Niall Cunningham

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.

The secret garden? Elite metropolitan geographies in the contemporary UK

There is an enduring, indeed increasing awareness of the role of spatial location in defining and reinforcing inequality in this country and beyond. In the UK, much of the debate around these issues has focussed on the established trope of a long-standing ‘north-south divide’, a divide which appears to have deepened in recent decades with the inexorable de-industrialisation of northern Britain presented in stark counterpoint to the burgeoning concentration of wealth in London and the south-east, driven by the financial and ancillary services sectors. Due to a lack of available data, such debates have tended to focus solely on economic inequalities between places, and until now there was little understanding of how these disparities played out in the social and cultural domains. This paper significantly advances our understanding of the true meaning of spatial inequality in the UK by broadening that definition to encompass not only the economic, but also the social and cultural arenas, using data available from the BBCs Great British Class Survey experiment. We argue that these data shine a light not only on the economic inequalities between different parts of the country which existing debates have already uncovered but to understand how these are both reinforced and mediated across the social and cultural dimensions. Fundamentally, we concur with a great many others in seeing London and the south-east as a vortex for economic accumulation but it is also much more than that; it is a space where the coming together of intense economic, social and cultural resources enables the crystallisation of particular and nuanced forms of elite social class formations, formations in which place is not incidental but integral to their very existence.

On Social Class, Anno 2014

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.

Religious change in twentieth-century Ireland: a spatial history

The conflicts that have deeply affected the island of Ireland in the twentieth century have been political, rather than religious, in basis. However, the powerful coalescence of Catholicism and nationalism on one hand, and Protestantism and unionism on the other, has meant that religious affiliation in Ireland has come to embody a wider range of cultural, political and social values. Furthermore, the successive waves of organised colonisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have left the island with the legacy of a distinctive religious geography, which became the explicit template for the political division of the island in 1921 as well as having profound implications for its development since the European Reformation of the early modern period. Yet, despite its centrality to Irish history and geography, it has been difficult to assess detailed change in that religious geography due to the inconsistency of territorial units over time. This article presents findings from a major research projec...

P6 Varying mental health in the population across scotland during the recent recession

Background This research focusses on geographical variation in population mental health over the period 2007–2011 (during the onset of the economic recession). We report preliminary results from a project recently funded under the ESRC SDAI programme, seeking to explore variability in mental illness in Scotland during this period. Our methods combine information on individual lifecourse changes, as well as change over time in areas where the individuals are living. This research contributes to a growing field concerned with the relationships between population health and changes in wider determinants of health, operating over time for both individual people and places where they live. Methods We are making innovative use of a variety of data sources including individual data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS), a large (5%) sample from the Scottish population; drawn from the population census made available under secure conditions at the Longitudinal Studies Centre Scotland, with help and supervision of SLS staff. (SLS is supported by the ESRC/JISC, the Scottish Funding Council, the Scientists Office and the Scottish Government.) We report on work which has linked these data to information on prescriptions likely to be used to treat mental illness (provided by the Electronic Data Research & Innovation Service (eDRIS) and information on area socio-economic conditions publicly available via Scottish National Government and NOMIS (Durham University) a service provided by the Office for National Statistics, ONS. Results We report preliminary results from a dataset for more than 1 20 000 people. Most of those reporting mental illness were taking antidepressants. There is a significant statistical association between risk of reporting mental illness in 2011 and employment trajectory of local authority of residence by 2011, (after controlling for individual risk factors and for neighbourhood deprivation in 2001, before the onset of the recession). Conclusion Various personal, family and neighbourhood factors are associated with self-reported mental illness. Allowing for individual/family factors and local deprivation, people in local authorities where employment rates remained higher during the recession had lower risk of reporting mental illness, especially in the highlands and Islands of Scotland. Further research is being carried out to explore these relationships (eg controlling for migration and other possible area level determinants of mental health). The research underlines the importance of maintaining mental health services across Scotland during the recession to protect mental health and control inequality.

EMERGING CULTURAL CAPITAL IN THE CITY: : PROFILING LONDON AND BRUSSELS

Abstract: This essay examines how the contemporary city is being redefined as a fundamental crucible in which new and emerging modes of cultural capital are being forged. Drawing inspiration from the links Bourdieu draws between physical and social space, we use comprehensive quantitative surveys from Belgium and the UK to explore the accelerating interplay between large urban centres and the generation of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’. We show a close association between urban sites and the location of residents with new kinds of emerging cultural capital. This appreciation allows us to understand the increasing prominence of large metropolitan centres, which stand in growing tension with their suburban and rural hinterlands. This process is simultaneously cultural, economic, social and political and marks a remaking of the nature of cultural hierarchy and cultural capital itself, away from the older model of the Kantian aesthetic, as elaborated by Bourdieu in, which venerates a ‘highbrow’ aesthetic removed from everyday life, towards ‘emerging’ forms of cultural capital that valorize activity, engagement and intense forms of contemporary cultural activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making and mapping Britain’s “new ordinary elite”

ABSTRACT There has been a sharp intensification in public and academic interest in differing conceptions of an urban “elite” in recent times. However, the concept of social class in the construction and reproduction of urban elites has remained either an implied or unexplored concern. The purpose of this paper is to explore the empirical manifestations and methodological issues surrounding the definition of an elite which arose from the BBCs Great British Class Survey experiment. This paper builds on our commonplace understanding of an elite as economically distinct by focussing on their social resources and patterns of cultural consumption, based upon a Bourdieusian“capitals” approach to social class, and highlighting dimensions of this cadre which have hitherto received scant attention in recent public and academic debate.

A Classless Society?: Making Sense of Inequalities in the Contemporary United Kingdom with the Great British Class Survey

Abstract This chapter explores the inter-urban dimensions of contemporary inequality in the United Kingdom. It does so by drawing on quantitative measures of inequality from the British Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Great British Class Survey’ experiment of 2011–2013 and representative economic indicators of productivity. It takes its starting point as an acknowledgement of the deepening inequalities in western, developed economies, a reality reflecting in the burgeoning of literature on macro-economic disparities at the start of the twenty-first century. Whilst invaluable, this literature has tended to focus solely on economic definitions of inequality between countries or regions. The purpose of this chapter is to continue the expansion of our understanding of the manifold dimensions of inequality into the social and cultural domains. The data from the Great British Class Survey are uniquely positioned to do this: approximately 325,000 people participated in the online questionnaire, providing information not just on their stocks of economic capital but also on the size and scope of their social networks and the nature and extent of their cultural activities. The size of the sample thus provides an unparalleled tool for analysing the complex nuances of contemporary inequality in the United Kingdom using a framework informed by the theoretical approach to cultural class analysis pioneered by Pierre Bourdieu. The analysis here focuses solely on inter-urban disparities in the United Kingdom and demonstrates the ways in which economic inequalities are reflected and reinforced in the social and cultural domains.

An intensifying and elite city

This paper contributes to the debate on London’s social class structure at the start of the 21st century. That debate has focused on the use of census metrics to argue the case for whether or not the capital has become more or less middle class in composition between 2001 and 2011. We contend that the definition of the middle class has become confused in the course of this debate and is of less critical importance for an understanding of the city’s contemporary class structure than is a focus on London’s elite. We make use of data from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey (GBCS) to shed light on the social, cultural and economic resources of this group, in addition to their spatial location. We then return to the census data for 2001 and 2011 and posit that belying the image of stability in London’s class structure these data suggest clear and localised patterns of intensification in class geographies across the capital, an intensification characterised by a growing cleavage between Inner and Outer London.

‘A sort of whirlwind’: mapping the changing geography of Presbyterian religious observance in Ireland

Since the European Reformation and the colonisations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ireland has evolved a distinctive religious geography which had profound implications for its political development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leading ultimately to the division of the island along explicitly religio–territorial lines in 1921. Troubled Geographies, a major project funded under the auspices of the Arts and Humanities Research Councils ‘Religion and Society’ programme was the first attempt to seek to understand patterns of change in the islands complex geography of religious settlement in the period since the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century up to the most recent published censuses for both Northern Ireland and the Republic. This paper will present findings from a smaller spin-off project funded by the British Academy, which digitised records of attendance at Presbyterian churches across the island over the last 150 years, enabling us to assess how patterns of practice were affected by the momentous events of the period, including partition, civil war, two world wars, the vicissitudes of the global economy and the Troubles of the more recent past. In addition, the use of new quantitative materials such as those in the Presbyterian records enables us to reflect on how patterns of substantive religious practice reflect those on nominal religious affiliation available from successive censuses from either side of the border.