Daniel Laurison

The Class Pay Gap in Higher Professional and Managerial Occupations

This article demonstrates how class origin shapes earnings in higher professional and managerial employment. Taking advantage of newly released data in Britain’s Labour Force Survey, we examine the relative openness of different high-status occupations and the earnings of the upwardly mobile within them. In terms of access, we find a distinction between traditional professions, such as law, medicine, and finance, which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals, and more technical occupations, such as engineering and IT, that recruit more widely. Moreover, even when people who are from working-class backgrounds are successful in entering high-status occupations, they earn 17 percent less, on average, than individuals from privileged backgrounds. This class-origin pay gap translates to up to £7,350 (

'Like Skydiving without a Parachute: How Class Origin Shapes Occupational Trajectories in British Acting

11,000) lower annual earnings. This difference is partly explained by the upwardly mobile being employed in smaller firms and working outside London, but it remains substantial even net of a variety of important predictors of earnings. These findings underline the value of investigating differences in mobility rates between individual occupations as well as illustrating how, beyond entry, the mobile population often faces an earnings “class ceiling” within high-status occupations.

On Social Class, Anno 2014

There is currently widespread concern that access to, and success within, the British acting profession is increasingly dominated by those from privileged class origins. This article seeks to empirically interrogate this claim using data on actors from the Great British Class Survey (N = 404) and 47 qualitative interviews. First, survey data demonstrate that actors from working-class origins are significantly underrepresented within the profession. Second, they indicate that even when those from working-class origins do enter the profession they do not have access to the same economic, cultural and social capital as those from privileged backgrounds. Third, and most significantly, qualitative interviews reveal how these capitals shape the way actors can respond to shared occupational challenges. In particular we demonstrate the profound occupational advantages afforded to actors who can draw upon familial economic resources, legitimate embodied markers of class origin (such as Received Pronunciation) and a favourable typecasting.

Are the creative industries meritocratic? An analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey

This article responds to the critical reception of the arguments made about social class in Savage et al. (2013). It emphasises the need to disentangle different strands of debate so as not to conflate four separate issues: (a) the value of the seven class model proposed; (b) the potential of the large web survey – the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) for future research; (c) the value of Bourdieusian perspectives for re-energising class analysis; and (d) the academic and public reception to the GBCS itself. We argue that, in order to do justice to the full potential of the GBCS, we need a concept of class which does not reduce it to a technical measure of a single variable and which recognises how multiple axes of inequality can crystallise as social classes. Whilst recognising the limitations of what we are able to claim on the basis of the GBCS, we argue that the seven classes defined in Savage et al. (2013) have sociological resonance in pointing to the need to move away from a focus on class boundaries at the middle reaches of the class structure towards an analysis of the power of elite formation.

Breaking the ‘Class’ Ceiling? Social Mobility into Britain's Elite Occupations:

ABSTRACT There is currently widespread concern that Britain’s cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are increasingly dominated by the privileged. This stands in stark contrast to dominant policy narratives of the CCIs as meritocratic. Until now this debate has been clouded by a relative paucity of data on class origins. This paper draws on new social origin data from the 2014 Labour Force Survey to provide the first large-scale, representative study of the class composition of Britain’s creative workforce. The analysis demonstrates that CCIs show significant variation in their individual “openness”, although there is a general under-representation of those from working-class origins across the sector. This under-representation is especially pronounced in publishing and music, in contrast to, for example, craft. Moreover, even when those from working-class backgrounds enter certain CCIs, they face a “class origin pay gap” compared to those from privileged backgrounds. The paper discusses how class inequalities, as well as those related to gender and ethnicity, between individual CCIs point to occupational subcultures that resist aggregation into the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s broader category of CCIs. The paper concludes by suggesting the importance of disaggregating CCIs and rethinking the definition and boundaries of CCIs as a meaningful category.

Cultural Capital: Arts Graduates, Spatial Inequality, And London’s Impact On Cultural Labor Markets

In this paper we use the unusually large sample size of the Great British Class Survey to compare rates of social mobility into different elite occupations. We find a distinction between ‘traditional’ professions, such as law, medicine and finance, which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals, and technical or emerging high-status occupations, particularly those related to IT, that appear to recruit more widely. Second, we find that even when the upwardly mobile are successful in entering elite occupations they invariably fail to accumulate the same economic, cultural and social capital as those from privileged backgrounds. While many such differences may be explained by inheritance, we also find that the mobile tend to have considerably lower incomes. Investigating this further we demonstrate that even when controlling for important variables such as schooling, education, location, age, and cultural and social capital, the upwardly mobile in eight occupations – located largely in the business sector – have considerably lower incomes than their higher-origin colleagues. These findings underline the value of analyses of mobility into specific high-status occupations as well as illustrating how, beyond entry, the mobile often face considerable disadvantage within occupations.

The right to speak: differences in political engagement among the British elite

This article looks at the degree to which spatial inequalities reinforce other forms of social inequality in cultural labor markets. It does so using the example of London, an acknowledged hub for the creative and cultural industries. Using pooled data from 2013 to 2015 quarters of the United Kingdom’s. Labour Force Survey, we consider the social makeup of London’s cultural labor force, and reveal the extent to which, rather than acting as an “engine room” of social mobility, London’s dominance in fact reenforces social class disparities in cultural employment.

Are postgraduate qualifications the ‘new frontier of social mobility’?

In this paper, I examine differences in political engagement among an elite segment of the British population: GBCS respondents who are college-educated, non-routine workers making over £100,000a year. I show that even though everyone in this group ought to have more than sufficient skills and resources for political engagement, there are still substantial differences by social position. Specifically, postgraduate degrees and higher incomes still differentiate political engagement, and cultural and social capital (as indicated by cultural activities practised, and the occupations people report knowing) differentiate elite political engagement even more strongly. This indicates that social position qua social position – that is, connection to dominant and legitimated ways of being – contributes to a sense of the ‘right to speak’ that matters as much as or more than costs and resources for facilitating political involvement.

Social Class in the 21st Century

We investigate the relationship between social origin, postgraduate degree attainment, and occupational outcomes across five British age-group cohorts. We use recently-available UK Labour Force Survey data to conduct a series of logistic regressions of postgraduate (masters or doctorate) degree attainment among those with first degrees, with controls for measures of degree classification, degree subject, age, gender, ethnicity and national origin. We find a marked strengthening of the effect of class origin on degree- and occupational attainment across age cohorts. While for older generations there is little or no difference by class origin in the rates at which first-degree graduates attain postgraduate degrees, those with working-class-origins in the youngest age-group are only about 28 per cent as likely to obtain a postgraduate degree when compared with their peers from privileged origins. Moreover, social origin matters more for occupational destination, even among those with postgraduate degrees, for those in younger age groups. These findings demonstrate the newly important, and increasing, role of postgraduate degrees in reproducing socio-economic inequality in the wake of the substantial expansion of undergraduate and postgraduate education. Our findings lend some support to the Maximally Maintained Inequality thesis, suggesting that gains in equality of access to first-degrees are indeed at risk from postgraduate expansion.