Tak Wing Chan

Class and Status: The Conceptual Distinction and its Empirical Relevance

In this article, we return to Max Webers distinction between class and status as related but different forms of social stratification. We argue that this distinction is not only conceptually cogent, but empirically important as well. Indeed, class and status do have distinct explanatory power when it comes to studying varying areas of social life. Consistent with Webers assertions, we show that economic security and prospects are stratified more by class than by status, while the opposite is true for outcomes in the domain of cultural consumption. Within politics, class rather than status predicts Conservative versus Labour Party voting in British general elections and also Left-Right political attitudes. But it is status rather than class that predicts Libertarian-Authoritarian attitudes.

Social Status and Newspaper Readership1

In this article, the authors explore the social bases of cultural consumption by examining the association between newspaper readership and social status. They report a strong and systematic association between status and newspaper readership which is consistent with the expected link between status in the classical Weberian sense, on the one hand, and cultural level and lifestyle, on the other. This association persists in a multinomial logistic regression model in which the authors take into account, among other things, educational attainment which serves as a proxy for the respondent’s information‐processing capacity. The social status of respondent’s father and best friend also have significant and substantial effects on newspaper preference. Finally, the authors report results that indicate that the effects of status on newspaper readership are generally more important than those of class.

Social status and cultural consumption

1. Social status and cultural consumption Tak Wing Chan and John H. Goldthorpe 2. The social status scale: its construction and properties Tak Wing Chan 3. Social stratification and musical consumption: highbrow-middlebrow in the United States Arthur S. Alderson, Isaac Heacock and Azamat Junisbai 4. Bourdieus legacy and the class-status debate on cultural consumption: musical consumption in contemporary France Philippe Coulangeon and Yannick Lemel 5. Social status and public cultural consumption: Chile in comparative perspective Florencia Torche 6. Social stratification and cultural participation in Hungary: a post-communist pattern of consumption? Erzsebet Bukodi 7. Status, class, and culture in the Netherlands Gerbert Kraaykamp, Koen van Eijck and Wout Ultee 8. Social stratification of cultural consumption across three domains: music theatre, dance and cinema, and the visual arts Tak Wing Chan and John H. Goldthorpe 9. Conclusion Tak Wing Chan.

The Grandparents Effect in Social Mobility: Evidence from British Birth Cohort Studies

Using data from three British birth cohort studies, we examine patterns of social mobility over three generations of family members. For both men and women, absolute mobility rates (i.e., total, upward, downward, and outflow mobility rates) in the partial parents-children mobility tables vary substantially by grandparents’ social class. In terms of relative mobility patterns, we find a statistically significant association between grandparents’ and grandchildren’s class positions, after parents’ social class is taken into account. The net grandparents-grandchildren association can be summarized by a single uniform association parameter. Net of parents’ social class, the odds of grandchildren entering the professional-managerial class rather than the unskilled manual class are at least two and a half times better if the grandparents were themselves in professional-managerial rather than unskilled manual-class positions. This grandparents effect in social mobility persists even when parents’ education, income, and wealth are taken into account.

Union Dissolution in the United Kingdom

Abstract: This article uses recent panel data to explore the dynamics of divorce in the United Kingdom. The findings are consistent with the independence hypothesis, but reveal little impact of gender-role attitudes or domestic division of labor. The article also finds a robust effect of children in raising the risk of divorce.

Should the voting age be lowered to sixteen? Normative and empirical considerations

This article is an examination of the issue of whether the age of electoral majority should be lowered to sixteen. We consider and reject several arguments raised by both sides of the voting age debate. The key issue, we claim, is the political maturity of young people. Drawing on empirical data collected in nationally representative surveys, we argue that the weight of such evidence suggests that young people are, to a significant degree, politically less mature than older people, and that the voting age should not be lowered to sixteen.

Optimal Matching Analysis: A Methodological Note on Studying Career Mobility

This article explores how Optimal Matching Analysis (OMA) can be applied to study career mobility. I first apply OMA to career history data to identify typical mobility paths. Then I test whether the mobility paths are selectively open to different people. This procedure provides a useful handle to map the opportunity structure of national labor markets.

The Social Stratification of Cultural Consumption: Some Policy Implications of a Research Project

The paper briefly describes a recently completed research project on the social stratification of cultural consumption, presents some major findings from this project, and considers their implications for public policy in relation to the arts. A central theme is the inadequacy of the ‘homology’ argument, claiming that social hierarchies and cultural hierarchies map closely onto each other. This argument is shown to be empirically unsound and to underestimate the complexity of the relationship between social stratification and cultural consumption, as this is determined by the combined effects of income, education and social status. One question that then arises is what policy response, if any, is required by the fact that many individuals do not participate extensively in the arts even though they have the economic and cultural resources required to do so (self-exclusion rather than social exclusion). And a second is that of how far, in attempts at increasing participation, status-linked motivations might be exploited.

Revolving doors reexamined : Occupational sex segregation over the life course

Scholars have argued that although occupational sex segregation is high in aggregate terms, women frequently move between sex-typical and sex-atypical occupations over the life course - hence the revolving doors. I reexamine the revolving doors thesis using career history data from Great Britain. I argue that the conventional boundaries for occupational sex types need revision, at least for Britain. Specifically, female-dominated occupations should be distinguished from heavily female-dominated occupations. I show that although the strong version of the revolving doors thesis (which rules out path dependence) does not apply to both female and heavily female occupations, a weak version describes the former better than it does the latter. This result points to a ghetto effect.

Who marries whom in Great Britain

We investigate educational assortative mating, or homogamy, by modelling the hazard of entry to first marriage for a sample of residents of Great Britain. Using marital, and imputed educational, life-histories drawn from the British Household Panel Study, we estimate first a set of competing-risk models where the outcome variable is defined as respectively hypogamy, homogamy and hypergamy. Age, educational participation and cohort have very strong effects, in directions that may be expected. Time gap between leaving education and marrying shows some signs of the hypothesised effect (that a greater time-lag means less homogamy). Cohort differences suggest men are decreasingly likely to marry down and women decreasingly likely to marry up. We also fit a second set of competing-risk models, where the outcomes are marriage to individuals of specific educational levels. We argue that these are more stable models, and that they provide more insight into the actual marriage patterns. In both sets of models we attempt to control for the changing opportunity structure by including estimates of the educational distribution of single people in an appropriate age range. While this is obviously a necessary control variable, and while it has strong effects on other covariates, its own parameter estimates are hard to interpret. We cannot therefore claim that the effect of changing marginal distributions has been fully removed, but we feel our estimates are nonetheless improved.