outlined, and its relation to empirical studies of the changing nmc is suggested. The paper concludes with some speculations about the likely future of Anglophone new middle classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores and contrasts the gender value systems of two groups of anti-school boys. It suggests that cultural differences in specifically gender values can lead to (i) polarisation between anti-school boys and (ii) confrontation with school authorities in ways not explained by the traditional theory of culture clash between the working class pupil and the middle class school. It is also noted that the label 'counter-school' used by Willis to convey the culture of some working class boys ('the lads') may need to be refined if the culture is reassessed in a way which acknowledges the commonality between the gender value systems of 'the lads' and those of the school. In fact, the research reported in this paper found that another group of anti-school boys (not working class) was much more counter the gender value system of the school than 'the lads' and did not uphold traditional masculine values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use findings from an empirical study of the meaning of tranquilliser prescribing and use to examine the contention that these drugs are a means of social control, and to assess the explanatory value of the concept of social control when applied to the doctor-patient relationship. We first outline the historical application of the concept to the health field, specify the cultural mechanisms by which social control is said to be achieved and look at the ways in which the mechanisms are thought to operate through the prescribing of the most widely used kind of tranquilliser/hypnoticbenzodiazepines (e.g. Valium, Mogadon). We then draw on our data to see how far they substantiate the arguments which have been developed. In the final section of the paper we suggest some alternative explanations regarding the nature of doctors' power and of patient dependence. We also discuss problems involved in conceptualizing gender and class ideologies, note an inherent tendency towards an over-socialized view of the person and assess the usefulness of functionalist explanations stemming from the application of the social control concept to the doctor-patient relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews certain theories outlined by Taylor, Clarke, Critcher, Dunning et al. which try to set out the relations between professional football and working class culture and which, as part of this, seek to explain football hooliganism as resulting from changes in these relationships. Such theories draw on English evidence and English forms and this paper provides some historical and contemporary evidence, concerning hooliganism and community ties, about a major Scottish club -- Rangers FC -- to indicate that the parallels and causal trajectories these theories suggest do not seem to hold good north of the border.
In conclusion, some additional points are made about English theories and Scottish football in order to argue that a good deal more research is required if we want to understand either the symbolic significance of football in working class culture or football hooliganism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial societies have a characteristic occupational structure, which arises from the process of industrialisation. The introduction of new technologies, the growing shift to inanimate power, the diversion of manpower and capital resources from primary production into manufacturing production and into new 'non-productive' service sectors, are recognised as the mechanism by which 'occupational transition' takes place. These changes in occupations interest a wide range of sociologists, partly because occupation is used so extensively to operationalise the concept of social class, and more fundamentally because .the emergence of industrial society is one of the central problems of social theory.
While this paper does not wish to challenge the fact of occupational transition, it does wish to question its form and the quality of the empirical evidence on which theories of industrialisation and industrial society (in several formulations) have been based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up a series of related issues arising out of the work of Karl Marx. The first two sections consist of a discussion of the premises and methodology of Marxist analysis. I then go on to explore the implications of this discussion for two central features of Marx's legacy: the concept of class, and the base/superstructure distinction. In both cases I argue that undue faithfulness to the letter of some of Marx's texts has distracted attention from the methodology implicit in his analytic and historical work, and thereby has contributed to an overly sterile Marxism. The final section of the paper is devoted to a critique of a particular vulgar historicist view of Marxism, which is in fact rarely espoused today by Marxists. It is included for two reasons. First, this interpretation is occasionally presented by Marx's critics as Marxism, and it is therefore worth destroying this illusion. Secondly, and far more significantly, elements of this view can be found buried within the work of Marxists whose Marxism is, when taken as a whole, far from vulgar.
Many of the points made here have been made before. Such originality as this paper has, therefore, rests mainly in the way I have sought to relate them. I hope to show that what have often been treated as isolated problems, in fact rest on a common failure to grasp how Marx conceived and analysed production; and that, conversely, it is in the methodological principles which are embedded in these substantive analyses that the distinctiveness of Marx's historical materialism is to be found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the authors comment on an article by researchers Steven Box and Julienne Ford. Relying heavily on data derived from self-report delinquency studies, they conclude that the available evidence, while contradictory and confused, cannot be said to support the hypothesis that social class is negatively related to criminal behaviour. On the basis of this conclusion they then proceed to launch an attack on social labelling theory. The authors first lists a number of serious errors in their review of self-report delinquency studies. Following this they present their own review, the conclusion of which differs significantly from that of Box and Ford. Finally they argue that their paper appears to contain a concept of crime that is simply not viable. In developing their argument Box and Ford clearly find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. Their less than consistent efforts at specifying the form of behaviour under consideration is perhaps indicative of their confusion. On the one hand they are anxious to advance general statements that will embrace the activities of adults as well as juveniles. Yet the evidence on which they must rely is confined as they themselves readily admit--almost exclusively to the activities of juveniles or adolescents.

The research findings presented in this paper are drawn from some of the early results of a project undertaken in the Centre for Business Research at Manchester University, England. The project seeks to explain earnings movements of workers in industrial and commercial organizations with reference to the social, economic and technical systems within which they are operating. After a thorough examination of previous research on the subject, a theoretical model was developed. This model contained variables of different types. Although the scope of the model seemed vast it was considered that only by taking all these variables into account could a reasonable explanation of movements in earnings and social behavior related to the wage payment system be achieved. This paper is concerned with one of the darker corners of the model; that is, with the mutual dependency between roles and statuses at work and those in the family and local community. More particularly it deals with the transitional period between leaving school and getting married of broadly working class young women.

The article sheds light on 'embourgeoisement' and self rated class. In a paper published in the periodical "The Sociological Review," sociologists John H. Goldthorpe and David Lockwood, have convincingly argued against the view that post-war affluence has made manual workers and their wives 'middle-class' in attitudes and styles of life, and have put forward a model which gives the notion of 'embourgoisement' a precise and testable meaning. This paper sets out to show that figures for self-rated class in Great Britain can, on the contrary, be used to elucidate both these questions provided that respondents have been asked about the meaning of their self-rating. The data on which this conclusion is based are taken from a national sample survey carried out in the spring of 1962. The embourgeoisement thesis is of course not new. Before the Second World War many different observers spoke of a visible assimilation between the manual and non-manual classes. Proper examination of the embourgeoisement thesis requires, however, that the relationship with income should be more fully considered. The embourgeoisement thesis would presumably lead people to expect that the frequency of Conservative support should be highest among those manual workers (or their wives) who have reached the top third of the overall income distribution, and perhaps it would also lead people to expect that the correlation with self-rating should hold within all three levels of income.

The aim of the paper is, to consider the social position of the Anglo-colored in relation to his ethnic group and to the host society. The immigrants take as wives or consorts mostly local working class white women and miscegenation has now produced two generations of British-born colored. For the purpose of this paper they will be called Anglo-coloreds and only Negro and Muslim immigrants will be discussed. Muslim immigrants and their sons are seamen by occupation. Their wives or consorts are mostly white working class women but as the communities increase in numbers and time-depth Anglo-colored Muslim girls become available for marriage. Muslims have their own institutions for religious, social and recreational purposes using as centres for these activities, the Mosque or Zoaia, cafes and boarding houses respectively, with the sheikh and boarding house master performing the roles of primary and secondary leaders of the community. The attitude of the Negro father towards the upbringing of his child differs from that of his Muslim counterpart. Except for his insistence on strict obedience to parental control no attempt is made to train the child to become a carrier of the culture of the Negro community. The British wife or consort occupies a unique position in the community.

Recent ideological shifts, along with budgeting constraints, have made parental involvement in the schooling process necessary. Such expectations have increased the toll on working-class mothers, who now have to assume responsibility in three time-consuming areas: child care at home, school involvement and labour market participation. In analysing how mothers deal with this threefold expectation, research has focused on class-specific maternal ideals and practices, but rarely directed systematic attention to how these concurrent expectations shape the maternal ideals they embrace. Moreover, few studies have examined how mothers' maternal ideals shape their employment interruptions. The current paper considers how working-class mothers rationalize the maternal ideals they embrace with regard to school involvement and examines how they negotiate them vis-à-vis other possible maternal ideals. Interviews of 48 Israeli low-income mothers reveal that educational success is consensually perceived as critical for maximizing life chances and that this understanding evolved from the gradual realization that school involvement through extensive mothering - where women rely on others to meet their children's schooling needs - must be replaced by school involvement through intensive mothering - namely, personal presence-based nurturing. We draw some implications relevant to the debate over class-based maternal ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Savage and his colleagues have shifted intellectual ground and changed the intellectual focus of the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) from the provision of 'a comprehensive map of class in Britain' to an examination of what they call the British 'elite'. I argue that this 'elite' is no such thing and that whatever it is, it is not well defined by the procedures that are used to identify it. At the heart of all the papers the GBCS team present in this issue of the journal is an unavoidable incoherence which arises from the bias in responses to the original survey. Despite protestations to the contrary this response bias has not been dealt with properly and the resulting empirical analysis is without much value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we engage with new cultural theories of class that have identified media representations of 'excessive' white heterosexual working-class femininity as a 'constitutive limit' of incorporation into dominant (middle-class) modes of neo-liberal subjectivity and Bourdieu's thesis that classification is a form of symbolic violence that constitutes both the classifier and the classified. However, what we explore are the implications of such arguments for those modes of white heterosexual working-class masculinity that continue to reproduce themselves in forms of overtly masculinist popular culture. We do so through a critical examination of the symbolic representation of the genre of heavy metal music within contemporary music journalism. Employing a version of critical discourse analysis, we offer an analysis of representative reviews, derived from a qualitative sample of the UK music magazine, New Musical Express (1999-2008). This weekly title, historically associated with the ideals of the 'counter culture', now offers leadership of musical tastes in an increasingly segmented, niche-oriented marketplace. Deploying a refined model of the inscription process outlined by Skeggs, our analysis demonstrates how contemporary music criticism symbolically attaches negative attributes and forms of personhood to the working-class male bodies identified with heavy metal culture and its audience, allowing dominant middle-class modes of cultural authority to be inscribed within matters of musical taste and distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper inquires into the mechanisms conducive to social class differentials in educational choice in Flanders (the Northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) using both quantitative data gathered from parents ( N = 1339) and qualitative data gathered during two focus groups with pupils ( N = 16). Unlike most of the previous studies, this study takes into consideration all three theoretical perspectives that have driven research on class differentials in educational choice so far, namely cultural reproduction theory, rational action theory and the notion of social capital. Logistic regression analysis shows that self-selection does also occur in Flanders and that the effect of parental SES cannot be explained by a specific measure of cultural capital centred on knowledge of the educational system, nor by measures of social capital. What emerges most clearly from this study is that pupils' perception of their choice process is powerfully framed by deep-rooted conceptions about the educational alternatives available to them. Furthermore, children's choices seem to be delimited by parents' opinions of which educational alternatives were acceptable, and which ones not. Our study calls for future research to take the wider context of decision-making processes more explicitly into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are signs that a significant number of British people do not feel that their concerns are being addressed by the mainstream parties or the political system. This paper attends to the quality of that political dissatisfaction amongst members of 'the white working classes'. There is a need to extend typical concerns about youth disengagement to adults and to consider the role that class plays. Lower participation in formal democratic processes may not mean disengagement from all forms of politics, but could have considerable consequences for who gains power and for the tone and focus of political debates and policies. Our project contributes to exploring political dissatisfaction by engaging with low wage workers in Yorkshire and the North West, where high support for the far-right BNP and low voter turnout are signs that mainstream politics and politicians are failing to impress. We asked people about their feelings in relation to mainstream politics and their concerns. These participants feel distanced from governing elites, formal political processes and old ideologies. They are searching for ways to make sense of their struggles to live a decent life, and in doing so must contend with the dominance of racist discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre Bourdieu's famous theory of educational reproduction is often depicted by critics in simplistic terms: individuals either have plenty of cultural capital, and thus symbolic mastery and school success, or they do not and develop practical mastery and vocational interests instead. Social mobility, deviant trajectories and resistance, on the other hand, are seemingly impossible. The nature of Bourdieu's writing fuelled this perception, but implicit in his early work, and elaborated in his later writings, is the idea that class and capital possession are fully relational, gradational and refracted by family dynamics, thereby suggesting the existence of all manner of possible shades of difference between the two poles of reproduction. This paper, whilst acknowledging that reproduction is still the major feature of the education system in the UK, thus revisits Bourdieu's thesis and sketches some of the manifestations of this intermediate zone of educational performance, namely social space travel, the Icarus effect, recovered trajectories and pathways born of dispersed family fields. In so doing it draws on a qualitative research project examining the life histories of adults from a variety of class positions in Bristol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an increasing concern in various European cities with 'youth' in public space. This concern is by no means new. Young men have been a cause for public concern for a long time. In some countries in the global North, such as Holland, the marginalization along lines of class and ethnicity rather than just class have brought a relatively new dimension to perceived 'problems' of youth. Holland is particularly interesting, as it moved from championing tolerance to rather harsh policies and an often overly racist discourse on urban youth. This shift to a more repressive policy model has responded to an increasing public fear. Two peculiar empirical patterns raise the question of effectiveness of such repressive policies. First, the neighbourhoods targeted by these policies continue to show strong feelings of fear. Second, the number of incidents between youth and police do not drop, but rise, affecting the crime and nuisance statistics. This paper explores four hypotheses to explain these trends, drawing on empirical data from studies in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Rotterdam and The Hague, the Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an increasing sociological interest in the middle classes and their educational practices, research has largely concentrated on the white middle classes. This paper considers the case of the minority ethnic (ME) middle classes through empirical data from a small, exploratory study conducted in England with 36 minority ethnic, 'middle-class' individuals (parents, pupils and young professionals) from a range of ME backgrounds. It is argued that participants experienced ME middle-class identity as a profoundly conflictual and precarious space, negotiated through a matrix of relational classed and racialized positionings. 'Authentic' middle-classness remains the preserve of white society due to racial inequalities and the dominance of whiteness as the popularly legitimated marker of middle classness. Moreover, attempts to define an acceptable, legitimate and principled ME middle-class identity are compromised by the discursive threats of 'inauthenticity', 'pretension' and 'misrecognition'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on two qualitative studies which looked at diet, weight and health from a social class perspective, we use Bourdieu's theory of habitus to help explain the different food and eating practices undertaken by families with young teenagers. Whilst the families displayed considerable reflexivity when making decisions about what to eat on a daily basis, the analysis highlighted that everyday behaviours are still bounded by distinctions of taste, according to social position. The paper includes an examination of the relationships between different forms of capital and whether form or functionality is prioritised within families. We show the importance of temporal frameworks when interpreting classed food and eating practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about family day care and the reproduction of identity at the intersection of public and private domains. It uses mealtimes as a lens to elucidate the social relations which popular fictive kinship ideologies at once suggest and obscure. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with childminders in an inner London borough, the paper explores some of the ways in which boundaries - principally of class and ethnicity - are dissolved and reproduced in everyday food practices within and between families. The paper suggests that food is an important medium for symbolic and material boundary work in home based childcare. Describing a continuum from incorporation to segregation, the paper suggests that the 'objective' description of home based childcare (as asymmetrical) and the subjective representation (as family like) are not mutually exclusive, but mutually constitutive, constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on social class and whiteness points to disquieting and exclusive aspects of white middle class identities. This paper focuses on whether ‘alternative’ middle class identities might work against, and disrupt, normative views of what it means to be ‘middle class’ at the beginning of the 21st Century. Drawing on data from those middle classes who choose to send their children to urban comprehensives, we examine processes of ‘thinking and acting otherwise’ in order to uncover some of the commitments and investments that might make for a renewed and reinvigorated democratic citizenry. The difficulties of turning these commitments and investments into more equitable ways of interacting with class and ethnic others which emerge as real challenges for this left leaning, pro-welfare segment of the middle classes. Within a contemporary era of neo-liberalism that valorises competition, individualism and the market even these white middle classes who express a strong commitment to community and social mixing struggle to convert inclinations into actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst theories of individualization are usually perceived as posing a severe challenge to the oft-disputed concept of class, the recent work of postmodernist-turned-liquid-modernist Zygmunt Bauman in this vein has generally escaped the attention of faithful class analysts keen to defend their object of study. Indeed, in places Bauman has been mobilised to critique the cognate ideas of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, despite the fact that the intellectual affinity between the three is patent and has been rightly flagged by others. This paper seeks to remedy the treatment of Bauman thus far by tracing his precise views on class as they have developed over his extended career and clarifying his current position on its decline in the face of the sweeping individualization brought by liquid modernity. It then provides a critique of his views by pulling out the contradictions and errors besetting them and, in the process, attempts to render less credible his claim that class is no longer a significant sociological tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on data from a qualitative project exploring the engagement of working class families in London with childcare. It is a first attempt to throw some light on our usage of the term ‘working class’, and consider what forms ‘working class-ness’ takes in relation to our respondent families. We discuss some recent sociological literature on the working class(es) in order to understand the emphasises and focuses of other research. We emphasise the heterogeneity of the working class(es), the differences in attitude and experiences based on place, gender, occupational status, education, age and family membership. Then we consider our respondents in relation to their strategies and exercise of agency, their engagement with the labour market, and their embedded-ness in social networks. We conclude that one way of understanding the lives of urban working class families is to consider the extent to which they ‘manage or struggle to cope’, a focus which emphasises process, activity and the differential degrees of agency which the respondents are able to exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the classed dimensions of ‘taste’ have, following Bourdieu, been widely discussed, expressions of disgust at perceived violations of taste have been less frequently considered in relation to class. This paper considers various expressions of disgust at white working-class existence and explores what they might tell us about middle-class identities and identifications. I argue that the narratives of decline and of lack present in such representations can be seen in terms of a long-standing middle-class project of distinguishing itself. Drawing on Bourdieu's critique of Kantian aesthetics, I argue that the ownership of ‘taste’ is understood as reflecting true humanity, and as conferring uniqueness. Ironically, however, this uniqueness is only achieved through an incorporation of collective, classed understandings. The paper calls for a problematization of a normative and normalized middle-class location that is, I argue, given added legitimacy by a perceived decline in the significance of class itself. [A]n account of class, rank or social hierarchy must be thin indeed unless accompanied by an account of the passions and sentiments that sustain it (William Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, p. 245). Social identity lies in difference, and difference is asserted against what is closest, which represents the greatest threat (Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 479). What we read as objective class divisions are produced and maintained by the middle class in the minutiae of everyday practice, as judgements of culture are put into effect (Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, p. 118). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]