Notes on:
Savage, M. Devine, F., Cunningham, N., Taylor,
M.,Li. Y., Hjellbrekke, J., Le Roux, B .,
Friedman, S., & Miles, A. (2013) 'A New
Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC's
Great British Class Survey Experiment'. Sociology
47 (2): 219--50.
Dave Harris
Escalating social inequalities have led to a new
interest in the analysis of social class
especially '"cultural class analysis"'derived from
Bourdieu and some feminist work (220). In
this new model, economic cultural and social
capital is combined and applied to the UK.
The BBC survey is the largest survey of social
class ever conducted 161,400 respondents to a web
survey, for combined with 'a parallel national
representatives survey'. Overall, the
established middle class, or service class, and
the traditional working class persist, but there
are five other classes as well, some of which show
increased social polarisation.
Originally, class was studied using the Registrar
General's schema, based on '"standing within the
community"' (221), and then "skill". Six
classes resulted with professionals at the top and
unskilled manual workers at the bottom.
However, this was not adequately informed by
social theory, and this led to the development of
the Goldthorpe scale [technically the
'Erikson-Goldthorpe -PortoCaero'model] which was
able to successfully challenge a 'rival Marxist
framework of Erik Olin Wright'. Here there
were seven classes defined according to employment
position, distinguishing between employees and
employers, and between those on labour contracts
and those in a more service relationship with
their employers like professionals and
managers. This model led to the National
Statistics Socio - Economic Classification scheme
as an official definition.
However, that model can itself be criticised,
despite its successes, especially in analyzing
social mobility:
- It focuses on 'criterion
validity'(222), measuring 'features of the
employment relations which are held to define
class relationships'. This misses out
the wider cultural and social activities and
identities which do not link closely to class
position, as in patterns of cultural
consumption.
- It works pragmatically as
a way of managing 'standard nationally
representative surveys with a moderate sample
size' -its preferred form of analysis,
log-linear modeling, requires 'reasonable cell
sizes', and this was apparently the reason why
the study did not separate out an elite within
the service class. Larger sample sizes
do show differences within the classes.
- Classes were still based
on measures of income and wealth, and this has
been criticised by those who want to examine
'moves between income groups, rather than
occupational classes' as a form of social
mobility. This will become important if
'income variation within occupations is
growing'.
- Feminist critique has
pointed to important symbolic and cultural
aspects of class and the way it works on
'forms of stigmatisation and marking of
personhood and value'
Recent studies of social mobility has challenged
the validity of the scheme, again for taking
salaried middle class as too homogeneous a group,
and for over stressing the divide between manual
and non manual occupations. In particular,
there seemed to be substantial 'cross national
differences with respect to qualification levels,
job autonomy, career prospects… organisation
of production, etc.' (223), providing different
'occupational realities' in different countries,
say between skilled worker and supervisor ['two
formally identical categories']
Bourdieu has been influential in thinking of the
new scheme, based on combinations of economic
capital, cultural capital, and social
capital. Different stocks of each of these
can be combined to produce a more complex model of
social class, with multiple dimensions. The
social and cultural are particularly important
when considering 'social reproduction and cultural
distinction'. We can also reexamine the
formation of classes, the way in which class
boundaries are generated. Bourdieu has led
to a number of subsequent sociological studies
[including Bennett et
al]. Until recently, however, there
have been few questions on cultural and social
capital in surveys, hence the importance of the
BBC work, which collects a number of data from web
surveys since 2001, although this is the first
sociological one.
The BBC survey asked questions about cultural
capital -- leisure interests, musical tastes, use
of the media, food preferences-- which were rather
similar to Bennett et al., 'The most sophisticated
study of cultural capital ever conducted in
Britain'(224). Questions on social capital
attempt to 'measure the range of people's social
ties', whether they knew anyone in 37
different occupations. The questions on
economic capital asked about household income,
savings, and the value of housing.
Additional information was gathered on 'household
composition, education, social mobility and
political attitudes'. The survey launched in
2011 and responses were 'enthusiastic' until
161,400 surveys had been submitted. However,
there was a 'strong selection bias'towards the
well-educated, and this led to the separate
representative face to face survey using identical
questions, this time with 1026 respondents,
operated as a quota surveyed using a market
research firm. This helps calibrate the over
representation of the professions in the original
BBC survey. Attempts to weight this survey
by referring back to Bennett et al was not
possible, because respondents were 'highly
unrepresentative of their peers in these
classes'(225) , with far more cultural and social
capital, and 'the very act of participating in the
[BBC survey] was a 'performative" way of claiming
cultural stakes'. However, this problem can
be dealt with by combining it with the other
survey.
The national survey was used first to develop
'robust summary measures' to develop the new model
of class. Thus for social capital, the 37
occupations mentioned above were coded by a
particular Cambridge Social Interaction and
Stratification Scale, which is 'widely validated',
number of contacts was measured and then the
'means status scores of the occupations' of
contacts, ranging from 85 to 5. The range
for each respondent could also be noted. The
table shows that the average respondent knows
socially someone in 13 out of 34 valued
occupations, the mean status score of contacts is
41, and the mean range is 62 [I have rounded up
these figures]. In the end, only some
measures proved robust enough - range was omitted
because it varied with a number of contacts any
way. The mean status score of occupations
was used, together with the mean number of social
contacts reported.
For cultural capital, there is still much debate
about how to define and measure it.
Bourdieu's categories have been questioned in
recent research, and elite culture in the UK seems
to be more liberal and tolerant, while there are
more middle and upper class omnivores.
Instead, an 'inductive analysis of cultural taste'
was pursued without assuming a division between
high and low. Specifically, multiple
correspondence analysis was pursued on 27 cultural
variables in the national sample [producing the
usual Bourdieu type maps, 227, 228]. The
first axis differentiated the culturally
disengaged from the engaged, the second one
distinguished those interested in highbrow
culture, 'engagement with classical music, or
attending stately homes, or museums, art
galleries, jazz, theatre and French Restaurants'
(227), as opposed to popular culture, 'associated
with sport, using information technology, and
popular and contemporary music' (226). The
latter can also be seen as '"emerging" cultural
capital'. The issue of engagement or
disengagement was then compared to age and
class ['of respondent and of main earner when the
respondent was a child']. The first axis was
'clearly aligned with social class', with 'the
routine classes' more disengaged, and with an age
split reflecting the split between highbrow and
emerging cultural capital. As with Bennett
et al, the implication is that there are 'two
different modes of cultural capital'(227).
Highbrow culture scores provided a maximum of 30
if people engaged 'often' in all these activities.
Popular culture is further defined as 'engagement
with video games, social networks sites, the
Internet, playing sport, watching sport, spending
time with friends, going to the gym, going to gigs
and preferences for rap and rock'. These
activities were scored, with a maximum of 32.
Economic capital was based on 'household income,
household savings and house price', combined to
produce an overall variable of "assets", and the
distribution is revealed in a table on 229.
These are measures for households not individuals,
and they may reflect significant differences in
individuals earning as, but the team preferred to
household measure as 'more likely to tap the
economic resources available to individuals',
although there may well be a suppressed issue of
gender inequality (228).
How might these measures be used to decide where
to place the main class boundaries? This is
an inductive approach working from the results to
see which classes emerge, 'latent class analysis',
based on 'the most parsimonious way to group
people to classes'(229). The idea of the
latent variable assumes that some parameters
'differ across unobserved sub groups', and it is
these that provide the categories.
[Apparently] factor analysis assumes continuous
latent variables. [There are other technical
reasons on 229].
Six variables were standardised - 'mean status
scores of contacts, total number of contacts,
highbrow cultural capital, emerging cultural
capital, income and assets', and a latent class
analysis carried out. The national survey
was used to correct the the BBC survey by
combining the national values with a weighted
version of the BBC values [rather a strange weight
of 1/161,400 -- implies total dominance of the
national survey?]. The effect was the ability 'to
allocate classes' to all the respondents from the
BBC survey derived from nationally representative
data'[with a further statistical test]. The result
was a seven class model. Tables 5 and 6 show
the results [below].
Further socio demographic details of the latent
classes are also available on such matters as
gender, ethnic minority, graduates, those with
jobs and professions and management, and those
from professional or senior management families,
while another table shows that certain occupations
were over represented -- eg in the elite
especially chief executive officers, IT and
telecommunications directors, various other
directors and then judges and managers [It is
actually quite a large table providing a good deal
of detail about the main occupations in each
class, 231-33]. This is one way to show that these
groups are actually 'sociological meaningful', so
that the latent class analysis 'is producing
relevant findings' (233). It is worth
comparing them to the earlier classification
schemes based on Goldthorpe.
Class one: elite. Members here are
'the most advantaged privileged group in the UK'
with high levels of all forms of capital
[including a mean household income of 89,000
pounds and an average house price of
325,000. These figures are 'almost double
that of the next highest class'. Savings are also
'exceptionally high'. They have the highest
number of social contacts, and only the second
highest mean status score [unsurprisingly -- if
they have a wide circle of friends this must
include those of lower classes? ]. They
score highest on highbrow cultural capital and
even have 'moderately high scores on emerging
cultural capital'. They also have other
social advantages, 'the lowest proportion of
ethnic minorities, the highest proportion of
graduates, and over half come from families where
the main earner was in senior management or the
professions'. They have restricted upward
mobility into their ranks. They are
occupationally narrow, with over representations
[as above], and over representation of elite
university graduates, a disproportionate location
in the southeast of England close to London.
They seem to be a definite elite within a class,
promising to unite class and elite analysis.
Class two: Established middle class.
Good scores on economic capital, a larger class
than the elite with 1/4 population, probably
understood as the bulk of the old service class,
with a high proportion of managers and
professions. There are more social contacts
here than in any other classes' and these tend to
be high status. They are highly culturally
engaged both for highbrow culture and emerging
cultural capital, showing they are cultural
omnivores. Their possession of the three
kinds of capital make them secure although not as
wealthy as the elite. They have a high
proportion of graduates and a majority work in the
professions or management as did their families.
However, 'they are more open than the elite'
especially in terms of access by ethnic
minorities. They are not particularly over
represented by particular occupations although
professionals in public service are 'modestly
high'. They live away from London and
outside the southeast, in the provinces, and this
'is a sizeable bulwark of "Middle England"'(236).
Class three: Technical middle class.
This is another distinctive and original
group. It only takes up 6% of the
population, but it is relatively prosperous,
especially with household savings and expensive
houses. It is therefore the 'second most
prosperous class in terms of economic
capital'. However, socially and culturally
'it is much more restricted' (237), with a low
number of social contacts, even though these tend
to be high status - 'it presumably socializes
nearly exclusively with other professional
experts', so it is not the poor or disadvantaged
who have the most restricted social networks, but
this group! Culturally it has relatively low
scores for both kinds of cultural capital and
'therefore appears to be relatively culturally
disengaged': it is both relatively socially
isolated and culturally apathetic. There is
a lower proportion of graduates and professionals
and managements, but certain occupations are over
represented, for example aircraft pilots. So
members 'have achieved good economic rewards often
without distinctive credentials'. 59% of
members are women. Researchers and
scientists and technicians are over represented,
with graduates from established and prestigious
universities, slightly more likely to be in
science and technology. Locations are
primarily in the southeast where the jobs are
likely to be found, but these are suburban
dwellers. Overall, this category seems to
support Savage's earlier argument that there is 'a
distinctive technical group somewhat at odds with
the larger section of the middle classes who are
more oriented towards the arts and humanities'.
Class four: New affluent workers.
This class scores highly on emerging cultural
capital but low on highbrow versions, but is not
culturally disengaged. Economic capital
values are moderate, so people here are
'economically secure without being very well
off'. There are high scores on social
contacts although they have moderate status.
Thus there are moderate scores on all three
capitals with a particular interest in emerging
cultural capital. Social origins are mostly
non middle class, and few have been to
university. 57% are men. Where there
are graduates, new universities are
overrepresented. There is a high proportion
of young people. Various white collar and
blue collar jobs appear, largely in the private
sector and 'in customer facing occupations'
(239). They are 15% of the population.
They tend to be over represented in 'old
manufacturing centres of the UK'. This group
has not particularly benefited from educational
expansion, nor from major inherited resources, but
have achieved relative security and are relatively
engaged. The term affluent worker is used to
indicate 'the need to understand this is 'an
unusually fluid grouping'(240).
Class five: Traditional working class.
This is one of the 'clearly less advantaged
classes' with moderately poor scores on economic
capital, even though 'members predominantly own
their homes'. They have restricted social
contacts with only average data scores, only
moderate scores on highbrow cultural capital, and
low scores on emerging cultural capital. All
these measures of capital are therefore low, but
they are not totally deprived. There are few
graduates, and an over representation of
traditional working class occupations, including
'menial white collar occupations'. This
group is particularly under represented in the BBC
survey. It is predominantly female.
Many graduates tend to have come from those
unis specializing in mature or part time
students '(such as Birkbeck and the Open
University)'. They are located in the old
industrial areas, especially in Scotland, Wales
and Northern Ireland, and they can be seen 'as a
residue of earlier historical periods'.
Class six: Emergent service workers
have a modest household income but are more likely
to rent. There is a significant number of
social contacts with moderate status scores, more
emergent cultural capital and high levels of
engagement in things like 'youthful musical
sporting and Internet activities', but with low
highbrow cultural capital. It is marginal in
the sense that it has low economic capital but
higher social and cultural capital. It is
relatively young, with a high proportion of ethnic
minorities. Members are not graduates or
from middle class families, but they are more
culturally engaged unlike the traditional working
class. They work in lower levels of the
service sector, and appear to be the groups who
'are "making their way" in a range of relatively
insecure occupations' (241). Any graduates
are overrepresented from universities specializing
in arts and humanities. It is an urban group
living in cheaper areas of the larger cities.
Class seven: Precariat. These
are economically the poorest, they have a small
social range with a low mean status, and low
scores for both highbrow and emerging cultural
capital. This is the most clearly deprived
class, even though they are relatively large,
consisting of 15% of the population. They
are to be found in old industrial areas,
especially Stoke on Trent! They are unlikely
to have attended university. They are
overrepresented 'amongst the unemployed, van
drivers, cleaners, carpenters, care workers,
cashiers and postal workers'. This is a
group with high amounts of insecurity on all
measures.
So this is a new model of class, different from
Goldthorpe, based on inductive rather than
deductive approaches, and shedding more light on
cultural and social dimensions and their role in
class division. The plan is to produce more
qualitative research in the future. All the
measures are still controversial, of course.
Economic capital might obscure divisions within
households. Social capital measures are
based on validated scores, although the division
into highbrow and emergent groupings departs
rather from Bourdieu ['more nuanced', 243 is their
claim]: whether emerging cultural capital will go
on to produce a robust form requires further
investigation.
Wider implications include a less than clear fit
between occupational profiles and seven classes,
which suggests 'the need for caution', and
investigations on 'whether specific occupations
are clearly differentiated from each
other'(244). Overall, with the exception of
CEOs, 'we have found no clear affiliation between
specific occupations and our latent classes'(245),
implying that class is less a matter of occupation
than the result of a multi dimensional process,
spreading occupations between different
classes. There does seem to be a distinctive
elite, and this is the first time that that group
has been particularly identified in the class
analysis: this has critical implications for the
old notion of the service class, and does
demonstrate more clearly 'the accentuation of
social advantage at the top of British
society'. At the opposite end there is now a
precariat, 15% of the population, again this was
not identified before in class analysis.
Only two of the seven classes conform to the old
models of middle and working class. The
boundaries between them might be becoming blurred,
as in much recent discussion. This scheme
sees the established middle class as corresponding
to the service class in the old analysis. It
is still the largest single class, with 25% of the
population, so there is a secure group in British
society. The traditional working class might
be seen as the survivors of the old class, but
they now only compromise 14% of the population and
are relatively old, so they might be 'fading from
contemporary importance'. Nevertheless,
overall, this is still only 39% of the national
population, with the majority falling into other
classes outside the conventional analyses.
The distinction between white and blue collar jobs
is now 'of little value in unraveling these
patterns'.
Despite obtaining moderate levels of economic
capital, there is no strong association with
conventional highbrow culture, unlike
Bourdieu. Instead, there have been new ways
of acquiring economic and social capital. It
is also the case that economic capital does not
always lead to extensive social networks.
Social and cultural engagement does not decline
evenly with social class position.
The new affluent workers and the emergence service
workers are perhaps the most interesting
groups. They can be seen as 'the children of
the "traditional working class"'(246), arising
from 'deindustrialisation, mass unemployment,
immigration and the restructuring of urban
space'. They are engaged with the emerging
cultural capital and have extensive social
networks, so they might represent a new social
formation not just a disengaged group.
Overall, social inequality has polarised, and
traditional middle and working class divisions
have become fragmented producing 'more segmented
forms'. More detail will be apparent from
future publications and research.
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