Search

Since the Second World War, considerable attention has been focused by sociologists on the processes associated with the rehousing of families on council estates on the periphery of large towns. Parallel with this has been a growing interest in the residential mobility of middle-class spiralists. The number of households owning rather than renting in Great Britain today has risen to about fifty per cent. from a figure of around ten per cent at the turn of the century. In a generation, the proportion owning has risen from a quarter to a half. All the indications are that it will continue to grow, encouraged as it is by all the major political parties. The social effects of this change on the families concerned remain unexplored. This paper sets out to investigate the life-style of manual workers and their families on new owner occupied estates, and to compare them in a number of respects with their non-manual neighbors, and with an equivalent group of manual workers in new council houses.

There was a dramatic turning point in the sociological career of Leonard Hobhouse. It occurred about the close of the first decade of his tenure of the Martin White Chair. But before speaking of that, something must be said as to how Hobhouse came into the sociological movement. His passage from the Oxford tradition of political philosophy, and the somewhat arid field of Teutonic epistemology, marked by the publication in 1901 of the book "Mind in Evolution," was no doubt deflected in a more sociological direction during the following years, when preparations were being made for the public launching of the Sociological Society in 1903. A public meeting was held in June, 1903, for considering ways and means to launch the projected Society, Hobhouse warmly seconded a resolution, moved by sociologist Oscar Browning, for the appointment of a committee to formulate the scope and aims of the Society and to draft its constitution. Hobhouse became an active member of the formative committee whose Report, having been accepted without amendment at the first general meeting of members, may be taken as the substantive basis of the sociological movement in Great Britain.

In recent years ergonomist and industrial sociologists have found considerable common ground in the study of the impact of technological change on work. The former have been concerned mainly with the ways in which new technologies affect the activities and skill requirements of the individual worker and with studies of newly emerging man-machine systems. The latter have turned their attention more to the impact of technological change at the level of the total organizational system and on the occupational structure of industrial society. Conceptions of skill and ideas about levels of skill are highly relevant to both lines of enquiry, but in bringing the two approaches together a problem arises, in that 'skill' as defined for the purposes of ergonomics research is something different from 'skill' as an element in the social structure of a manufacturing plant or the occupational structure of an industrial society. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the existence of two sets of ideas about skills, to show how they relate to each other in occupational life, and to examine the implications for technical progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The view is widely held amongst sociologists and political scientists and also expressed in the mass media that Great Britain is a very effective, stable, liberal democracy. It has long been blessed by a high degree of political integration, of which the broad consensus on the Constitution and on policies, is only the most remarkable instance. The theme around which their interpretations turn is the identification of what is thought to be the mixture of attitudes and orientations that characterises British political culture. Whilst all the studies mentioned, can be faulted in varying degrees on methodological grounds' as well as on substantive points of interpretation, their analyses have gained widespread support, and even acclaim, amongst academics. Indeed, the view of British life that they present has until recently remained virtually unchallenged. More recently, an alternative interpretation of the data presented in these and other studies has been suggested: This heterodox account contends that the political stability of liberal democracies is not underpinned by normative consensus as was previously assumed, but rather that it rests upon the pragmatic acceptance by the lower class of existing arrangements.

This article attempts to indicate both the diversity of substance and the diversity of approach, which characterize sociological studies of blue-collar workers in Great Britain. The discussion hinges on four perspectives, which may be distinguished in the relevant sociological literature: 1. Institutional Empiricism; 2. Systems Analysis; 3. Social Action Studies; 4. Reference Group Analysis. These perspectives are sufficiently clear to justify organizing the discussion around them, but it should be emphasized that they are not necessarily to be seen as mutually exclusive categories Sociologists see in fact that sometimes two perspectives may be consciously utilized by an author in a mutually supportive way. They further see that sometimes the answer to a problem of research strategy posed from the standpoint of different perspectives may lead in practice to an unexpected convergence as between different writers. What has to be recognized here is that the occupational community serves as an important membership and reference group in explaining the continued working class identification. To describe these workers as privatized would, therefore, be misleading. This suggests that the occupation itself needs to be treated as a variable in assessing the extent to which one can talk of normative convergence between the working and middle classes. It provides an analytical point of contact with the work of Scott et al who, as was noted above, treated occupation as a social system variable in their attempts to explain blue-collar worker behavior.

Agriculture in general and agricultural workers in particular have mainly aroused the interest of sociologists in this country in the context of rural community studies. Unfortunately these studies have by no means dealt with a representative sample of the different types of agriculture carried out in Great Britain, so that a very uneven representation has emerged. This article outlines the approach followed in a study of a particular group of deferential workers-agricultural workers-which the writer is currently undertaking in East Anglia. The emphasis is dynamic rather than static, for it will be argued that significant changes within the overall class situation of agricultural workers have taken place in recent years. Indeed the 'second agricultural revolution' has altered the components of their class situation in certain very important ways. Examining how far these changes have imposed strains on the agricultural workers' deferential image of society should enable an assessment of their relative importance to be made.

Over the past two decades, sociologists in this country have given a great deal of attention to studies of the manual working class, and to the 'new' middle class, but they have paid less heed to the upper echelons of the class structure. In the first place, on the general level, the study of social class has always been closely linked to the analysis of 'power' or 'domination'; and this is an area which can hardly be adequately understood if only one side of the coin is examined the 'subordinate' classes. Secondly, and more specifically, the fate of the British 'ruling class' is of special significance historically and sociologically, since Great Britain was the 'cradle of the Industrial Revolution', and the first 'industrial society' the world has known. This supposed transformation is usually portrayed as part of a generalized process of `decomposition' of class relationships as they existed in nineteenth century capitalism. One pole of this argument concerns the lower levels of the class structure, whereby the `traditional' working class is presumed to have become internally fragmented or diversified, and the boundaries separating it from the white collar `middle class' blurred or dissolved altogether.

This article focuses on the contributions of sociologist Patrick Geddes, as the profession celebrates the centenary of his birth in 1954. Geddes was deeply moved by the social condition of the poor in 19th century Great Britain. His application for the chair of Botany at the Edinburgh University, Scotland, was rejected, apparently because of his active interest in social problems. The development of Geddes Town Planning was to come, and in these years, he was primarily the expositor of ideas of social structure and welfare. Geddes was deeply moved by the social condition of the poor in nineteenth-century Great Britain. One of the most fundamental elements of thinker Charles Darwin's thought was that living beings and their environments made up a whole that to separate them and discuss influences of heredity and environment apart was to go astray into artificial abstractions, and on this truth Geddes seized with enthusiasm. Geddes had a very strong urge to spread his ideas, and he was one of the first to organize summer schools and vacation courses especially to give teachers the mental refreshment many of them so greatly need if they are to avoid staleness in their very exhausting work.