Mike Savage

Introduction to Elites from the ‘Problematic of the Proletariat’ to a Class Analysis of ‘Wealth Elites’

This introductory paper argues that it is vital to reorient class analysis away from its long term preoccupation with class boundaries in the middle levels of the class structure towards a focus on the class formation at the top. This will permit sociological analysis to engage more effectively with concerns about the ‘1 percent’ and accentuating wealth which are increasingly evident. Accordingly I sketch out the persistence of the ‘problematic of the proletariat’ in sociological analysis before considering theoretical resources which might permit an engagement with the ‘wealth elite’. This paper serves to introduce the other papers of this special issue which use the GBCS to explore different facets of the wealth elite in Britain today.

New directions in elite studies

Since the financial crisis, the issue of the ‘one percent’ has become the centre of intense public debate, unavoidable even for members of the elite themselves. Moreover, inquiring into elites has taken centre-stage once again in both journalistic investigations and academic research.

A new model of social class? Findings from the BBC's Great British Class Survey experiment

The social scientific analysis of social class is attracting renewed interest given the accentuation of economic and social inequalities throughout the world. The most widely validated measure of social class, the Nuffield class schema, developed in the 1970s, was codified in the UK’s National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) and places people in one of seven main classes according to their occupation and employment status. This principally distinguishes between people working in routine or semi-routine occupations employed on a ‘labour contract’ on the one hand, and those working in professional or managerial occupations employed on a ‘service contract’ on the other. However, this occupationally based class schema does not effectively capture the role of social and cultural processes in generating class divisions. We analyse the largest survey of social class ever conducted in the UK, the BBC’s 2011 Great British Class Survey, with 161,400 web respondents, as well as a nationally representative sample survey, which includes unusually detailed questions asked on social, cultural and economic capital. Using latent class analysis on these variables, we derive seven classes. We demonstrate the existence of an ‘elite’, whose wealth separates them from an established middle class, as well as a class of technical experts and a class of ‘new affluent’ workers. We also show that at the lower levels of the class structure, alongside an ageing traditional working class, there is a ‘precariat’ characterised by very low levels of capital, and a group of emergent service workers. We think that this new seven class model recognises both social polarisation in British society and class fragmentation in its middle layers, and will attract enormous interest from a wide social scientific community in offering an up-to-date multi-dimensional model of social class.

Property, bureaucracy and culture : middle-class formation in contemporary Britain

Preface: Why we wrote this book 1. Are the Middle Classes Social Classes? 2. The Dynamics of Service Class Formation 3. The Historical Formation of the British Middle Classes 4. The Contemporary Restructuring of the Middle Classes 5. The Housing Market and the Middle Classes: Class Tenure and Capital Accumulation 6. Culture, Consumption and Lifestyle 7. Social Mobility and Household Formation 8. Regional Context and Spatial Mobility 9. Class Formation and Political Change, Appendix 1: What is Class Analysis? Appendix 2: Socio-Economic Groups, Appendix 3: The British Market Research Bureaus Classification of Occupations, Footnotes, References

Identities and social change in Britain since 1940 : the politics of method

First historical account of the development of social science research methods in Britain Accessibly and engagingly written Sheds new light on the huge social changes experienced in Britain over the last 70 years Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940 examines how, between 1940 and 1970 British society was marked by the imprint of the academic social sciences in profound ways which have an enduring legacy on how we see ourselves. It focuses on how interview methods and sample surveys eclipsed literature and the community study as a means of understanding ordinary life. The book shows that these methods were part of a wider remaking of British national identity in the aftermath of decolonisation in which measures of the rational, managed nation eclipsed literary and romantic ones. It also links the emergence of social science methods to the strengthening of technocratic and scientific identities amongst the educated middle classes, and to the rise in masculine authority which challenged feminine expertise. This book is the first to draw extensively on archived qualitative social science data from the 1930s to the 1960s, which it uses to offer a unique, personal and challenging account of post war social change in Britain. It also uses this data to conduct a new kind of historical sociology of the social sciences, one that emphasises the discontinuities in knowledge forms and which stresses how disciplines and institutions competed with each other for reputation. Its emphasis on how social scientific forms of knowing eclipsed those from the arts and humanities during this period offers a radical re-thinking of the role of expertise today which will provoke social scientists, scholars in the humanities, and the general reader alike.

Reassembling Social Science Methods: the challenge of digital devices

The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilize and materialize social and other relations. In doing so, our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to ‘know’ the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CRESC on the social life of methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by social worlds, and can in turn become agents that shape those worlds. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer the following nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualization; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilizing; and non-coherence.

Ascription into Achievement: Models of Career Systems at Lloyds Bank, 1890-1970

Optimal matching algorithms are used to model the transformation of career systems in a large British bank (Lloyds) from 1890 to 1970. The authors first model the breakdown of the traditional ascriptive, status-based system, and then identify a more dynamic, achievement-based system, and then identify a more dynamic, achievement-based system as its replacement. By relating the structure of careers to organizational growth and social change, the authors explore how the modern achievement career came about. More broadly, they argue that optimal matching enables one to see clearly the multiple time frames that are necessarily intercalated into career systems and hence provides new insights into the discontinuous and contingent nature of organizational change.

Urban sociology, capitalism and modernity

Introduction - The Roots of Urban Sociology - The Economic Bases of Urban Form - Inequality and Social Organisation in the City - Perspectives on Urban Culture - Modernity, Post-modernity, and Urban Culture - Urban Politics - Conclusion: Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity - References

Elites: remembered in capitalism and forgotten by social sciences

By any account, the last twenty years of the 20th century have seen the most rapid and dramatic shift of income, assets and resources in favour of the very rich that has ever taken place in human history. This ‘raiding of the commons’ has been most evident in the former communist nations, especially Russia after 1989, where an arriviste plutocracy emerged in little over a decade from the hasty, even squalid, privatization of state assets and public resources. We can see the rise of the ‘super rich’ in the ‘old’ capitalist nations, especially those such as the UK and USA, which have enthusiastically embraced neo-liberalism from the early 1980s. In both countries the top one or five percent of income earners have more or less doubled their share of total income since the early 1980s and we have now almost returned to pre-1914 levels of income inequality (Atkinson, 2003). There is no historical precedent for such regressive redistribution within one generation without either change in legal title or economic disaster such as hyper-inflation. For reasons which nobody yet understands, corporate chief executive officers have for two decades obtained real wage increases of 20 per cent each year and the much larger number of intermediaries earning multi-million

EMERGING FORMS OF CULTURAL CAPITAL

/£ incomes in and around finance has hugely increased. Where, however, are the social theorists who focus on these processes as central to understanding the contemporary dynamics of social change? As the rich draw away and inhabit their ever more privileged worlds, one might expect a revival of elite studies from contemporary critical writers who are concerned about such developments. After all, earlier generations of theorists were in no doubt about the importance of elites and elite formations for understanding the social dynamics of their nations. Max Weber’s first major sociological work was an account of the challenge to patriarchal relations on Prussian landed estates at the end of the 19th century (see Poggi, 2005, chapter 1). Karl Marx’s focus on the ruling class needs no demonstration, and his famous chapter on ‘Primitive Accumulation’ in Capital (Marx, 1961), which focuses on how a new capitalist class enriched itself from the enclosure of land and thereby set in train the process of capital accumulation, certainly repays reading in light of current events. Other early 20th century sociologists, notably Pareto and Mosca, also saw the nature of elites as fundamental to understanding the characteristics of their societies (see the discussion in Scott, 1996: chapter 5). Yet, from the middle