To what extent do people of different social class backgrounds identify with their objective social class position and feel as if they share anything in common with people of the same class?
According to the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) there are seven objective social classes in Britain today, based on the amount of mainly economic but also cultural and social capital people have, which crucially has accumulated over time and is passed down the generations.
An individual’s objective class position impacts their life-chances but while most people can recognise the existence of social class and may recognise the class they are, most people today DO NOT consciously identify with that class position: they are more likely to be ambivalent about their own social class, and are unlikely to feel any sense of shared identity with those from the same objective class background.
This is especially true for those in the middle of the social class scale: there is widespread uncertainty around working and middle class identities, but the Elite class are more likely to see themselves as ‘elite’ and the precariat more likely to recognise that they have been labelled as such by wider society, but seek to distance themselves from that label.
Only 32% identify with a social class and the proportion rises the higher up the social class ladder you go, which is a sort of inversion of class consciousness.
50% of the elite identify as elite.
25% of the precariat identify as working class.
Of those who do did identify:
25% of people identify as upper middle class
41% identify as Middle Working Class
62% identify as Working Class.
So people shy away from identifying as middle class: People are most likely to identify as being ‘somewhere in the middle’ irrespective of where they fall in the objective class structure.
This post with take a brief look at the history of social class identification in Britain before exploring social class identities in contemporary British society, looking at ‘elite’ identity, working and middle class identities, and the Pecariat.
A Brief History of Class identification in Britain
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.
Elite class identity
Britain’s ordinary class elite is the top 6% of society who have the highest levels of economic, cultural and social capital. They are most likely to own their own homes (a crucial source of wealth) and be in high income professional occupations such as law, finance and journalism.
Britain’s ordinary class elite are most likely to positively identify as ‘elite’, although they also tend to ‘play down’ how important their enormous amounts of economic, social and cultural capital have been in providing them with better life chances, preferring to delude themselves that their success is purely down to their hard work and talent.
While Britain’s ordinary class elite makes up only 6% of the population, they made up 25% of the British Class Survey sample. They were queuing up to do this in droves, and Savage (2015) suggests this is because the survey was a self-legitimating activity for them: it was a chance to get quantitative/ scientific/ objective confirmation that they were at the top of British society.
And this class were the most likely to share their class status to social media, suggesting again positive identification with and a sense of pride in their social class status. However, they usually did this with a sense of irony or humour, in an attempt to distract from the bragging aspect.
The elite don’t really identify with everyone from the same class: they tend to identify more with people in similar occupations and in their local neighbourhoods: so those with similar value properties, they also tended to stress that they had some friends outside of the elite too to demonstrate that they weren’t living in an isolated social class bubble.
It is very important to recognise that NOT actively recognising that their elite status is important is the primary means whereby this class maintain their dominance. They benefit from high levels of cultural, economic and social capital, but in playing down the existence of these advantages, they help to keep such advantages hidden, but the GBCS revealed just how obvious such advantages were in keeping this class and their children at the top of British society.
Working and Middle Class Identities
The traditional view of class is that people would identify with their objective class position. This was the view of THOMPSON: the working classes would unite in tight knit working class communities and come together around collective political campaigns for labour interests. However, in the 21st century there is a more muted, individualised and complex set of class identifications.
The GBSC found that people were ambivalent about class, preferring to say that they straddle middle class and working class boundaries.
Class is not important as a badge for most people, but its mention does prompt emotional reactions, especially negative ones. People wanted to avoid the labels of CHAV or as someone who has ‘middle class problems’.
People also felt a sense of shame if they were from a lower social class background but had not climbed the class ladder.
People shy away from identifying as middle class. They were most likely to identify as being ‘somewhere in the middle’ irrespective of where they fall in the objective class structure.
Identity among the Precariat
The Precariat were well aware of the negative labels attached to them by the mainstream media and the widespread dislike of them by many in mainstream society.
They were the most reluctant to take part in the GBSC, probably because they had little to gain from doing it: they didn’t want to take part in what was effectively ritual humiliation the end result of which was receiving a formal label which placed them at the bottom of the social class scale.
In terms of identity, the Precariat didn’t positively identify as Precariat, and had no interest in shouting about their low social status (unlike many members of the elite) and they were reluctant to even talk about social class, preferring instead to identify in other ways, such as with other members of their local community or through using other markers such as gender.
Sources
Savage, M (2015) Social Class in the Twenty First Century.
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.
Many national identities do not have formal nation states with full autonomy: examples include the Welsh, the Basques, the Kurds and the Palestinians.
Nations without states consist of well-defined ethnic groups who identify together as a nation but lack an independent political community and autonomous self-governing body.
Nations without states exist within existing nation states, and sometimes across more than one already existing state. Examples include separatist movements in Israel/ Palestine and the Basque country in France and Spain.
Guibernau (1999) identifies two basic types of nations without states depending on the relationship the ethnic group has with the state or states in which it exists.
The Kurdish People are one of the larges stateless nations.
‘Nations’ recognised by nation states
An established nation state may accept the cultural differences of its ethnic minority populations and allow them some freedom to manage these. For example Scotland and Wales within Britain have the freedom to manage some of their own institutions.
Scotland has its own parliament and independent legal and education system. It also has the power to set a different rate of Income tax to England. Wales also has its own parliament and education system, and the welsh language is prominent in public institutions (formal documents are published in both English and Welsh), although Wales is not quite as devolved as Scotland.
Similarly the Basque country and Catalonia are both recognised as ‘autonomous communities’ within Spain and they have their own parliaments with some degree of autonomy.
But in both the cases of Britain and Spain most of the political power is located in the main national governments in London and Madrid: military power is controlled by these, for example, and not devolved!
Other nations without states have higher degrees of autonomy with regional bodies which have the power to make major political decisions without being fully independent. Examples here include Quebec in Canada and Flanders in Belgium.
In all of the above cases, these ‘nations without states’ have nationalist movements which advocate for full autonomy.
There is a possibility that Scotland will become fully independent in the future: there is a lot of support for the Scottish National Party who campaign for full independence, and although they lost their referendum on independence in 2014 they may well win another one in the future.
Nations not recognised by nation states
There are other examples where ‘nations’ are not formally recognised and the formal nation state in which they exist may use force to suppress the minority group.
Examples such situations include:
Palestinians in Israel
Tibetans in China
Kurds in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.
The capacity for these groups to build their own formal nation states depends on many factors, but mainly the relative power of the nation state(s) within which they exist and any other nation states elsewhere in the world they may form alliances with.
The Kurds for example have a ‘Parliament in Exile’ in Brussels, and also a ‘safe haven’ in Northern Iraq which was established after the Gulf War of 1990-91 and consolidated after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, so you might say they are on their way to establishing nationhood.
The Dalai Lama is the center of the movement for Tibetan Independence from China, based in Dharamshala in India, but the Tibetans have much less chance of having their autonomy recognised given the immense power of China, even though Tibet was once a distinct country before China took it over in 1951.
Signposting
This material should be relevant to anyone studying the nationalism and identity aspect of the culture and identity module, taught as part of most A-level sociology specifications.
Sources
Giddens and Sutton (2021) Sociology 9th edition
Montserrat Guibernau (1999) Nations Without States: Political Communities in a Global Age.
Benedict Anderson (1983) defines a nation as an imagined political community: imagined both as inherently limited and sovereign.
There are three defining characteristics of a nation:
It is imagined because most members of even the smallest nations never meet most other members, yet they feel like they belong to the same community.
It is limited because nations include some people and exclude others. No nation claims to include all of humanity.
It is sovereign because nations claim political independence and the right to self-governance on the part of the people who belong to them.
The nation is a social construction: it exists in as far as the people who perceive themselves as part of it imagine it.
The origin of nations
Anderson argued that the first European nation states were formed with the emergence of national print languages, in the early to mid 16th century, shortly after capitalist entrepreneurs started producing mass print runs of books in national languages rather than the more elitist Latin.
One event which symbolises the start of this process is Martin Luther’s 1517 presentation of his religious views in German rather than Latin, and it was in the region around today’s Germany and also England that the first national languages were produced.
Gradually greater numbers of people started to communicate with each other in national print languages rather than local dialects.
The printing press laid the foundation for nations as imagined communities.
Nations as imagined communities
National Print languages helped to develop early nation states, political entities which then went on to develop their own mass publications and further standardised national languages in doing so.
Nation states also contributed to the imagination of national identity by developing maps (thus making visible the boundaries of nations), and standardising calendars and clock time.
Also important was the decline of the idea of the Divine Right of Kings and the emergence of democracy: previously the Catholic church had power over large swathes of Europe, which had been something of a barrier to the formation of national consciousnesses. The gradual separation of the church from the state laid the foundation for the imagination of the nation as a sovereign, political community.
As nations developed through the centuries more institutions and ceremonies were developed that further reinforced the idea of a shared national identity, some of them having their origins in government, some in the private sector.
Examples of things which enhance a sense of national identity include:
Great works Works of literature such as those by Shakespear, whose plays had a mass audience.
Standing militaries and conflicts. War is a time when mass populations get behind their nations, the Falklands war in the 1980s may have been a good example of this.
Many political parties in the 20th century came to power on the back of overtly nationalist ideologies, Nazi Germany is an obvious example of this.
Sending national teams to global events such as the World Cup and Olympic Games.
The industrial revolution and capitalism were essential to the emergence of nations and ideas of nationalism because without these the printing press and mass communications would not have been developed.
Early maps of Europe reinforced a sense of national identity.
The difference between racism and nationalism
Racism is based on ‘dreams of eternal contamination’ an is based on certain peoples having fixed, biological characteristics which form the basis of inclusion and exclusion in terms of racial groups. It is not possible to become part of a race which one is not born into.
Nationalism is not based on ideas of certain people having fixed biological traits which automatically exclude them. Anyone can potentially become part of a nation, irrespective of who their parents or grandparents are.
Early ideas of nationalism may have been tied up with colonialism and racism, but nationalism and racism are not the same thing!
The nation as a positive source of identity
Anderson claims that we have lived in the ‘era of nationalism’ since the 16th century: since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in nationalist terms and we can thus say that nationalism is the most universal value of our times.
He argues it is difficult to dismiss as problematic an idea that has such importance to so many people and forms the basis for modern global political relations in the form of Nation States.
Certainly the idea of Nationalism is very relevant today as the examples of Brexit, and the United Kingdom’s recent immigration bill which puts the British Nation before the European Convention on Human Rights demonstrate.
He recognizes that the origins of nationalism may well have been racists, but his distinction between nationalism and racism reminds us that nations do not have to be imagined at all in racist terms. The idea of British Values possibly demonstrates this.
Evaluations
Anderson may understate the relationship between nationalism and racism: many nationalisms are based on ideas of ethnic purity.
Anderson did not apply his ideas to the mass media or the internet. Mass communications online may do more to enhance cross border global identities compared to national identities.
National Identity may be less important today given that many people’s sense of self is more tied up with their sense of gender identity or simply their interests!
Signposting
This material is mainly relevant to the Culture and Identity option, taught as part of A-level sociology.
Benedict Anderson (1983) Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism
Part of this post was adapted from Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives 8th Edition.
Printing press image source: By Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki – DANIEL CHODOWIECKI 62 bisher unveröffentlichte Handzeichnungen zu dem Elementarwerk von Johann Bernhard Basedow. Mit einem Vorworte von Max von Boehn. Voigtländer-Tetzner, Frankfurt am Main 1922. (self scanned from book), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17927966
The GBCS found seven ‘objective’ social classes based on economic, cultural and social capital. However, most people do not identify with these social classes!
The results of the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) were first published in 2013 based on a sample of 161 000 responses.
The survey used a range of questions to measure three types of Capital:
economic capital (wealth and income, especially housing wealth)
cultural capital (of which there are two types: highbrow and emerging)
social capital (who people know, and the status of who they know)
The survey drew heavily on the work of Bourdieu in its design. One of the key aims was to measure the three types of ‘capital’. This is because social class in Britain today is a matter of advantages that people have accumulated over decades, and even generations as economic, cultural and social capital are passed down to children.
The results of the survey were analysed using ‘latent’ class analysis to group responses into clusters of overlapping answers and revealed that are seven broad social class today as below:
Elite (6% of the population): the most privileged class in Great Britain who have high levels of all three capitals which sets them apart from all other classes. Typical jobs include lawyers, doctors and higher-level managers. Much of their wealth is in property (they are typically home owners), and their income and wealth are double that of the next class down. Also one of the oldest classes in terms of age with an average age of 57.
Established Middle Class (25% of the population): members of this class have high levels of all three capitals although not as high as the Elite. They are a gregarious and culturally engaged class. Average age of 46.
Technical Middle Class (6%): a new class with high economic capital but seem less culturally engaged. They have relatively few social contacts and so are less socially engaged. Average age of 52.
New Affluent Workers (14%): this class has medium levels of economic capital and higher levels of cultural and social capital. They are a young and active group with an average aged of 44.
Emergent Service Workers (15%): a new class which has low economic capital but has high levels of ‘emerging’ cultural capital and high social capital. This group are the youngest class with an average age of 32 and are often found in urban areas.
Traditional Working Class (19%): this class scores low on all forms of the three capitals although they are not the poorest group. The oldest class with an average age of 66.
Precariat (15%): the most deprived class of all with low levels of economic, cultural and social capital. These are the most likely to rent and will typically be in unskilled temporary jobs, with an average age of 50.
Key findings from the Great British Class Survey
The elite class, the top 6% is far removed in terms of economic, cultural and social capital from all the other classes. For example, they are twice as wealthy on average as the next class down. 22% of respondents in the GBCS were from this class.
The elite are happier to identify as elite than other classes: they recognize themselves as distinct.
The precariat is also distinct from the other 6 classes: they are much more likely to rent rather than be home owners and much less likely to know someone in the elite class.
The other five classes are less distinct, and there is ambivalence among respondents about whether they are working or middle class: more than 60% of respondents were reluctant to identity with a social class.
Age plays an important role in determining class, mainly because of property ownership: most people in the elite are over 50, most people in the technical middle classes are much younger.
Mike Savage (2015) saw the GBCS as an act of symbolic violence against the Precariat: only 1% of respondents were precariat, they were reluctant to do the survey because they saw it as an act of labelling them as inferior; the elite flocked to do the survey and then tweeted about their status afterwards: for them it was an act of class-affirmation.
Ambiguous Class Identities
The results of the survey give us a set of ‘objective’ class positions, however in terms of identity very few people identified with their own social class position.
The elite were most likely to identify as elite and think of themselves as superior, however they tended to play down the significance of money in their lives and emphasise the people they knew from different classes and the eclectic tastes they had rather than just ‘highbrow tastes’ .
This mirrors how cultural and social capital work: their importance is played down and not spoken about, they confer silent and subtle advantage on the children of the elite, but they themselves attribute their success to meritocracy and hard work.
‘Lower down’ the social class order more than 60% of people didn’t identify with a social class at all. People today are reluctant to identify with social class because of the negative labels associated with social class: Chavs for the working classes and #middleclassproblems for the middle classes.
There was also a significant tendency for people to identify themselves as being ‘somewhere in the middle’ of the social class scale: rich and poor alike tended to say ‘I am somewhere in the middle’, possibly people tended to compare themselves with people of a similar age, or with people in their local community rather than social class.
In the lowest social classes, especially the Precariat, people recognised the economic constraints on their lives and how these limited life chances but they were reluctant to take part in the survey because they knew it would label them as inferior.
The rest of this post provides an overview of Bourdieu’s cultural class analysis and then summarises the findings of the survey for economic, cultural and social capital.
Bourdieu’s cultural class analysis
Class is fundamentally tied up with inequality, but not all economic inequalities are about class. For example, if someone wins £10 million on the National Lottery, this does not automatically propel them into the elite or upper classes.
What determines someone’s class goes beyond one single transaction. If that same lottery winner invested their money in stocks or set up a business and sent their children to private school, we might then, several years afterwards, start to talk of them having moved up the social class hierarchy.
According to Bourdieu, social classes are fundamentally associated with the accumulation of advantages over time, a view which reflects the trajectory of his own life as he was born the son of a rural French postal worker and ended his career as an illustrious professor at an elite university.
He was interested in the symbolic power of class and the shame and stigma that were bound up with forms of domination. For him class was associated with how some people feel ‘entitled’ and others ‘dominated’, thus recognising the cultural elements to social class.
Bourdieu saw class privilege as being tied up with access to ‘capital’ which he defined as having ‘pre-emptive rights over the future’. Some resources allow people the ongoing capacity to enhance themselves and the processes associated with the uneven distribution of resources are crucial.
In the words of Bourdieu himself: ‘Capital, in its objectified or embodied forms takes time to accumulate and has a tendency to persist, so that everything is not equally possible.’
For Bourdieu it is essential that we understand class historically rather than as a series of transactions as snapshots in time; in any one moment we come to social life with different endowments, capacities and resources, and thus social classes are historically forged.
Thus life-chances (such as your chance of getting into a good university) are NOT like playing roulette. In roulette two individuals place a bet, one on black and one of red, both have an equal chance of winning. And if they do so for another round, they have an equal chance of winning again. The odds are reset to the same after each round. Who wins in round two is NOT affected by who won in round one.
With economic (and cultural) capital whoever wins round 1 (generation 1) passes on a greater chance of winning to whoever bets with them on round 2 (their children)
Cultural Capital
Economic capital is one important form of capital Cultural capital is another.
Cultural capital is a form of inheritance, associated with educational qualifications. Well-educated parents pass on to their children to capacity for them to succeed in education and get qualifications to get them into the best jobs. This is not a direct inheritance but a probabilistic one.
Cultural capital is passed on, but in a opaque way, dressed up in the language of meritocracy and hard work, and thus its existence is denied. This opacity is part of how it works, because it makes it impossible to challenge.
This is like gift economics in gift-based societies: gift-giving tacitly demands reciprocation at some point in the future, and is, in reality, about someone with ore capital (the person able to give gifts) manipulating or dominating the person they give the gift to, because by doing so everyone knows they owe the gift-giver something.
Yet this is never spoken about, and it appears that the gift-giving is voluntary and altruistic, and the maintenance of this narrative-myth in public is key to the gift-giver maintaining their power.
According to Bourdieu, to accept the gift as a gift is a form of symbolic violence, it is an acceptance of domination, but as soon as we refuse to see gifts as voluntary and altruistic, they become a form of domination or manipulation.
This is similar to they way in which cultural capital works: in reality middle class parents pass on their higher level academic skills and ‘highbrow’ cultural tastes to their children and THIS is what gives them an unfair advantage and helps them be more successful, but in public we DO NOT TALK about this, instead we prefer to believe that it is simply the hard work of the middle class children that accounts for their success.
Social capital works along similar lines to both cultural and economic capital: the upper middle classes have more contacts their children can use later on in life to get them jobs in, for example, hospitals, law firms, and finance firms.
Capital accumulations and social class
These three forms of capital: economic, cultural, and social take decades to accumulate, they are the result of careful accumulation over the lifespan of parents, who then pass them on to their children, who pass them on to their children and so on.
For those born with little or no capital, it is very difficult to catch up all on your own. It can be done, but you have a long way to go compared to the children of the upper middle classes.
Economic capital
Britain is more unequal than most comparable nations and 78% of Britons are in favour of some forms of redistribution, but when it comes to viewing their own lives, people do not straightforwardly place themselves as winners or losers despite this intense inequality.
Simply noting that Britain is unequal and is getting more unequal tells us nothing of how people experience these inequalities. Economic divisions stamp themselves in complex ways in people’s identities.
Based on interviews with the Great British Class Survey, people in very different economic circumstances all place themselves in the middle, but if you dig down into it ‘being in the middle’ has different meanings depending on their objective position in the economic class structure.
In general, those with modest amounts of money are aware of how a relative lack of money has shaped their life in the past and continues to constrains their life in the present.
Whereas those with money tend to downplay the importance of it. Those who have money report caring less about it. They are able to stand back from the brute power of money itself.
People do not want to show off, nor do they want to recognise the shame and stigma of being at the bottom. Yet despite this, economic inequalities are central in shaping people’s lives.
Wealth inequalities and social class
Britain has got a lot wealthier in the 20th and 21st centuries, so much so that income from employment in the present is increasingly overshadowed by the influence of wealth accumulated from the past.
The absolute gap between the top 1% and bottom 50% by wealth increased threefold from 1976 to 2005.
The absolute increase in wealth is divisive: it means that those who start today with no wealth have a larger hill to climb in order to reach the top and this makes breaking social inequality difficult.
Bringing wealth into an analysis of social class has three major implications:
It makes us realise that income is not the only, or even the main way economic capital influences people’s lives.
The gap is getting bigger, so it is harder for people at the bottom to climb the ladder.
Wealth is accumulated, and so your parent’s wealth matters – we need to understand class in terms of transfer of resources from young to old
The power of income inequalities
According to the Spirit Level Britain is a country of gross high income inequalities.
The Higher Managerial Class earns three times as much as those in routine manual occupations, but within the top class there is a group of especially well paid occupations such as CEOs, doctors, lawyers and financial intermediaries, and these occupations have pulled away from similar occupations which require similar education and skill levels.
The top 10% earn nearly 17 times as much as lowest 10%.
Is there a new aristocracy?
The GBSC shows us that there is a strong overlap between those who have extremely high incomes, savings and wealth.
In social terms those with the most economic capital are only slightly more likely to have degree-level qualifications. Those who have the most economic capital really do have the most privileged backgrounds.
The very wealthy also tend to have a strong awareness of themselves as either upper or upper-middle class, and they are more likely to identify as such.
Those with the most economic capital also have distinctive social and cultural characteristics too, they have more exclusive social networks.
House ownership and social class
One of the most important things which makes positioning oneself on an economic scale is whether one owns a house or not, something which is especially true for the over 50s, many of whom bought houses when they were much cheaper back in the 1990s.
There are many people, for example, who have had traditionally working class jobs for their entire lives, but by virtue of having bought a house in the ‘right area’ 30 years ago, are now sitting on property worth more than half a million, with no mortgage.
On the other hand there are also many people who have worked in traditionally middle class jobs but are sitting on cheaper properties with huge mortgages.
By way of an example: where would you place the following two people on the class scale?:
A builder with no qualifications earning £30K a year with a property worth £700K and no mortgage.
A teacher with two degrees earning £45K a year with a property worth £300K and paying £15K a year on their mortgage for the next decade?
These two examples demonstrate how difficult it is to place people on class scales today and show the complexity of class identities, and that’s just factoring in income and housing wealth, and before we even look at the cultural and social aspects of class identification.
looked at more broadly, owner-occupied housing is now thoroughly implicated in the accumulation of economic capital, creating a powerful categorical divide between those who are owners and those who are tenants.
The housing divide also tends to increase the significance of age and location in terms of social class divisions.
The meaning of economic capital revisited
People’s perceptions of economic inequality might not involve comparing themselves with those in other occupations but rather those in certain geographical locations or age.
In this way the effects of economic capital can be naturalised so that monetary differences are associated with a range of personal, social and spatial factors which may make them appear ‘natural’ in the minds of many.
The fact that it takes so long to accumulate economic capital is why people place their situation in the context of life histories rather than draw direct ‘relational’ contrasts with the wealthy or poor, and thus people see their economic fortunes tied up with their life histories rather than global economic forces.
In the minds of respondents property was a very important form of economic capital, especially as it could be passed onto the next generation.
The continued importance of economic capital
An increase in economic capital clouds the boundary further between working and middle classes and it means those at the top are further apart.
One cannot make simple judgements based on occupation alone. Economic capital especially housing has an impact – age and region.
We can only understand economic capital by recognising it is the result of long term accumulation. In every dimension the better off are more closely associated with historically resonant forces: social cultural or coming from a senior managerial background. Economic capital is about long term investments.
Finally, growing relative proportions in economic capital might reduce general awareness of where they stand in relation to other people. It’s not just about income and employment anymore: people compare themselves to those of a similar age and neighbours!
Cultural Capital: Highbrow and Emerging
Most people are aware that economic capital (wealth, especially housing today) are assets that can be accumulated and invested to give oneself and one’s children advantages in life.
However most people don’t think of cultural tastes and interests as being forms of capital, but for Bourdieu they are, and what matters is the extent to which one’s tastes and interests are seen as legitimate. There are countless cultural pursuits, but not all are valued equally.
For example, there is a widely held notion that classical music and literature, fine art, opera and have more legitimacy and value and show better taste than Big Brother and computer games.
Traditionally three factors have cemented the notion that ‘high culture’ is superior:
High culture has been deeply promoted by the state through subsidies from bodies such as the Arts Council.
The education system reinforces the idea that classical literature and music are superior.
Cultural critics and other taste makers further reinforce the idea.
Social Engagement: the new divide
The GBCS believes that cultural capital still exists today but that it has changed its form.
We see this from a cultural mapping exercise which shows us which kinds of activities are NOT done together and from that we can see which are furthest apart and even in contrast from each other and a hierarchy emerges.
Cultural activities A
Cultural activities B
Liking fish and chips
Going to the theatre
Eating out rarely
Going to the gym
Not going to restaurants
Going to rock gigs
Not liking pop music
Playing sport
Disliking Indian food
Going to art clubs
Not going out with friends
Watching live sport
Disliking jazz
Liking French and Italian restaurants
Disliking world music
Liking world music
Not going for a walk
Going to museums and art galleries
Disliking reggae music
Going to the opera and ballet
Cultural mapping shows us that it is more likely that your choice of activities will ALL come from one column in the table above rather than finding equal numbers of activities from both columns.
On the right hand side of the column, the activities involve going out into the world of public, cultural institutions, such as going to the theatre and eating out at restaurants and on the left hand side there is an aversion to these, and most readers would probably recognise there is subtle social pressure to view the activities on the right as more socially legitimate.
Those on the right are socially approved of and supported, those on the left abstain.
This is not quite the same as ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture because also on the right we find activities such as going to the gym and rock concerts.
Those who are well educated and have a high income tend to engage in pursuits on the right and vice versa, so cultural tastes do map onto social position. The activities on the right require, in general a lot of money, those on the left do not.
For those on the left, they do not simply sit at home passively watching T.V. but their cultural activities are more likely to be informal, and kinship or neighbourhood based, done in private and with less of a public profile.
For those who engage in the activities on the right, it involves taking part in public life, they are more visible and this may lead to more confidence and assertiveness. They have more of a public profile.
Someone on the left may well be very culturally engaged, but they are more likely to play themselves down as lacking ‘culture’ as not being very informed. Those with lower income are more tentative about what good taste is as they tend to lack confidence.
Those with ‘good taste’ are more likely to be confident that their tastes are legitimate and may use this to ‘inflict’ their taste on others. They are sure they have ‘good taste’. They are at ease. They are much happier to communicate this conviction in public.
The secondary cultural divide: highbrow versus ’emerging’ cultural capital
Cultural mapping also reveals a second set of oppositional tastes and activities. Activities such as going to the opera, classical music and ballet correlate with disliking rap and popular music:
Cultural activities A
Cultural activities B
Liking fast food
Going to the theatre
Being indifferent to classical music
Disliking pop music
Being indifferent to heavy metal
Going to stately homes
Liking rap music
Liking classical music
Liking vegetarian restaurants
Disliking reggae music
Being indifferent to jazz music
Disliking rap music
Playing sport
Not going to fast food restaurants
Not going for a walk
Disliking rock music
Taking holidays in Spain
Going to museums and art galleries
Watching live sport
Going to the opera and ballet
Those tastes and activities on the right are consistent with ‘highbrow taste’ and seems to support Bourdieu’s views on Distinction.
Those on the left who prefer such things as popular music are more likely to state they are ‘indifferent’ to classic music and so on.
Age is also a factor in this opposition, with younger people being more likely to fall into the left hand column, those with ‘highbrow’ tastes are more likely to be older. The average age of a Radio 3 listener is 62.
When we factor in both age and class, we see from this are two modes of cultural capital: ‘highbrow’ and ’emerging’.
Highbrow culture is more established, historically sanctioned and institutionalised in the education system, but is also an ageing mode of cultural capital.
Emerging is more hipster – adopted by the younger middle class – it has its own infrastructure in bars and on social media and sports and may be institutionalised in new professional workstyles which emphasise adaptability.
So with respect to cultural capital, younger people are not obviously disadvantaged compared to their elders: they partake in these new forms of cultural capital and are engaged.
People are also increasingly keen to express their eclectic tastes, the drawing of sharp boundaries was relatively rare, even among older respondents.
Sociologists in the USA have talked about the rise of the ‘cultural omnivore’ who is more culturally tolerant and less snobbish and more accepting of diversity. This is NOT what the GBCS reveals.
While the better off talked about their eclecticism there was a ‘knowingness’ about this diversity of engagement. For example, the elite tend to be very selective about which precise and particular ‘unusual’ aspects of popular culture they like, and explained in great depth why they like them.
They were off the cuff about their like of highbrow tastes, but had to legitimate their like of things falling outside this.
Emerging capital is thus not about liking popular culture per se, but rather demonstrating one’s skill in manoeuvring between the choices on the menu and displaying one’s careful selection of particular pop artists. Demonstrating WHY you liked something (in relation to your life) was as important as WHAT you liked.
Especially among the younger generation, no pop artist was out of bounds, but this was usually done with a lot of justification – exhaustively selective, even in terms of Burger King over McDonald’s.
In other words, emerging cultural capital is expressive, it is a performance.
For example on respondent: Henry said of his music tastes – ‘there is no cohesion at all’ and he was proud of this, but his play lists included such things as ‘obscure’ and ‘hopelessly poppy’. His collection of tastes was about having material to add to discussions in university halls.
You can consume ‘right pop music’ but also ‘wrong pop music’ in the right way by demonstrating an eclectic taste but a privileged understanding.
Ways of Seeing
There is a difference between activities which are immediate and sensuous and discerning.
Discernment is the ability to judge across genres and justify these: skills associated with education and professional jobs. These are not neutral skills and those who value them tend to denigrate immediate, sensual reactions.
There is a class differences in how things are enjoyed. The basis of a new snobbery.
Just getting lost in classical music at a sensual level is seen as inferior to engaging with it at a more highbrow level of appreciation: being stretched intellectually is seen as superior to merely being entertained.
The working classes are more likely to express just ‘getting lost in the music’ but for the middle classes, engaging in something just for pleasure was often tied up with guilt: being too knackered to do anything better after work, for example.
Cultural snobbery
Emerging cultural capital embeds its own form of subtle hierarchy.
People in higher class positions distance themselves from snobbery but they contradict themselves by showing a dislike of culture that was mass produced.
Reality TV and talent shows were frequently mentioned as things they didn’t like as was Bingo and certain fashion brands.
Responses to questions about such cultural tastes tended to start with a denigration of lifestyle (so not personal) but then moved on to a criticism of the people who liked them: such as audiences of reality shows being passive and easily duped by advertisers.
Towards the end of interviews, when they were more relaxed, the wealthier better-educated respondents often considered cultural tastes as powerful indicators of pathological identities, expressing even disgust.
They tended to commend themselves on their own flexibility and energy in choosing the ‘right’ cultural products, and in contrast saw those who watched shows such as the X factor as being lazy and non-discerning.
Cultural activities were not seen as just private enthusiasms, they brought with them social baggage.
Social Capital
Most of us understand the importance of networks in our lives, especially in the age of social media.
Most of us pride ourselves on having a wide range of social contacts, and especially for the elite it is seen as vulgar to stress that you only know other people from the elite, they stress the working class people they know.
However we are also aware of the strategic importance of knowing certain types of people.
Bourdieu’s conception of social capital is that it is something the privileged and powerful use to protect their interests and shut out those without social capital.
Three main findings from the GBCS about social capital were:
Social networks are not exclusive. Most people know someone a fundamentally different walk of life, so we do not live in a closed society.
However, there is a strong tendency for those in professional and managerial jobs to know people in similar jobs and the same is true for those in manual and routine jobs. People in the bottom quintile know just over one person in one of the elite 8 positions, for those in the top quintile, they know three.
The extremes are distinctive. The very wealthy are much more likely to know very advantaged people than everyone else, so these are more closed off. And those with no educational qualifications are much less likely to know those from other occupational clusters. The elite occupations are the most socially exclusive.
Social capital accumulates over time, and is passed down. Those with a parent ranking in the highest-status income earners know twice as many people in the elite professions compared to those whose parents belong to the routine manual class.
A Subtle shaping occurs: social capital determines who you socialise with, and how you think about your class position, but this is not immediately obvious in day to day life.
Social Class: the new landscape?
The interplay of economic, cultural and social capital generate the kinds of cumulative advantages and disadvantages which may fuse together in social classes more broadly.
Drawing links between these three kinds of capital is complicated because the three strands are organised on different principles.
Economic capital has accumulated massively in recent years, but it is difficult to see cultural and social capital accumulating in this sort of way. Technical innovation especially means people have more cultural and social capital than previously, but it is difficult to map this out because there is so much diversity, unlike with economic capital, which is more blunt.
Economic capital has been subject to more absolute accumulation, but with social and cultural capital the accumulation is more relative, in that people have become divided by different kinds of cultural interests and social ties.
We often fixate on where there is NOT a fit between these types of capital – such as with wealthy footballers or self-made working class millionaires, but Bourdieu tended to see these three types of culture as coinciding – there was a ‘homology’ between them, but the fit was never perfect.
The GBCS confirms Bourdieu’s view to an extent: it shows us that there are some common intersections between these three types of capital, but it is far from perfect, and age also has a significant impact on class location in the new class scale.
A new model of social class?
The responses to the GBCS were analysed using a model of ‘latent class analysis’ to group the three types of capital and show how they cluster.
The seven classes were then ranked according to their economic capital, the variable that is the most unevenly distributed.
The hierarchy here is not always that distinct, for example it is uncertain whether the new affluent workers should be placed higher or lower than the technical middle class.
The two most clearly differentiated classes are the elite and the precariat. These score highest and lowest on most of the measures of the three capitals.
The elite have incomes twice as high as any other class and by far the largest house values. They also have the highest amount of ‘highbrow’ capital, and extensive social networks. With the elite we see more of a ‘homology’ than with other classes.
At the bottom the Precariat refers to the precarious proletariat. This class has the lowest household income, little savings and is the most likely to rent property. It also ahs the fewest social ties, and least likely to know people in the elite. Its cultural capital is also more limited than other classes.
Signposting and Sources
This post was summarised from Mike Savage’s (2015) Social Class in the 21st Century.
Stuart Hall (1992) argued that ideas about identity have changed throughout history.
He argued there were three main concepts of identity which fitted three main historical eras:
Pre-modernity – individual identities were not regarded as unique, but rather related to the great ‘chain of being’.
Modernity and the sociological subject – individuals were seen as unique and their identities linked to broader class structures, genders and nation states.
Postmodernity – postmodern subjects have multiple and fragmented identities.
Identity in Premodern societies
In premodern societies people’s identities were largely based around the position they were born into, and was determined by traditional social structures and religion.
People were not regarded as being unique individuals in their own right, but rather as part of the great chain of being and a person’s identity was ascribed dependent on their place in that chain.
Individuals thus had little scope to change their identities as they moved through life, they were largely set at birth, and established by their social class and gender.
The Enlightenment Subject
During the Enlightenment (16th to 18th centuries) a new conception of identity emerged with each individual coming to be seen as having a unique, distinct identity of their own which was not part of the great chain of being.
Hall suggests this concept first came from Descartes who had a dualistic conception of humans, with each individual mind being separate from every other mind, as evidenced in his well known phrase ‘I think, therefore I am’.
From the Enlightenment onwards individuals were seen as having unique identities with distinctive consciousnesses and were seen as capable of working things out for themselves on the basis of logic and reason.
The Sociological Subject
As modernity progressed a number of complex social and political structures emerged, such as companies and nation states.
Individuals increasingly became connected to these complex local, national and increasingly global structures and the concept of identity started to become more social, as individual identities were more an more related to things such as class structures and nations.
For much of modernity these structures stitched the individual into them, stabilizing both individual identities and the societies which they inhabited.
We see this approach in the Functionalist theory of identity, although this may have been over romanticized and uncritical, and we also see it in the symbolic interactionist approach to identity, the latter perspective allowing for much more individual freedom than the former.
The Postmodern Subject
With the shift to postmodernity identities become more fragmented. Individuals no longer have a clear sense that they have just one identity, rather they see themselves as having multiple, overlapping and sometimes contradictory identities.
According to Hall identity has become decentered: individuals can no longer find a core to their identity. Identities are more likely to be constantly changing, fluid, and thus more uncertain.
Social changes and the fragmentation of identity
A number of social changes have lead to the increasing fragmentation of identity:
Globalisation means that people are now increasingly communicating with others in faraway places and, even if they are unable to leave their location, individuals no longer have to construct an identity based on the specific place they are in.
Individuals living in Asia are able to identify with bands or sports teams in Europe and America, just by adopting dress styles and the appropriate ways of speaking.
Granted, the spread of consumer culture may have lead to more homogenization of culture globally, but from the perspective of the individual constructing their identity there is certainly more choice than in modern times, and the capacity to construct multiple identities at once, combining both the local and the global.
Politics has changed to become less about social class and nation states and more about identity politics. New Social Movements have emerged around such issues as ethnicity, gender and identity and green issues, which has fragmented the political landscape.
Feminism has played an important role in changing identities because it opened up the historically private realm of the private sphere to scrutiny, debate and ultimately change.
In modernity men and women largely accepted their given gendered identities, but since early Feminism challenged domestic roles such as the ‘housewife role’ as an identity that had to be linked to women, and also challenged it for being inherently unsatisfying, every aspect of identity linked to sexual relationships and family life has come up for ongoing negotiation.
Reaffirming identities
Hall argues some individuals and groups respond to the above postmodern fragmentation brought on by globalisation by reaffirming national identity.
We see numerous examples of this ranging from civil wars which want to break up countries along imagined ethnic lines (Yugoslavia for example) and we see it, possibly, in Brexit.
Signposting and Relevance to A-level Sociology
Hall’s conception of identity means that traditional sociological perspectives such as Functionalism and even social interactionism will struggle to explain the nature of identity in postmodern society.
This material is mainly relevant to the Culture and Identity option.
Sources
Hall, S. (1992). The Question of Cultural Identity. In: S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew (Eds.), Modernity and Its Futures. Milton Keynes. Cambridge: Open University Press.
Part of this post was adapted from Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives 8th Edition.
A summary of Kath Woodward’s theory of how identity is constructed.
Identity is to do with how an individual answers the question ‘who am I?’. This is not just a psychological question but also a social question because it involves an individual in deciding what social groups they identify with.
The individual has agency over which groups they identify with and can choose to act in a way that confirms that identity.
Identity is a matter of making decisions about similarities and differences. It is about deciding which groups you share things in common with and which groups are different to the groups you identify with.
This post is a summary of some of the key ideas in Kath Woodward’s (1997) Identity and Difference.
Structural constraints on individual identity
Identity is both subjective and objective. It involves how I see myself and how other see me.
With some identities it is relatively easy to synchronise how I see myself and how others see me, such as with being a football fan or being a metalhead. As long as you support the team, wear the strip, and attend matches or listen to heavy metal music, where a leather jacket and grow your hair long, most other people in the football or metal groups will probably accept your subjective definition of yourself.
With other identities syncing the subjective and objective dimensions of identity may be more difficult as other people may contest your own self-definition. Consider the recent debates over trans-rights for example: the British government does not accept that a person who is a biological man has the right to subjectively identify as a female, even if that is their subjective definition of their self.
Thus in some cases there are structural constraints which limit the capacity of individuals to self-identity in certain ways.
Examples of structural constraints on identity
biological sex – even in Britain in 2023 the government doesn’t recognise the legal right of trans people to identify as a different gender to their biological sex
social class – in many of the highest paid professional jobs such as Medicine, Journalism and Law the working classes lack the cultural capital to fit in with work culture and may well be excluded from equal opportunities.
Economic – some people may lack the money to purchase the products to signify the identities they wish to.
nationality – some immigrants may be prevented from adopting formal identities as citizens because of racist immigration policies.
Structure and individual identities
Following Althusser, Woodward argues that we are recruited into identities through a process of interpellation, or hailing.
As individuals go through life they are surrounded by a number of signs and symbols which call to them, they look at these symbols, interpret them and recognise themselves in some of them, with which they come to identify.
Pre-existing symbols often interpellate different groups differently, so there are different hailings dependent on age, gender and ethnicity for example.
For example, media images are far more likely interpellate women to wear short skirts and sexualise their bodies compared to men.
These symbols are a pre-existing part of the social structure and different symbols call out to different types of people depending on their class, gender and nationality, and thus interpellation links structure to agency in the formation of identities.
Developing identities
Woodward drew on the work of Mead, Goffman and Freud to theorise about how individuals developed their identities.
Mead
Following Mead, Woodward argued that an individual develops an identity by imagining how others see them, and this involves visualising ourselves in social situations and thinking through what ways of acting are appropriate for those situations.
For example, when we attend a job interview, we tend to plan ahead and think about what to wear, how to introduce ourselves and what questions to ask the interviewers at the end of the process.
When attending a job interview an individual does not have total freedom of choice over what to wear or how to act. They have a range of clothes, speech styles and demeanours (symbols) they can choose from which are limited by the pre-existing culture of the job they are applying for.
Thus while we have to employ agency when we visualise ourselves in the job interview and are making choices about what to wear and how to act those choices are limited by the culture we are going into.
An individual goes through a similar process when deciding what social roles to adopt.
Goffman
Following Goffman, Woodward argues that there is a performative element to social roles. People imagine what behaviours are appropriate to the roles they are in (or wish to go into) and try to act in ways which will convince people they are fulfilling that social role (at least when they are visible, or on on the social stage)
If you think about a teacher, for example, there are a number of behaviours they need to display every day to convince people they are performing the teacher role successfully, such as smart dress, punctuality, prompt and fair assessment, inclusivity, enthusiasm, and so on.
This process of developing a social identity is complex. Goffman distinguished between the back stage of social life where we prepare for and practice our social roles and the front stage where we perform them.
Teaching is a good example of how these two work together. The backstage is the lengthy teacher training process, lesson planning, thinking through how to deal with difficult students, there is a lot of planning and preparation before the teacher goes into school and plays their role on the front stage.
Freud
Finally Woodward draw on Freud and recognised that the repression of sexual desire in early childhood plays an ongoing role in the formation of identity in adulthood.
People have an unconscious which contains repressed feelings and desires they are not aware of. Sexual desire and sexuality are large part of this and gender is a huge part of our identities. Our sense of who we are is fundamentally tied up with our identities as men and women.
Uncertainty and identity in the UK
Changing social structures in postmodern times mean that identities are increasingly insecure and uncertain today, and there are several example of this…
The decline of traditional masculine and female identities
The decline of heavy industry such as mining in the U.K. has lead to men going through something of a crisis of masculinity. Traditional working class masculine identities in industrial areas were based on men doing physically demanding labour, such as mining, and adopting the breadwinner role within the family.
Men in traditional working class areas increasingly face a choice between unemployment or jobs which aren’t particularly masculine and much more likely to be insecure, which compromises their ability to express their masculinity through physical labour and to be effective breadwinners.
At the same time women’s job opportunities have increased and more women have gone into the labour market, changing their traditional roles as housewives and mothers, and meaning that the typical relationship today will involve a negotiation about the respective roles men and women will play, the old certainties are gone.
Family is also an uncertain source of identity today as marriage is less likely, and for those who do get married, more than 40% will end in divorce. The result is a family landscape that is more diverse with more single people, more cohabiting couples, more step-families and thus the family today is much less likely to be a stable source of identity, and more likely to be one in which identities shift as relationships breakdown.
New technologies have also challenged traditional biological constraints on when women can have children. The oldest person to have a child is now over 65 thanks to IVF, and so women don’t necessarily have to switch off the idea that the parent-hood identity is over by their mid-40s, and the same goes for their male partners too.
The decline of national identities
There is also more uncertainty over national identity today. Just look at the painfully insipid list of characteristics which the government calls ‘British Values’, these are so vague and can be interpreted in so many different ways that they can never act as a source of collective identity.
Add to this Brexit which divided the nation, the death of Queen, the main symbold of British identity in many people’s eyes, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all wanting to go their own way, and it’s clear there is no real idea of what ‘Britishness’ means anymore, if there ever was.
New Social Movements such as the green movement also offer new sources of identity linking the global and the local around specific political issues, which overtly challenges the failure of the Nation State to tackle such issues.
Identity and Consumer culture
Consumer culture now allows people to express their identities in a huge variety of ways.
Individuals have a huge amount of choice over the material products they can buy which signify something about themselves: from clothes to cars and gadgets and the way in which they style their houses.
The body has also become a project in postmodern society with more people working out and sculpting their bodies becoming a major source of identity, and body modifications such as tattoos or more drastically plastic surgery.
Kath Woodward’s theory of identity: Evaluation
Woodward offers us a useful insight into the complexities of identity construction in postmodern society.
She draws mainly on action theory to describe how people actively construct their identities but she also recognises that there are objective, structural limitations which limit the identities individuals can carve out.
However despite the existence of objective structural barriers which limit the free expression and construction of identity increasing amounts of people forge forward to construct new identities in postmodern society.
Signposting
This material is mainly relevant to the Culture and Identity option within A-level sociology.
Barrie Thorne used observations in two primary schools and theorised that children played an active role in constructing their own gender identities.
Children play an active role in ‘doing gender’ and constructing their own gender identities. Differences in gender identity are developed dynamically as children interacted with several other children and adults throughout their childhoods.
There are not simply two sets of male and female gender roles or identities, there is a much more complex variation: not all boys respond in the same way in the same situations, and neither do girls.
However, despite their active role in the process, children still tend to adopt existing gender roles and thus reproduce gender inequalities.
The material below summarises the work of Barrie Thorne, primarily her 1993 book Gender Play. Thorne was a feminist researcher who developed her interest following her experience of attempting to bring up her own children in a gender neutral way, which didn’t quite work out.
Feminist theory applied to gender socialisation
Thorne argued that gender is not just something we passively receive through socialisation, rather gender is something that we actively do in our day to day activities. There are thus multiple different ways of interpreting and expressing masculinity and femininity, and the construction of gender identities is fluid.
She discusses her theory in the context of wider power relations, particularly those of men, but believes there is no fixed patriarchal structure and emphasised that groups of women can have different interests to others and follows the theory of postmodern and difference feminism.
School organisation and gender relations
Thorne found that some primary school classes were organised by teachers into boys only and girls only tables, but even in those classes where pupils were given freedom of choice, boys tended to sit with boys and girls with girls. So in terms of the organisation of the classroom it was either teachers or pupils who chose to reinforce gender segregation.
Some teachers, but not all, further reinforced gender differences by organising teams for games into boys and girls or having boys and girls lunch queues, and such situations could lead to antagonism or rivalry between the two genders.
However at other times children would work in mixed gender groups and generally got on with it and worked co-operatively when gender was not brought to the fore and made an issue out of.
Peer groups and gender socialisation
At play time children had much more freedom of choice over who they could hang out and interact with and children chose to organise themselves in a gender segregated way.
Friendship groups tended to be either all male or all female and you could visibly see in playgrounds that there were distinct boys and girls games, with boys being in one area and girls another.
Boys tended to take up most of the space in the playground, playing football and baseball while girls tended to play closer to the school buildings and play games such as skipping and hopscotch. Boys also actively excluded girls who wanted to play football and vice versa with girls who wouldn’t allow boys to join in with skipping.
Borderwork
Thorne developed the concept of borderwork to describe the active process of marking out the boundaries between male and female social groups.
One form of borderwork was ‘cross-border chasing’ the most well known form of which was ‘kiss chase’, ‘a ritualised form of provocation‘.
Girls chased boys and tried to kiss them, sometimes wearing lipstick so as to leave a visible mark on their ‘victims’, and boys tried to avoid being kissed to escape the embarrassment. Boys who were caught were teased by other boys complained about getting ‘cooties’, or germs from the girls who kissed them.
The lowest status girls were given the term ‘cootie queen’ to signify that spending too much time chasing boys (and thus being in boys’ territory) was not a good thing, not something that girls should be doing, other than occassionally to annoy boys.
A second form or borderwork was more deliberate cross-gender interrupting of activities, such as boys deliberately stepping on girls skipping ropes to annoy them.
Borderwork served to dramatise the difference between boys and girls, exaggerated the differences between them and reinforced the idea that the two were opposits.
Borderwork also tended to reinforce male power with boys being much more likely to use physical power to disrupt girls games and girls having to chase them off.
Why gender segregation?
Thorn argued that there was no one reason why boys and girls separated themselves along gender lines in school, socialisation alone certainly wasn’t enough to explain the obvious gender segregation, but she highlighted the following:
School playgrounds are crowded environments in which it easy for groups to police behaviour. Because of the relatively high population density it makes it easy for boys and girls to call-out those who don’t conform to their expected gender identities, and, following Foucault, it also means boys and girls are more likely to police their own gendered behaviour because they know they are under constant surveillance by their peers.
Some games in school involved public choosing, and under such circumstances boys tended to select boys and girls to select girls, reinforcing gender segregation. However with handball students tended to just line up behind the team leaders and here there was less gender separation.
Thorne noted that were adults were not present pupils tended to police behaviour along gendered lines more vigorously, but when adults were present, they were more likely to encourage gender mixing.
However some teachers could also reinforce gender segregation by warning boys off going into girls areas in the playground for fear that they might cause disruption.
Overlap between genders
There were plenty of activities in which traditional gender norms were challenged in the school, and there was not a straightforward duality of distinct male and female cultures.
Some games, such as handball, were gender-mixed and there were cases of ‘braver’ boys and girls crossing traditional gender lines to play games, with some boys playing skipping and some girls playing football, for example.
It was especially the more popular boys who could get away with playing girls games without being teased and the stronger girls who could get away with playing boys games and developing a ‘tomboy’ identity.
Evaluations
Thorne’s study challenges simplistic dualism behind early Feminist conceptions of dualistic gender norms, divided simply into masculinity and femininity.
Her concept of ‘doing gender’ reminds us that passive notions of socialisation are not sufficient to explain the very active and animated process through which the taking on of gender roles.
Her in-depth ethnography allows us to trace the subtle differences in interpretations and interactions through which gender identities are constructed.
On the downside she doesn’t really explore the role which structure plays in channelling pupils towards traditional gender identities, even though she makes such a big deal about how active the process of doing gender is.
Signposting
This material is primarily relevant to the compulsory education module taught as part of first year AQA A-level sociology.
socialisation is an active process of social interaction
Symbolic Interactionists see socialisation as an active process in which social interaction between children with adults and other children play a crucial role.
Gerald Handel drew on the work of George Herbert Mead to develop a symbolic interactionist perspective on socialisation and the development of the self, and he is the main theorist considered below.
Social Interaction and biological development
Social interaction is a crucial part of the biological development of the child.
The common sense view of child development is that biology comes first and once the child has the physical and brain capacities to walk and talk, then they walk and talk, but for Handel biological development and social interaction work and develop together.
A newborn child is unable to co-operate with others and take part in society because they are physically undeveloped and are unsocialised.
As the child gets older they mature physically and become socialised, both of which gradually allow them to function as a member of society.
A young child is dependent on its carers for its survival, but even this requires interaction between the child and the caregivers (crying is a basic form of communication), and social interaction is a vital part of a child’s intellectual and emotional development.
Intellectual capacities are developed through a child interacting with others in the same way in which muscles are developed through their physical usage.
Take the development of language for example: social interaction is absolutely essential for a child to develop the capacity to think in words and to speak and communicate. Without social interaction, language remains undeveloped as does the part of the brain which processes language.
Empathy, Communication and the Self
The process of socialisation allows the child to develop three key capacities:
The development of a self-concept. Following Mead, the development one’s self-concept is inherently social. It involves considering how other people see my own actions, and through this process the child learns to self-regulate by avoiding actions others don’t approve of and vice-versa for approved-of actions. In this way, by reflecting on the ‘looking glass self’ the individual comes to develop a sense of their own self as distinct from others.
The ability to empathise. Developing empathy is an integral part of developing a self-concept since it involves putting yourself in the shoes of others and considering how one’s actions make other people. Through doing this the child learns empathy.
The ability to communicate. Socialisation is inherently communicative, from the very early stages of non-verbal communication to the later development of language with its more complex grammatical forms and nuances of meaning.
So for Handel the process of socialisation simultaneously involves the individual developing a unique sense of self, but also a sense of their social self, and through socialisation they learn to regulate their behaviour so that they take account of the reactions of others, rather than just individuals doing whatever they want all the time.
Agencies of socialisation and peer groups
In order to fully understand the process of how a child is socialised we need to take a close, in-depth look at the perspectives of both the adult agents of socialisation such as parents and teachers and child’s peer group, or the other children they are socialised with.
Agents of socialisation
From an interactionist perspective adult agents of socialisation have a lot of freedom to socialise their children in different ways. There are many different styles of parenting practice for example, and most parents are, for the most part, left alone with their children for MOST of the time to socialise them as they see fit. Thus we should not expect all children in a society to be socialised in the same way.
Granted, there are laws and guidelines outlining how parents and teachers should interact with children, but these set very broad limits and the State rarely intervenes in any major ways in the socialisation of most children, and within the broad limits set there is a lot of room for variations in socialisation depending on the parents and teachers educational background, religion, politics, ethnicity, or just their personalities.
Peer groups
Children play a more active role in their own social interaction with other children compared to adults, and the opinions of other children are often perceived as important by children themselves.
Thus socialisation within the peer, or reference group is an important aspect of the child’s development.
Socialisation within the peer group operates differently to socialisation with adult agents.
Children take part in making up the rules of engagement rather than just being expected to follow rules laid down by adults.
Peer groups tend to seek more immediate gratification while adults try to stress deferred gratification.
Peer groups provide an alternative to adult standards of normative behaviour, which may come into conflict with those standards!
Peer groups are not just important for child socialisation, they also play a role in adult socialisation and adults go through changes, such as taking on a new job, for example.
Socialisation and conflicting norms
Handel sees conflict over appropriate norms of behaviour as a normal part of socialisation.
There will be conflict over what the child wants, possibly reinforced by the peer group (‘more cake now’) and what the parents expect, for example.
There will also likely be conflict when children and adults who have different histories of socialisation come into contact in certain social contexts, because of the wide variety of social norms in a society.
However there is also a sense of ‘societal demand’ – society as a whole has broad norms which nearly everyone understands they need to abide by and so for the most part we can settle our differences peacefully.
Evaluation
This is a more nuanced and complex theory of socialisation than that offered by Functionlists and Marxists which recognises that children play an active role in their own socialisation and are not just passive sponges.
Handel’s account is both too general (not in-depth enough) and takes too little account of structural features of society such as social class.
Signposting
This material is mainly relevant to the Culture and Identity option, which is sometimes taught within first year A-level Sociology.
Self identity is an active process through which ‘I’ reflect on how i think others see me and adapt my social self accordingly.
George Herbert Mead (1863 – 1931) believed that human experience, thought and action were inherently social because humans interact on the basis of symbols, the most important of which was language.
He saw the self as something active and dynamic which emerged through social action and interaction and was thus critical of structuralist theories such as Functionalism and Marxism which saw the self as something passive and determined by simply soaking up norms and values.
Mead emphasised the centrality of language as a shared system of symbols and signs which allows for the development of selfhood and social interaction.
Three key ideas of Mead’s social psychological theory of self are:
Individuals acquire language (symbolic meaning) through their attachment and interaction within social groups
Language (symbols) is the primary medium through which the concept of selfhood emerges
Individual selfhood is realised through social interaction which is mediated through language (symbols) and develops throughout the life course.
Mead was a philosopher and social psychologist whose most important work was Mind, Self and Society published posthumously from his ‘student notes’ in 1967.
The social self
The central idea of Mead’s work is that the individual self is inherently social. He didn’t see the self as something innate or fixed, but thought that it emerged through action and interaction with others.
He went as far as to say that the self could not be introspected because it only existed in interaction, outside of interaction the self ceases to exist.
It is only through language that we develop a sense of self and become self aware through an ongoing process of self-monitoring and reflection.
When the individual engages in such processes they are actively considering possible courses of action, possible ways of being in the world and actively excluding others, they are engaged in the process of ‘making themselves’ which is dependent on social interactions.
Language: the basis for human interaction
Mead emphasises the importance of language throughout his work.
Language comprises a system of symbols and signs that enable human beings to generated and signify meanings.
It is language which makes culture possible and separates humans from animals. Animals can make gestures related to objects and events in their immediate context, but their communication is always limited to those contexts.
Language allows human beings to refer to people and events that are divorced from the contexts in which they first occurred. Thus it is through language that the temporal and spatial dimensions of human existence are opened up and we are no longer trapped in the immediacy of. the present.
Language is also the basis of dialogue which is beyond mere one off exchanges between individuals, it allows for complex systems of classification and rational arguments to occur, both of which are again abstract in the sense that they are not dependent on immediate context.
The I and the Me
Language also allows for dialogue with one’s self and it is through language that one’s self-concept is developed.
For Mead, language does not only describe the world, it makes makes objectification possible, it enables us to objectify or ‘create’ the self.
Mead’s theory of language and the self rests on his distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’.
The ‘I’ is reality as we experience it from the inside and the source from which all consciously directed action springs. The I is the idiosyncratic and created aspect of the individual.
The ‘me’ is the object of self-awareness, one’s own physical body perceived by others. The Me represents the social component born out of the internationalisation of social roles, norms and values
The Me does not act as a constraining force on the I but is both enabling and regulating because it allows the individual to review and adapt their actions in light of the perceived reactions of others.
The self is thus a process, not fixed or static.
The generalised other
The generalised other refers to the complex of social attitudes, norms, regulations and ways of seeing the world internalised by an individual. It is the link between the individual and the social groups to which one belongs.
The notion of the generalised other is crucial to Mead’s theory of self-development.It explains how individuals learn to regulate and monitor their own conduct by assuming the perspective of a generalised and impersonal other.
it is only through thinking of how others see ‘me’ that the ‘I’ can realise its own autonomy.
In short we need this social interaction to be able to be conscious of ourselves and develop ourselves, without interaction the individual self does not exist!
The development of the self
Mead also theorised about how individuals come to develop a sense of self through different stages of childhood. He distinguished between the play stage and the game stage.
The play stage
Children first start to develop a sense of self by playing roles that are not their own, such as playing doctors, spacemen, or superheroes for example.
In doing so they become aware that there is a difference between themselves and the role they are playing, hence the idea of the objectified ‘Me’ starts to become apparent as different to the ‘I’.
The game stage
Mead provides the example of game playing as a situation in which children learn to see the world (or the game) from the general situation of all other players and the different view points of particular players.
A fundamental part of a game is knowing other people’s roles. Take as an example the game of football, where there are several different roles: attacking players, defensive players, the goalkeeper and the referee, to name a few, and to be able. to play football any individual needs an idea of the role of each of these, and this is already a complex process that involves thinking how other people will be seeing, and playing the game.
An individual also needs a concept of the generalised other to play a game of football – or an overall picture of the field of play and how all the parts work together in general.
Later on in life
The ability to empathise with and see oneself through the eyes of the ‘generalised other’ is essential to successful interpersonal communication because the reactions of others are tied to and shape the parameters of social situations. It is ultimately what makes co-operative action at the social level possible.
Role taking
An important aspect of the development of self identity is role-taking. People interact on the basis of taking on the role of the other: for example if someone is waving at you across the street, you think that they want to attract your attention, and this ‘taking on their position’ is crucial to the basis of your interaction with them. (Of course you may use other signs, stereotypes)
There are also range of professional roles associated with various jobs such as teaches and doctors, which have expected patterns of behaviour associated with them, and in order to take on one of these roles any individual will have to conform to these.
Culture, social roles and institutions
Mead recognised that social institutions existed, but only in so far as there were social roles attached to them.
For example, the nuclear family exists as long men and women accept the concept of mother and father, the school exists as long as teachers and pupils accept their relative roles to each others.
He did not believe that social roles determined the individual because…
Many cultural expectations were not specific. Clothes
Individuals have a choice over what roles they enter
Some roles encourage diversity
Society does not have an all embracing culture
Many cultural meanings suggest possibilies rather than requirments
At times it may not be possible to fulfil cultural expectations of social roles, innovation may be required.
Social Order
Despite the fact that Mead didn’t believe institutions existed in any modernist solid sense of the word, he still recognised that there was a sense of social order and stability, but these were only actively accomplished through interactions, which are dynamic.
It follows that social order is dependent on the actions and interactions of individuals and thus is fluid, and liable to change at a moment’s notice.
Evaluations
Mead offers us a social psychological account of human interaction which is relevant to social theory because it challenges the modernist, static theories of Functionalism and Marxism which view individuals as passive and lacking agency.
However, Mead’s symbolic interactionism may be too focused on the micro small scale, just interactions, there is no consideration of history and power structures.
Signposting
This material is mainly relevant to the Theory and Methods module taught as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology second year.
