Lecture 13 The Great British Class Survey and its critics PDF

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The Great British Class Survey and its critics...

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The Great British Class Survey and its critics Recap: social class and the cultural turn  

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The limits of classical models of social class The turn to culture – how is class experienced? o Bourdieu – habitus, capital, distinction and taste – social hierarchy – intersectionality – need to understand how class is done through masculinities and femininities o Classed notions of masculinity and femininity – how they affect experience of class But a new question emerges – how do we measure class in a way that draws on these insights? Why do we need a new model of class? – older models fail to account for social inequality

The Great British Class Survey  

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Mike Savage, Fiona Devine and colleagues (2011 onward) Measuring three dimensions of Social Class o Social – number and status of people in social networks based on occupation o Cultural – taste in activities highbrow and emerging forms o Economic – household income, savings and house price Two surveys using the model – GfK – survey company employed by Savage and Devine and GBCS (BBC) – opened up by the BBC to encourage public engagement, with the question of class and class inequality – reintroduce class as a subject of conversation – as something that had been lost from public debate On BBCs website – largest survey of social class in the UK 161,000 respondents

Bourdieu’s class concept

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Symbolic capital can be other forms of social capital i.e. living in a prestigious area gives you economic capital from owning a home, but also symbolic capital as it is perceived as a high status area

Marx’s class concept

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Weber’s class concept

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Bourdieu’s attempt in late 1970s at mapping class Difficult to map, using his approach Some class groups may be moving in upwards trajectory e.g. in economic capital, but other professional groups may be moving downwards Using this model with capital existing on different planes – difficult to have a hierarchy from top to bottom – how can you be positioned in a straight hierarchy? High/low

on each forms of capital Bourdieu 1960s French ‘food space’   

Curry and ‘light meats’ like beef are ‘legitimized’ Cassoulet and stews and ‘non-light meats’ like pork are not This is an arbitrary distinction Designed to assert/confirm status/power

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Res ults of

survey Elite – very high economic capital – mainly savings, high social capital (6% of pop, 22% in BBC) Established middle class – high economic, high status of contacts – social capital is high, high highbrow and emerging capital e.g. going to gigs Technical middle class – fewer contacts, less cultural capital New affluent workers – poor social capital, good emerging cultural Traditional w/c – reasonable house price Emergent w/c – poor economic capital Precariat – development of precariat class

Doing the Great British Class survey  

So how does it work? What happens if I take the test? 

What happens if you take the test? Which household

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More EM in emergent service Elite tends to be quite old

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The criticisms (Sociology 2014) 

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Dorling – as capitalism changes so does class. The struggle is to find new categories that are meaningful. GBCS is worthy but flawed – contradicts itself by using occupation categories to organise social capital – so old Goldthorpe model is within in e.g. cleaner knows teacher – more social capital, but m/c who knows cleaner brings down social capital Mills – a theory free data dredging exercise. What they derive is an arbitrary typology determined by a contingent fact – the size of their sample Bradley – classes are clouds they are not relational and without occupational coherence lack clear identity – not classes – float around, don’t relate to each other – whole point of social class is there being class boundaries – clear lines of class antagonism and exploitation Different occupations can float around the various categories, hard to put them in one place

Concluding thoughts and questions     

Are the 7 classes meaningful? Do they make sense? Does it work to incorporate multiple dimensions in one model? And do these specific dimensions work? Can/will they be used by other sociologists to understand the social class of research participants? Has the study broadened out public debates and engagement in the concept? Goldthorpe model still used, more popular model, used to measure class divisions in a way the new model hasn’t...