A brief summary of how the middle and working classes emerged and changed from the 17th to early 20th centuries.
Historians have shown that class awareness has a long history in Britain. Compared to other nations it is the persistence of working class identities that stands out.
In Britain the early onset of capitalist agriculture in the sixteenth century produced a large group of wage-earning farmers who also moved into part-time handicrafts to supplement their incomes.
Thus even before the industrial revolution there were a lot of independent skilled and unskilled trades people in Britain, and this cross fertilised with the socialist and labour movements in the 19th century, producing a strong shared identity.
In contrast to this was the British upper class which was not shattered through revolution as was the case in France. The British upper classes pursed a form of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ which was embedded in industrialism and colonialism and they prospered through innovation and free-trade enterprise.
The expanding middle class of businessmen, managers and white collar workers existed in an uncertain position in the middle of the aloof upper classes and proud working classes, and they were in a sort of mediating position between the two.
The franchise being extended in 1832, 1867 and 1885 to gradually incorporate more of the middle classes did something to distinguish the middle classes from the working classes who still could not vote.
Gradually throughout the 19th century the middle classes engaged in conspicuous consumption to differentiate themselves from the working classes below them, but their position remained somewhat uncertain and insecure.
During the 19th century the class position of women was even more ambiguous than that of men. Women’s occupations consisted of mainly domestic work (such as cleaning) for upper-middle class and upper class families, nursing and teaching. They thus occupied either working class positions in closer contact with higher classes compared to men, or lower-middle class positions which didn’t command the same status as men.
For much of the 20th century there was a preoccupation with who was working class and who was middle class, further fuelled by the changing nature of work during that period.
The work of George Orwell is a good indication of the fascination and complexities surrounding understanding class in the early 20th century. The Road to Wigan Pier is an especially good example of this!
Consumer price inflation has been floating at around just under 10% for a year now, since May 2022, and this means that people in Britain are, on average, worse off financially than they were a year ago.
A survey by the Office for National Statistics recently found that seven in ten adults are spending less on non essential items and a recent IPSOS poll found that half of us are worried about our finances.
The Bank of England’s chief economist has called on workers to stop asking for wage increases and for companies to stop passing on their increasing costs to consumers by raising prices.
In short he thinks that Britons to accept the fact that they are getting poorer and are just worse off and that this will lower inflation.
An individualised solution to a structural problem?
This strikes me as possibly the ultimate example of what Bauman would call an individualised solution to a structural problem: one of the global elite asking individuals to solve inflation.
Whereas in reality the cause of the current inflation is structural: it is 40 years of neoliberal economic policy which has sucked hundreds of billions, probably trillions of dollars out of the UK economy over those 40 years and into tax havens, benefitting the global elite (and many non-British people).
Of course the elite themselves blame our current ‘cost of living crisis’ on Covid and the Ukraine War, but Britain’s economic decline predates both of these events.
In a neoliberal system it becomes easier for investors to extract profit from state enterprise because of deregulation, and so what we’ve seen now for 40 years is lack of investment in infrastructure and education and health and social care and huge profits getting sucked out the country.
We could have, over the past 40 years, invested more in green energy, more in local food production, more in creating a highly skilled, high wage workforce, but the neoliberal Tories (and New Labour) chose not to, and hence we have inflation and the ordinary people suffering.
the idea that there is a ‘war’ between younger and older generations is a media construction.
Media narratives suggest that we are in the middle of a generational war: Baby Boomers are selfish sociopaths who are steeling the future of younger generations and Millennials are narcissistic ‘WOKE’ obsessed snowflakes.
For example, at the end end of 2019 Great Thunberg was named Time magazine’s person of the year, with the magazine calling her a ‘standard bearer in a generational battle’, but this characterisation of there being a ‘battle’ between the generations around climate change isn’t born out by the statistics: old people are just as likely to be concerned about the environment as young people.
However, while there is a growing separation between the young and the old, with resentments mainly concerning economic, housing and health inequalities, the generations share more in common than you might think and there is still a decent degree of intergenerational goodwill.
This goodwill was demonstrated during the response of the younger generations to the Covid Pandemic: the vast majority obeyed lockdown rules to protect the older generations, despite the fact that the chance of young people dying from the virus was very small.
In order to truly understand the differences in attitudes between generations, and thus the extent of any generational divide, we need to distinguish between three things:
Period effects – the effect of big events on populations
Lifecycle effects – how people change as they age
Cohort effects – genuine differences between the generations.
It is only the later where we can really talk about there being ‘generational differences’, and in fact quite a lot of differences in attitude are down to the first two above.
For example, concern about terrorism tends to increase for ALL age groups when there is large scale terrorist attack (a period effect); people tend to get fatter as they get older (a Lifecyle effect); but church attendance is truly effected by cohort: older generations are more likely to attend church than younger generations.
To examine differences between generations without taking into account period effects and lifestyle effects is to ignore two thirds of ‘age based’ analysis!
IF we take the time to do ‘synthetic cohort analysis’ we find the differences between generations are not as drastic as the media would have us believe.
A Moral Panic?
The narrative of young people against old people makes for good headlines, but it is almost certainly something of a moral panic, and we must remember that:
Young people have always been seen as a problem by older people, with moral panics about youth being recurring.
Young people have always been more likely to adopt the latest fads and fashions.
Older people have been stereotyped for decades, usually negatively
It follows that media criticism of young people as snowflakes or WOKE obsessed, and the ‘OK Boomer’ refrain from the young are nothing new: the old have always criticized the young, and the young have always seen the old as reactionary.
But there are generational differences
Having said this, there are differences in opportunities between the generations: young people do face economic, housing and health challenges that their parents and grandparents did not and do not, as a general rule.
And while the exact boundaries between the classic generational dividing lines are blurred (Baby Boomer, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z) there are meaningful differences in life-experience between them.
However, it is NOT helpful to characterise the generations as being at war, what we need to improve the lives of Gen Z, for example, is more intergenerational goodwill of the sort we saw during the Covid Pandemic.
Sources and Signposting
This post was summarised from Bobby Duffy (2021) The Generation Divide: We We Can’t Agree and Why we Should.
What are the strengths and limitations of using secondary data to research the academic progress of students in schools?
This challenging question came up in the methods in Context section of the November 2021 AQA A-Level Sociology exam, and students found it difficult according the Examiners Report, with significant numbers focussing only on quantitative secondary data, rather than both quantitative and qualitative, and many answers making generalisation and failing to pick up on the specifics of different types of data, let alone APPLY these to the topic at hand which was student progress.
So this applied research methods topic is probably worth going over in some depth! (Remember, even though this came up relatively recently it can still come up this year, especially since the examiners know it’s a challenging topic for many students!).
The Question and Item
Applying material from Item C and your knowledge of research methods, evaluate the strengths and limitations of using secondary data to investigate the academic progress of pupils in schools.
Notes towards an answer
The item suggest that you should focus on both quantitive and qualitative forms of secondary data.
And with methods in context questions you need to at least try and apply the strengths and limitations of the data to the actual topic in the question: academic progress!
Secondary quantitative data to research academic progress
Official Statistics include exam results and SATs. They have excellent representativeness and usually these are easy to compare, but with education statistics, there are several different versions to measure progress and this can get confusing, also GSCE results changed from A-C to numerical form which makes comparing more difficult over time.
However, official stats do not tell us WHY students achieve at different rates, also for Gypsy and Roma children, many don’t sit formal exams so there is missing data here.
Schools may also record their own quantitative data in the form of internal tests (not official statistics) which provide more insight than official statistics but there are access issues.
Secondary qualitative data to research academic progress
Secondary qualitative data will give you more insight into WHY students achieve at different rates, and such data includes OFSTED reports, school progress reports, the written work of students and even personal documents such as diaries.
Written work in particular can give you an insight into the quality of feedback students get and also how much effort they are making, while personal documents can tell you what is going on in students’ lives outside of education.
The main problem with both of these sources is access.
Six anti-monarchy protestors were arrested at the Coronation of King Charles III on Saturday morning.
The six were arrested as they were unloading placards and loudspeakers from their van close to route of the coronation procession where they had planned to stage their protest. They were detained for 16 hours under the very new Public Order Act 2023 which allows the police to arrest people if they have equipment that could be used to lock onto buildings or vehicles in order to cause disruption to the public.
However, there was no such lock-on or other significantly disruptive action planned by the six people arrested, and there was no lock-on equipment in the van.
One of those arrested was the CEO of anti-monarchy group Republic and he believes that the police had planned to arrest them in advance of the protest even though they knew they were planning a peaceful event. His suspicions come from the fact that they’d had 4 months of prior conversations with the police telling them what the protest would entail, and the police had said they’d been fine with it, right up until the stealth arrest on Saturday.
Of course some people made it to the protests and in reality, all the protestors did was gather in a relatively small group sporting anti-monarchy placards and T-shirts and shout ‘Not my King’ as Charles went past in his gilded coach.
There were more widespread arrests of protestors during the day, 52 in total, 60% of which were arrested under suspicion of causing a public nuisance.
Relevance to A-level sociology
This is a good example of a state crime: here the police are preventing people from exercising their right to protest and free speech which is against the UN convention on human rights.
So the Tory government no longer respects human rights and the MET police are prepared to abuse human rights to attempt to make the monarchy seem more loved than it is on the global stage.
It shows us the power of the media in relation to protest. In reality, had the police done nothing, the mainstream media probably wouldn’t have even shown the protestors. It was a relatively easy thing to cut-out of footage, given how small it was.
But now these arrests have been made and the state has shown itself to be against human rights, this is becoming big news, as is the anti-monarchy debate that’s being represented!
ageing is socially constructed, to an extent, shaped by social norms, the age structure and generation experiences.
Ageing is a universal biological fact of life: everyone goes through physical transformations as they age: from conception to birth followed by a period of physical and mental maturation during childhood, puberty and adulthood, and finally physical decline leading towards eventual death.
While biological age and ageing are obviously linked to both physical and psychological development sociologists argue that age and ageing cannot be fully understood without looking at their social contexts: the process of ageing and the normal ‘stages of life’ which are associated with different ages vary enormously historically and across societies, and so many aspects of age are a social construction.
Norms surrounding childhood in Britain have, for example, changed drastically over the last 200 years. In the early 19th century it was regarded as acceptable for young people to do paid work, meaning that people as young as 12 were already taking on adult roles. Today people are legally required to be in school until at least 16 and most won’t take on full adult working responsibilities until finishing tertiary (university) education at 21 or 22 years of age.
Attitudes towards older people vary across cultures too: in China and Japan elderly people are treated with respect, regarded as having wisdom and worth listening to and seeking advice from. In Western European societies older people are generally seen as non-productive, dependent and out-of-touch, and the very elderly are often hidden away in care-homes, forgotten about by society.
Hence to an extent age and the life course are socially constructed, but we have to also recognise the role that biological or physical ageing plays too!
Factors affecting the experience of ageing
There are at least three broad factors which affect the experience of ageing:
Biology and the physical ageing process
The society we live in and the way society interprets the ageing process (and socially constructs age)
The age structure of a society
The historical period into which we are born (our age cohort or generation).
Biology and ageing
Although sociologists prefer to focus on how things such as ‘age’ and ‘childhood’ are not purely biological but rather socially constructed, we can’t deny that biological age has an affect on the experience of ageing.
As mentioned above human beings start off totally dependent on older human beings and as they get very old their physical and mental capacities deteriorate.
Society and the social construction of age
Most societies have norms surrounding what people of different biological ages should be doing at those ages, and these norms are often codified into laws. For example, people aged below 5 in Britain don’t have to go to school, people aged 5-16 MUST go to school (or be home-school), and from 16-18 laws change to allow the transition to adulthood at 18.
It is well established within sociology that childhood is socially constructed, but also at the other end of the life course the pension age is too because it is society that determines that (for younger people today) this starts at age 68, it is currently (for people retiring today) set at 65.
Most people would also recognise that there is a typical ‘life course’ in their society, or a broad set of norms which outline what it is socially acceptable for people to be doing at certain ages between childhood and retirement. For example in Britain we broadly have a transition from childhood (dependency) to adolescence (becoming adult 16-21) to early adulthood (21-35 dating/ renting/ finding career) to midlife (35-65: established career, home owning, children) to retirement (65+ children left home, stopped working).
Granted, the boundaries above do vary a lot, and MANY people diverge from this model, but the life course above is still possibly recognisable as ‘typical’.
Age Structure
The age structure of a population refers to the relative size of age groups within a population at any one point in time.
The age structure is affected by the fertility rate, life expectancy and migration.
Age structures vary enormously between countries. In Germany, for example, which has a low birth rate and high life expectancy there are relatively few young people, a high proportion of 50-60 year olds and then numbers gradually tail off after 60, but still large numbers of people aged 70 plus.
In Nigeria, there are many more younger people and relatively fewer people aged over 70 because of higher birth rates but lower life expectancy.
The typical age someone can be expected to live can have a huge impact on the social construction of age, especially the retirement age.
Age Cohort or Generation
A group born in the same historical period is known as an age cohort, and they will grow up and age experiencing similar historical events which will influence their experience of ageing.
There are no objective dividing lines between one age cohort and the next, it depends how the observer decides how to split the ages up: in schools we refer to each year as cohorts, but other research models may look at the experiences of people born in the same decades, grouping all people born in the 1970s together, all born in the 1980s together and so on.
One of the best known popular versions of this is the distinction between Baby Boomers, Generation X and so on…
Baby Boomers: 1946 – 1964
Generation X: 1965 – 1980
Millennials: 1981 – 1996
Generation Z: 1997 – 2012
Generation Alpha 2013 – present day.
You’ll have to decide for yourself whether the groupings above make sense, but the general idea is that the historical period you are born in will shape how you experience the life course.
One way this seems to be true is that Baby Boomers had an easier time buying their houses when they were cheap and are able to retire comfortably, Generation Z face much more job insecurity, global warming as more of a threat, unaffordable housing and a later retirement age (yes kids, life is getting worse, sorry!).
Life course and life cycle
Life Cycle refers to the stages of life which people usually pass through as they age, from birth to death.
There are different models of ‘life cycles’ but one example, applicable to the United Kingdom, is from Bradley (1996) who Identified five stages of life:
Childhood – when children are in a state of innocence and dependency, protected by their parents and (in the UK today) and by law. This is the stage of life when children are learning norms, values, skills and knowledge to prepare them for adulthood, but are free from many of the responsibilities of adulthood.
Adolescence – a time of transition from childhood to adulthood which takes place from puberty onwards. During this time adolescents are given more freedoms and responsibilities as they get older. This is also typically regarded as a time of experimentation, exploration of identities, and maybe deviance and rebellion.
Young adulthood – the period from leaving the adult home to full adulthood, so possibly from early 20s to mid 30s: the time when young adults find their first jobs, and find and move in with their long term partners.
Mid-life – There is disagreement over when mid-life begins: somewhere between 35 and 50. This is the ‘churn’ of adulthood – full time careers, dependent and then maybe independent children.
Old age – Formal retirement age, when you can claim your pension, is 65 in the UK, so that is the formal ‘marker’ of old age. In Britain it is the end of work which marks this point in life.
Jane Plicher argues that the concept of the life cycle is problematic because it implies that there are set stages through which all people pass.
In reality, however, there is no universal life cycle through which everyone passes, and thus Plicher prefers to use the term Life Course.
The concept of the life course recognises that in most societies there is a ‘socially defined timetable’ of behaviours generally seen as normal and acceptable for people of certain ages in that specific society, but also that people may experience their own individual life course in very different ways.
You can probably already see the above scheme of five stages is problematic because there is so much blurring between the boundaries of the stages, especially in the boundary between young adulthood and mid-life as there is so much variation in when people get established in their careers and have children.
There is also considerable variation in experience within each age-group. For example, many people retire well before 65 and some continue working into their 70s.
Ethnicity and gender can also affect people’s experiences as they age, another reason why ‘life course’ is preferable to ‘life cycle’.
The De-standardisation of the Life Course
Postmodernists argue that there is so much variation in the ‘Life Course’ today that it no longer makes any sense to talk of a life course anymore.
Not only is there huge variation in the age at which people transition from adolescence to a state of independence in young adulthood, the age at which people have their first children spans 20 years, and many choose not to have children at all. Similarly it is hard to see when young adulthood becomes mid-life: many would argue 50 is still relatively young, and incredible diversity within all of these age brackets and especially in the way people experience retirement.
Maybe there is no longer a social norm of the life course, just a series of individual choices around how to age?
Signposting
This material is mainly relevant to the culture and identity module within A-level sociology, but also partly relevant to families and households.
An answer for a 10 mark ‘analyse’ question in A-level sociology (AQA)
This question cam up in the recent 2021 AQA Education and Theory and Methods Exam, as a 10 mark, with item question.
In the 10 mark education question, you get an item which directs you to two specific issues you need to analyse, and it’s good practice to give equal weighting to both issues.
NB there are no marks for evaluating in these questions, it’s all analysis (in-depth logical explanation).
It’s crucial to draw the links between the ’cause’ and the ‘effect’ explicitly!
The question
Read Item A below and answer the question that follows.
Item A Some sociologists claim that the curriculum taught in schools today prioritises some cultures over others. Research also suggests that teacher expectations can be based on stereotypes.
Teaching and learning in schools may affect the educational experiences of minority ethnic groups
Applying material from Item A, analyse two ways in which teaching and learning in schools may affect the educational experiences of minority ethnic groups. (10 marks)
Possible Answer
The two focuses from the item are:
the curriculum prioritising some cultures over others.
teacher expectations based on stereotypes
Because this is a question on ethnic minority groups, it makes sense to discuss both of these as they relate to a range of different minority groups, and treat both focuses separately.
The curriculum prioritizing some cultures over others
The school curriculum has been criticised for being ethnocentric, which means it focuses on the experiences the main ethnic group, which in British schools means white British and White Europeans. Examples of this include the school year and holidays being based around a Christian timetable, European languages being the main ones offered, and history having a white-European focus, looking at things from the perspective of the colonising powers rather than the colonised, for exampled.
This can have negative effects on minority ethnic groups: school calendars are not necessarily in sync with Hindu or Muslim festivals for example, so students may take time off to celebrate these, and notoriously Ramadan frequently coincides with the A-level exam period, meaning fasting Muslim students may underperform because of this ‘ethnocentric timetabling’.
Many schools have a huge proportion of ‘minority’ students who speak African, Asian or Middle Eastern languages and yet there is rarely an option to study these as part of language options, these students may not see the point in studying another European language when they are already bilingual and might even feel offended that their own languages are not taught more widely to the majority white students.
The Prevent Agenda, which is part of the formal curriculum has also been criticized for being biased against Muslim students, with Muslim children feeling as if they are being singled out and being watched as potential terrorist threats more so than white children, which can be alienating.
Teacher expectations based on stereotypes
David Gilborn (1990) famously claimed that teachers expect black boys to be more aggressive and so they are more likely to punish them for being disruptive in class compared to white children doing the same. This may explain the higher expulsion rates for black boys compared to white boys. For those who aren’t expelled it might create the experience of the feeling of injustice about why they are being treated unfairly which could lead to less trust in teachers and less willingness to try hard in school.
Gilborn also found that black children are less likely to be put into the top sets by teachers because teachers expect them to be less able to cope due to their having higher poverty and lone parent rates, this means there will more able black students in lower sets getting frustrated because they are not being pushed, and blocked from sitting higher tier exams.
Wright found that teachers expect Asian girls to be passive and so didn’t include them in class room discussions as much, with can lead to them feeling excluded.
Similarly, teachers tend to assume Chinese students will always do well, something which less keen Chinese students don’t enjoy very much!
The A-Level Sociology exam dates for spring/ summer 2023 are:
Monday 22nd May: Education with Theory and Methods (morning)
Friday 9th June: Topics in Sociology (morning)
Wednesday 14th June: Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods (afternoon).
To make it easier on the head I’ve put these dates into calendar form:
So as of today, Wednesday 3rd of May the first exam is not that far away, so students should be revising in full force RIGHT NOW!
Of course the downer for the first exam is you need to revise both the entire education topic and the entirety of theory and methods!
You’ve then got a nice 2 and a half week break until topics, which is usually families and religion for most centres, but topics will vary depending on what you’ve been taught.
And then a reasonable five days until the final exam!
Overall, not a bad spread of time between exams.
Do double check the above dates using the The AQA Timetable, don’t rely on me, always double and treble check these things for yourself, you as a student are responsible, after all!
Good luck to anyone sitting these exams, and don’t be gutted when you get worse results than students did during lockdown: this is probably going to be the year when the exam boards adjust marks back down so they are much closer to what they were in 2019, to try and wash clear the memory of the suspiciously high teacher predicted grades awarded in 2020 and 2021, and the ‘half way house’ results from 2022 which I think were placed at half way between 2019 and 2021 in order to make those two years of Teacher Results seem more credible.
At the end of the day it doesn’t matter too much if your cohort gets worse results than the lockdown students, you are mostly going to be competing against your cohort for university places!
Please see my exam and revision advice page for hints and tips on how to answer the different styles of exam questions on these three papers!
Many new nations in the global south struggled to find national unity following independence because of ethnic and religious divisions within their national borders.
Most countries classified as developing today were once colonies of European countries and achieved independence at some point during the 20th century.
The development of nationalism followed a very different path to that of European nationalisms, and was very much influenced by the politics of many years of colonial rule.
During the 16th to 19th centuries European powers travelled to the Americas, Asia and Africa and subjected those regions to colonial rule, setting up colonial administrations, sometimes staffed by a mixture of Europeans and willing allies from the colonized regions (who were often given a European education to facilitate these roles).
When the Europeans set up their administrations they did not take into account existing political and ethnic divisions among the local populations and so each colony was a collection of peoples and maybe old local states brought together under and arbitrary boundary created by external powers.
The straight lines of African borders are a result of European colonists ‘carving up’ Africa themselves, with no respect for existing ethnic groups.
When former colonies achieved independence they often found it hard to create a shared national identity because of these divisions and in the 2020s many postcolonial states still struggle with internal rivalries and conflicts and competing claims to political authority.
In some countries nationalism based on shared ethnic identity did play a significant role in helping to achieve independence, such as in Rwanda and Kenya, but this was often limited to small groups of urban elites and intellectuals.
Many nationalist movements emerged in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s which promoted independence from European domination, but once liberation had been achieved the leaders of these movement in practically every country found it almost impossible to create a sense of national unity. It didn’t help that these leaders had usually been educated in Europe or the USA and so there was a vast gap between them and ordinary people in their countries.
Many African countries saw overt conflicts around ethnic and religion divisions and some ended up in overt Civil War, such as in Sudan, Zaire and Nigeria.
Nationalism in Sudan
Sudan is a good example of how one post colonial nation struggled to find national unity given the ethnic and religious divisions following independence.
About 40% of the population were Muslim Arab, mainly habiting the north, while the rest were mainly black and followed traditional religions with a minority being Christian, mainly in the south.
Following independence, Arab Nationalists took power and started a programme of national integration based on Islam as the national religion Arabic as the national language, which 60% of the population did not speak and saw the new government as imposing a national identity on them.
Civil war broke out in 1955 between the new government in north and the south, and it wasn’t until 1972 that a peace accord granted some level of autonomy to the south, but these were annulled in 1983, leading to more conflict until 2005 when a new agreement finally granted the south regional autonomy.
After a few years a referendum in 2011 gave the south full autonomy and a new nation: South Sudan was created, but disputes over the border continued.
However the sad story doesn’t end there: in 2013 a further civil war broke out within South Sudan which lasted five years until a power sharing agreement was reached in 2018, then a coalition government formed in 2020.
Colonialism: A barrier to national identity?
Many ex colonies struggled to create a clear sense of nationhood following colonialism and independence, and in some cases, like Sudan, the original independence nations fragmented into smaller nations, reflecting the intense political and ethnic differences within these ex-colonies.
The process of establishing nation states has gone much more smoothly in those areas outside of Europe which were never fully colonised or which had high degrees of ethnic unity, for example in China, Japan, Korea and Thailand.
Signposting
This material is relevant to students taking the Global Development option as part of the second year of A-level sociology.
It might also be relevant to the the topic of nationalism and identity within the Culture and Identity module.
Ernest Gellner argued that the nations, the nation state and nationalism had their origins in modernity, more specifically in the French and industrial revolutions of the late 18th century.
The origins of Nationalism and the feelings associated with it are thus not rooted in human nature, but in the social processes which emerged with the particular historical period of modernity.
Industrialisation led to rapid economic growth based on a complex division of labour and this required a large scale rational system to organise and direct it, hence the emergence of the nation state and its bureaucratic systems.
The modern state requires large numbers of people to interact with strangers, which in turn requires them to have some sense of connectedness to each other. Mass education based on an official language taught in schools helped to form the basis for this sense of unity on a large scale.
Nations emerged with modernity and the industrial revolution in Europe.
Evaluations of Gellner
Gellner’s theory is a functionalist one, and it tends to understate the extent to which modern education systems create divisions and inequalities.
His theory doesn’t explain the persistence of nationalism: national identity extends far beyond schooling and the kind of nationalisms we see in political conflicts can’t be explained by people simply having been taught in the same language at school several years or decades earlier.
The longing some people have for national identity precedes the industrial revolution by a long way, and there have been ethnic communities which resemble nations in previous periods: such as Jewish communities which stretch back 2000 years. The Palestinian minority in Israel also claim their origins in a longer historical time frame and that they have been displaced by the creation of the modern Israeli state in 1948.
Formal nation state identities in Europe are not recognised by some ethnic minority groups in many countries. A good example of this is the Basque language and identity which spans the border of France and Spain. Basques claim a unique identity of their own, neither French nor Spanish.
Nationalism is still an important part of identity
Malesevic (2019) reminds us that nationalism still has very broad appeal and argues that it is a ‘grounded ideology’ that has mass appeal and has been part of the political projects of peoples across the political spectrum: from liberals to socialists throughout modernity.
When globalisation theory started to become popular in the 1990s some predicted that the nation state and nationalism would decline in importance.
For example, Giddens thought that the Nation State was too big to deal with local problems and too small to deal with global problems. He also thought we would see an increasing importance for a global, cosmopolitan identity.
However as examples such as Brexit, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the pro-American rhetoric of Donald Trump and Jo Biden show us, ideas of nationalism and national identity have remained a persistent part of modern society!
Signposting
This material is relevant to the Culture and Identity aspect of the A-level sociology specification.
