Suchergebnisse

The debate over class dealignment is in part a debate about the meaning of class, which cannot be separated from the issue of the relationship between class and voting. Neither the simplified two-class model that has often been used nor the more sophisticated Goldthorpe class schema are adequate either at the conceptual or the empirical level. Both fail to deal coherently with the intermediate positions in the class structure. The argument that 'social class' is of continuing significance for the analysis of voting behaviour and of party identification is correct, but only if the nature of the stratification order is properly understood. The Cambridge Scale, a measure of general hierarchical, material and social advantage, based on patterns of social interaction, is shown to be comparable to the Goldthorpe schema in terms of statistical prediction. It is argued that it is preferable in the sense that it most clearly captures the single most important aspect of 'class', which is hierarchical position. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)

Reverses the traditional approach of defining classes or status groups before investigating patterns of social interaction by using patterns of interaction between more basic units such as occupational groups to determine the nature of stratification order. Outlines the theoretical basis and compares this to other methods before giving examples of applications.

The class tradition in the study of social mobility suffers from a number of theoretical and practical weaknesses. In this article we concentrate on the issue of how well the Goldthorpe/CASMIN class schema explains the extent of the social reproduction of advantage when compared with the Cambridge Scale, a continuous measure of occupational and social hierarchy. If classes are to be given any useful meaning, then the groupings involved should be internally relatively homogeneous with respect to a significant criterion of interest to the researcher and there should be relatively clear boundaries between them. In the case of social mobility, the criterion of interest is the ability of the members of one generation to pass on any relative advantage to their successors. Using data from the Nuffield Social Mobility Study, the article examines the relationship between the occupational position of fathers and sons, demonstrating that there is substantial variation within social classes with respect to the reproduction of advantage and that there is no evidence for the existence of boundaries between classes. One consequence is an under-estimation of the extent of reproduction. The findings indicate that the stratification order has to be seen as a continuous hierarchy rather than as a set of distinct classes.

There is a danger that the Cambridge Scale, which is based on data collected thirty years ago, is becoming out of date. This article considers an alternative basis for a social interaction-based social distance scale, that of marriage (or cohabitation) rather than friendship. This has considerable advantages in terms of the ready, low-cost availability of large-scale, representative data (usually from a census). It also makes easily possible the construction of comparable scales for many other countries. The article discusses the theoretical background to the approach and the justification for expecting that marriage and friendship would reflect equivalent structures of stratification arrangements. In order to provide direct comparability, a new scale was constructed, based on 1971 census data and using more satisfactory statistical techniques. Empirical analyses using this measure fully support the argument that this alternative method of deriving a scale leads to essentially the same results as the original. The way is therefore open for an updating of the scale and its extension to a number of other countries, under the generic heading of CAMSIS.

There have been calls from several sources recently for a renewal of class analysis that would encompass social and cultural, as well as economic elements. This paper explores a tradition in stratification that is founded on this idea: relational or social distance approaches to mapping hierarchy and inequality which theorize stratification as a social space. The idea of 'social space' is not treated as a metaphor of hierarchy nor is the nature of the structure determined a priori. Rather, the space is identified by mapping social interactions. Exploring the nature of social space involves mapping the network of social interaction patterns of friendship, partnership and cultural similarity - which gives rise to relations of social closeness and distance. Differential association has long been seen as the basis of hierarchy, but the usual approach is first to define a structure composed of a set of groups and then to investigate social interaction between them. Social distance approaches reverse this, using patterns of interaction to determine the nature of the structure. Differential association can be seen as a way of defining proximity within a social space, from the distances between social groups, or between social groups and social objects (such as lifestyle items). The paper demonstrates how the very different starting point of social distance approaches also leads to strikingly different theoretical conclusions about the nature of stratification and inequality.

This paper examines the hierarchy amongst female occupations in Britain in the nineteenth century, using information on marriage and family patterns to generate a measure of distance within a social space. This social interaction approach to stratification uses the patterning of close relationships, in this case between women and men, to build up a picture of the social ordering within which such relationships take place. The method presented here starts, not with the assumption of a set of broad social groups that may interact to a greater or lesser extent, but from the opposite direction, from the patterns of social interaction among detailed occupational groupings. Instead of reading off social hierarchy from the labour market, we use relations of social closeness and similarity (here marriage) to build a picture of the occupational ordering from patterns of relative social distance. Such an approach is possible because of the way in which social relations are constrained by (and constrain) hierarchy.

This article presents some preliminary results from a historical study of social mobility in Britain and Ireland, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The study is marked by a unique combination of features: (1) it follows families for up to five generations, through both maternal and paternal lines; (2) it uses a continuous measure of social position, rather than class categories; (3) this measure is derived from data on social interaction - correspondence analyses of cross-tabulations of the occupations for marriages taking place in the periods 1777-1866 and 1867-1913; (4) each individual's social position is summarised by a work-life trajectory, represented by his social location at ages 20 and 50. The analyses are based on twelve ten-year birth cohorts from 1790-99 to 1900-09. The results indicate a remarkable degree of stability of social processes of reproduction throughout this period, although there is an extremely slow shift towards a weakening of family influence. This process appears to have accelerated for those born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a period of both educational reform and major change in Britain's industrial organisation.

Ideological assumptions of equality and economic individualism have permeated the traditional analysis of social mobility. This is shown most clearly in the use of perfect mobility as the theoretical model that underlies most of the empirical analyses. A major consequence is that these analyses have offered a poor conceptualisation of the nature of the structure within which movement occurs, and have tended to ignore the question of relative distances between the objects, typically conceived as social classes, making up that structure. A further consequence is that they have concentrated on the issue of how much mobility, rather than on why it does, or does not, occur. It is argued that a more adequate conceptualisation would involve a move away from rigidly defined class categories towards a recognition of the hierarchical structure of occupational groups.