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The role of 'class strategies' in policy formation is sometimes unseen as plans are unrealised in practice over long periods of historical time. 'Subterranean class strategies' are an extension of existing work on class to consider 'class work' on policy in the 'long unenacted'. Using the example of emergency feeding in a national crisis, the stark difference in school meal planning for post-World War 2 emergencies when compared to the COVID-19 crisis is discussed. Through an analysis of archival records, it is shown that 'subterranean class strategies' - the devaluation of school catering expertise by the army and the private sector, the lack of co-operation of independent schools, and localisation and privatisation - diminished the role of schools in emergency feeding. The paper concludes by considering how the concept of 'subterranean class strategies' could inform work on educational think tanks, privatisation and subsumption, and intersectional areas such as race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused untold damage to the socio-economic lives of people all over the world. Research has also demonstrated great inequality in the pandemic experience. In the UK as in many other countries, people from ethnic minority backgrounds and in workingclass positions have suffered disproportionately more than the majority group and those in salariat positions in terms of income loss, financial difficulty, and vulnerability to infection. Yet little is known about how people coped in the daily lives and tried to maintain their well-being during the most difficult days of the pandemic through social capital. Methods: In this paper, we draw data from the COVID-19 Survey in Five National Longitudinal Studies to address these questions. The survey covered the period from May 2020 to February 2021, the height of the pandemic in the UK. It contains numerous questions on contact, help and support among family, friends, community members, socio-political trust, and physical and mental health. We conceptualise three types of social capital and one type of overall well-being and we construct latent variables from categorical indicator variables. We analyse the ethnic and socio-economic determinants of the three types of social capital and their impacts on well-being. Results: Our analysis shows that social capital plays very important roles on wellbeing, and that ethnic minority groups, particularly those of Pakistani/Bangladeshi and Black heritages, faced multiple disadvantages: their poorer socio-economic positions prevented them from gaining similar levels of social capital to those of the white group. However, for people with the same levels of social capital, the effects on well-being are generally similar. Discussion: Socio-economic (class) inequality is the root cause for ethnic differences in social capital which in turn affects people's well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper rejects the cases made in recent volumes of this journal for incorporating political economy into youth studies. A brief review of young people's transitions from education into employment in the UK during and following the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns shows how youth transitions research engages routinely with changes and continuities in politics, state policies, the economy and labour markets. It is argued that the main weaknesses in current transitions research arise from our lack of an up-to-date class scheme within which to locate subjects' childhood origins and adult destinations. However, the paper illustrates how young researchers occupy a privileged position from which to identify emerging, consolidating and declining social classes. The conclusion is that youth studies must necessarily foreground young people, that it must engage with the outcomes of political and economic processes but has no need to 'dig deeper' into political economy for alleged underlying root causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have long been interested in the meaning workers derive from their jobs. The issue has garnered increasing academic and policy attention in recent years with the concept of "meaningful work," yet little is known about how social stratification relates to access to it. This paper addresses this issue by exploring how the meaningfulness of jobs—as rated by their incumbents—is stratified across classes and occupations in a national survey of 14,000 working adults in the United Kingdom. It finds modest differentials between classes, with those in routine and manual occupations reporting the lowest levels of meaningfulness and those in managerial and professional occupations and small employers and own account workers reporting the highest levels. Detailed job attributes (e.g., job complexity and development opportunities) explain much of the differences in meaningfulness between classes and occupations, and much of the overall variance in meaningfulness. The main exception is the specific case of how useful workers perceive their jobs to be for society: A handful of occupations relating to health, social care, and protective services which cut across classes stand out from all other occupations. The paper concludes that the modest stratification between classes and occupations in meaningful work is largely due to disparities in underlying job complexity and development opportunities. The extent to which these aspects of work can be improved, and so meaningfulness, especially in routine and manual occupations, is an open, yet urgent, question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Aims: This paper examines the co-occurrence of drinking alcohol and eating in Great Britain. Applying a practice-theoretical framework, it attends primarily to the nature and characteristics of events – to social situations. It asks whether drinking events involving food are significantly different from those without, whether differences are the same at home as on commercial public premises, and whether differences are the same for men and women. The focus is especially on episodes of drinking with meals at home, an infrequently explored context for a substantial proportion of contemporary alcohol consumption. Data: Employing a secondary analysis of commercial data about the British population in 2016, we examine reports of 47,645 drinking events, on commercial premises and at other locations, to explore how eating food and consumption of alcoholic beverages affect one another. Three types of event are compared – drinking with meals, with snacks, and without any food. Variables describing situations include group size and composition, temporal and spatial parameters, beverages, purposes, and simultaneous activities. Basic sociodemographic characteristics of respondents are also examined, with a special focus on the effects of gender. Results: Behaviours differ between settings. The presence of food at a drinking episode is associated with different patterns of participation, orientations, and quantities and types of beverage consumed. Gender, age, and class differences are apparent. Conclusions: Patterns of alcohol consumption are significantly affected by the accompaniment of food. This is a much-neglected topic that would benefit from further comparative and time series studies to determine the consequences for behaviour and intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adds to the literature on cultural stratification by revisiting cultural voraciousness, nearly two decades after it was first introduced as a measure of cultural participation designed to capture inequalities in the pace and variety of cultural activities. Specifically, using the UK 2014–15 Time Use Survey, we compare measures of cultural voraciousness in the UK in 1998 and 2015, focussing in particular on the way cultural voraciousness is associated with both gender and class. We find continuity over time in the patterns of relationship between cultural voraciousness, gender and class, which are not explained by income or hours worked. While women at the bottom of the class scale are still the most disadvantaged in terms of unequal access to cultural participation, high level managerial women now equal equivalent men in their voracious cultural participation. We conclude that not only is cultural voraciousness still useful in depicting cultural inequalities delineated by gender and class, and not only do gender and class gaps in cultural voraciousness persist over time, but also that there is evidence for accentuated class inequality over time in cultural voraciousness among men and among women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a sociological model of the conditions of possibility of the UK's decision to withdraw from the European Union in 2016. Drawing on the conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu and those inspired by him, it synthesises and goes beyond the partial and fragmentary accounts offered so far to offer a more comprehensive narrative implicating the interrelation of multiple fields, with agents' evolving strategies within the different fields being the major fulcra. To be specific, the conditions of possibility for the referendum result were provided by mutations within the global field of nation states ricocheting through the UK's political field, ethno-racial field and class structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homelessness remains a prevalent issue, and estimates of the number of people without adequate shelter in the UK suggest that the issue is growing. This research draws on literature on the cognitive impact of poverty, stigma, and self-esteem to show how confidence is improved by coaching programmes with those at risk of homelessness. The paper is based on empirical research into one such programme which offers one-to-one guidance on the interlinked issues of financial management, digital skills, and employability. The research shows that coaching helps to provide relief for participants, which in turn frees up "mental bandwidth", allowing them to focus on issues such as managing debt and rent arrears. Confidence and self-esteem, which are often lowered by class-related stigma, are also shown to improve, and it is concluded here that this is largely due to participants becoming more closely aligned with normative neoliberal assignments of value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young carers are the subject of public policies in the UK, which aim to address their needs as a group experiencing disadvantage relating to their caring role. These policies are implemented in a way that aims to improve their health and their educational and social opportunities, but left unaddressed is a wider context of inequalities. Nevertheless, inequalities are a feature of the terrain upon which social policies for young carers are developed and implemented. Evaluation of the ways that young carers and their families are impacted by public policies demands an understanding of those inequalities. Academic knowledge of how experiences diverge as a result of multiple intersecting inequalities is so far limited. This paper reports from a study that aimed to contribute greater understanding of the interaction between inequalities, young carers, family life and social policies in England. Ethnographic research methods created a record of care, family life and the impact of social policies. Unequal conditions of care are an important feature of the lives of young people and their families with on-going caring responsibilities. Young carers and their families positioned at the intersection of inequalities of 'race'/ethnicity, class and disability had different and unequal experiences of support. The paper discusses these findings and explores the implications for social policies and social work practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past few years have seen the rediscovery by political and media commentators of areas in post‐industrial Britain characterised as "left behind". It is rarely acknowledged that this attention to regional inequality has only come about after decades of political neglect and cultural erasure of these areas following deindustrialisation. Current ideas about regional inequality and proposed solutions to it—from the "Red Wall" to "levelling up"—are often conceptualised in ways that in fact continue this neglect, by homogenising these regions and imposing top‐down narratives about their demographic and political nature. This paper will contrast these developments with new approaches in several parts of the UK, focusing on democratic localism or "community wealth‐building", which have seen communities in "left behind" areas already addressing regional inequality, and offering their own alternative economic and social models, in a way that presents a more nuanced picture of both class and regional identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers gender and social class in relation to teacher education through an episodic study of the development of adult educational institutions in Huddersfield. It briefly discusses nineteenth-century mechanics' institutes in the town before moving to a consideration of school teacher training college students in the twentieth century, highlighting aspects of the gendered and cultural ethos of teacher training. Local efforts to establish teacher training, and the wartime presence in the town of an evacuated women's teacher training college, provide a prism for the examination of transitions in social attitudes towards teaching as a profession, as do the educational aspirations of local working-class grammar school girls and boys during the 1940s/1950s. The paper then focuses on the establishment in 1963 of a 'new kind' of non-residential teacher training college and, in particular, on its introduction in the late 1960s of part-time provision designed specifically for 'married women'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the idea of "place‐based diversity" to examine the nature of undergraduate Geography students' attainment and progression with a specific focus on gender, ethnicity and socio‐economic status. In addressing the empirical neglect of progression when assessing inequalities in achievements among Geography students in general and the specific lack of research at the departmental level, the paper contributes to debates on challenging intersectional exclusion within the discipline at a university in London. While it shows that undergraduate Geography no longer privileges male, middle‐class students in terms of attainment, those from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds perform less well. While this is partly addressed by encouraging patterns of higher progression rates among BME students, much more needs to be done. Contributing to existing Bourdieusian analyses of student experiences as well as the role of the university in society, this requires exploration of students' identities and agency, especially their "dutiful aspirational capital," together with the "institutional habitus" of departments and universities and where they are situated geographically. While departmental support mechanisms have helped in facilitating progression for the disadvantaged, this must be combined with developing more positive diverse role models, curriculum change and targeted support practices that avoid the "black deficit model" which assumes that BME students are "lacking." This paper challenges assumptions about undergraduate geography students as white, male and middle‐class based on research within a department of Geography in the east of London in the United Kingdom (UK). In arguing that progression must be taken as seriously as attainment, it shows that while female undergraduates and those from less advantaged socio‐economic backgrounds are not necessarily hindered, ethnicity remains an issue. In explaining these patterns, the notion of "place‐based diversity" is useful in capturing the structures of institutions that are situating within specific localities and policy environments as well as the agency of departments to create conditions that are conducive to celebrating diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularization of wine drinking was one of the most significant changes in British drinking culture in the twentieth century, in terms of the increase in both the availability and acceptability of wine for the general population. Based on a discourse analysis of 35 years of Jane MacQuitty's Saturday Times Wine Column (1982–2017), this paper argues that while wine has been discursively constructed as a drink of the many, the distinction traditionally associated with wine drinking in Britain remains. The data demonstrate how MacQuitty constructs wine through the media stylistically as everybody's drink, while also constructing and maintaining a distinction between "us" as an in-group whose wine knowledge and taste are distinct from "them." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws on the Wolf (2015) report(Heading for the Precipice: Can Further and Higher Education Funding Policies Be Sustained?)and other quantitative data, specifically that derived from HEFCE’s Participation of Local Area (POLAR) classifications. In addition it explores key literature and debates that associate higher education in further education (HE in FE) with the pursuit of social justice. This enables an interrogation of conceptualisations of vocationalism as well as a consideration of its articulation with class and gender. Whilst the paper is set within a particular and English socio-economic context, it addresses issues that have a much broader global significance. The paper argues that whilst HE in FE has limited traction in facilitating social mobility it does serve as a resource in the struggle for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

E. P. Thompson's work on the making of the English working class is recalled in this paper for its continued relevance to historical materialist perspectives on global movements and class formations. Much commentary on Thompson's work confirms divisions between a first and second British New Left and largely confines the working class to an insular, English phenomenon, one which may present significant insight to a particular account of historical movement and change, but lacks wider spatial and conceptual resonance. This paper questions this view, and its wider implications for the writing of contemporary British history, while pointing towards the greater significance and application of Thompson's work on the making of the English working class than previously acknowledged. This has further implications for recent expressions of ‘global class formation’ as seen in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The focus of this paper is upon the educational background of academic lawyers in England and Wales and the extent to which qualifications from certain institutions may be seen as acting as a proxy for social class. In recent years higher educational background and socio-economic background have been significant topics of research relating to entry to the legal professions and judiciary in England and Wales. There is a relative absence of such research relating to academic lawyers. The research discussed in this paper aims to close that gap. The paper argues that critiques relating to the elite nature of the traditional legal professions in terms of educational background have parallels within the academic legal community, evidenced by a dominance of those educated at Cambridge, Oxford and other Russell Group institutions, with relatively lower proportions of graduates from other sectors, most notably the post-1992 universities. The paper further argues that economic hurdles to entry to an academic legal career are significantly higher than those for other law related careers, potentially exacerbating issues of socio-economic exclusion. The conclusion drawn is that law schools should engage proactively with measures to expand opportunities for entrants into the academic legal community from candidates from a much wider range of educational backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses analysis of interview transcripts and notes from participant observation to explore white reactions to the introduction of diversity management in a large public sector workplace in Glasgow. The paper analyses white talk about racial equality in a social context where the shaming, exclusion and demonization of disadvantaged groups including migrants, asylum seekers and the poor have ensured that issues of entitlement and race are highly charged. It is suggested that in such contexts diversity management is being wielded as a new kind of civility by middle-class people invested in the objectification of poor whites. This represents a form of class conflict over belonging within the body of whiteness that risks reinforcing rather than redressing racial resentments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use a powerful empirical resource to address what the popular politics of disadvantage might entail in contemporary Britain. We take advantage of the unusually rich qualitative data from the British National Child Development Study, a cohort of Britons born in 1 week in 1958, to focus specifically on the accounts of those who are particularly disadvantaged. By concentrating on these a small number of qualitative accounts, which have been rigorously selected from the wider nationally representative sample on the basis of their relatively small amounts of economic and cultural capital, we will explore in detail the accounts and identities of these disadvantaged Britons with a view to explicating their political frameworks, their social identities and more broadly their orientations towards mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a case of social conflict in an overlooked corner of England (Lincolnshire) in the late 1980s when self-described 'local' people opposed private housing developments and the migration of 'southerners', 'townies' and 'commuters' into their towns and villages. Protestors lamented change and disliked newcomers. This was a reaction to the arrival of affluent, 'post-industrial' workers on the back of a booming service sector. They personified a series of complex, interconnected socioeconomic and cultural changes which disrupted patterns of life rooted in disappearing productive industries and destabilised communities amidst factory closures, agricultural mechanisation, job losses and now suburbanisation. This affected meanings ascribed to places and introduced hierarchies and conflicts structured around Britain's transition towards a service economy. Opposition was expressed through nostalgia, conservationism, inverse snobbery, anti-metropolitanism, attachment to 'local' identities, and concerns about declining independence, community and power. This paper argues that these protests demonstrate the emergence of new ideas about social relations, difference and distinction in post-industrial England. The findings also highlight feelings which would slowly seep into a new, reactionary politics foreshadowing the way that many towns and rural areas (including Lincolnshire) embraced a new political right in the first decades of the next millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing is not, and has never been, our only means of communication or communion. In the university, writing continues to occupy the dominant position in terms of how ideas 'should be' communicated – and, more importantly, assessed. This is the case even in the visual arts where it is well understood that written language can feel limiting. This article considers the impact that the value afforded to the traditional academic essay has on working-class students, whose relationship to writing often differs from the norm. Impacts that are often conveniently forgotten – and set to become worse under the current UK government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the closure of the steelworks in Teesside, North‐East England, this paper focuses upon social class inequality and the re‐scripting of place. The study explores local responses to programmes such as Benefits Street and Location, Location, Location filmed in Middlesbrough. The study contributes to transnational debates on urban territorial stigmatisation in three ways. First, by extending the gaze from "spectacular" sites of multi‐ethnic urban unrest, to consider seemingly "mundane" post‐industrial peripheries. Second, by identifying how the recipients of spatial stigma might demonstrate agency through various acts of popular resistance including place re‐inscription. This includes developing alternative narratives of place, through commemorating Teesside's rich industrial heritage, supporting ex‐steelworkers, and challenging governmental stigma and media geographies declaring Middlesbrough to be a "benefits town" and the "worst place to live in the UK". Third, by considering the unfolding of place as event, where contingency, complexity and unpredictable constellations and re‐inscriptions might emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asserts that academics, unless they work for or in malign regimes, do not make ‘mistakes’, but work within their own historical period using their knowledge of past thinking. Thus, debates on race, ethnicity, race relations and so on, and the plethora of competing definitions and approaches, take place within specific historical times. The paper notes that for John Rex, racism was always the problem, to be defined and explained. It reviews the research carried out in Handsworth, Birmingham 1974–78, Rex's use of classical social theorists, and it refutes Banton's assertion that Rex did not engage with his critics. It concludes that Rex may well have been prophet in foreseeing the permanence of issues of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, migration, integration, citizenship and a ‘war on terror’ in a global era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper discusses the salience of class in Britain in relation to the experiment of the BBC-academic partnership of the Great British Class Survey (GBCS). It addresses the claimed inauguration of a third phase in class analysis in the UK sparked by the experiment. This is done by considering three main issues. First, the GBCS experiment is situated in the context of various explorations of cultural class analyses, and chiefly in relation to the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) project (ESRC funded 2003-6). Secondly, the focus is on the influence of the academic turn to big data for the procedures and claims of the project, and some implications of the methodological choices. Thirdly, attention is turned to the deleterious effects of commercial and institutional pressures on the current research culture in which the experiment exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In British social mobility discourse, the rhetoric of fair access can obscure wider issues of social justice. While socio‐economic inequalities continue to shape young people's lives, sociological work on class dis‐identification suggests social class is less obviously meaningful as a source of individual and collective identity. This paper considers subjective understandings of the post‐16 education and employment landscape in this context, drawing on qualitative research exploring the aspirations of young men and women as they completed compulsory education in north‐west England, and the hopes their parents had for their future. It shows how unequal access to resources shaped the older generation's expectations for their children, although this was rarely articulated using the explicit language of class. Their children recognized they faced a difficult job market but embraced the idea that success was possible through hard work. Both generations drew moral boundaries and made judgments based on implicit classed discourses about undeserving others, while at the same time disavowing class identities. There was a more explicit recognition of gender inequality among the parents framed with reference to hopes for greater freedom for their daughters. Opportunities and inequalities were thus understood in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how Paul Gilroy transformed hitherto dominant understandings of the relationship between race and class by developing an innovative account that foregrounded questions of racist oppression and collective resistance amid the organic crisis of British capitalism. The returns from this rethinking were profound in that he was able to make transparent both the structuring power of racism within the working class, and the necessity for autonomous black resistance. At the same time, significant lacunae in his account are identified, including the neglect of the episodic emergence of working-class anti-racism and the part played by socialists, particularly those of racialized minority descent in fashioning a major anti-racist social movement. The paper concludes with a lament for the disappearance of such work informed by a ‘Marxism without guarantees’ in the contemporary field of racism studies, and asks readers to consider the gains to be derived from such a re-engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the ways in which parents talk about choosing secondary schools in three areas of Greater Manchester. It argues that this can be a moment when parents are considering their own attitudes to, and shaping their children's experiences of, multiculture. Multiculture is taken as the everyday experience of living with difference. The paper argues that multiculture needs to be understood as shaped not only by racialized, ethnic or religious difference (as it is commonly understood) but also by other differences which parents may consider important, particularly class and approaches to parenting. We stress the need to examine what parents say about schooling in the context in which they are talking, which is shaped by local areas and the experiences of their children in primary schools. Based on interviews with an ethnically mixed groups of parents from different schools, we show how perceptions of the racialized and class demographics of schools can influence parents' choice of secondary schools. The paper also argues that attention needs to be paid to the ways in which terms such as 'multicultural' and 'mix' are applied uniformly to very different contexts, be they particular schools or local areas, suggesting there is a paucity of language in Britain when talking about multiculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the turn of the century, young people’s aspirations have featured prominently in UK education policy and practice. Governments of all sides have espoused a rhetoric and enacted initiatives which have tended to focus on somehow ‘correcting’ the aspirations of students of working-class and minority ethnic origins. This paper applies a Bourdieusian framework to the analysis of the education and career aspirations of British-born young women of Bangladeshi heritage in higher education. In doing so, it advances a theoretically informed understanding of aspirations, which accounts for the multiple factors that contribute to shape them as well as for the relative implications in terms of future pathways. Drawing on interviews with 21 female undergraduate students, and building on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and capital, I conceptualise aspirations as an aspect of habitus. I argue that this conceptualisation allows light to be shed on the ways in which multiple, intersecting dimensions of social identity and social structures play out in the shaping, re-shaping and possibly fading of aspirations. Additionally, it enables us to examine the mutually informing influences of aspirations and capital on practice. Findings indicate that the valuing of education and social mobility expressed by those of Bangladeshi and other minority ethnic origins are integral to collective constructions of ‘what people like us do’, which are grounded in diasporic discourses. They also illuminate the significance of social and cultural capital for young people’s capacity to aspire and actualise aspirations, as these contribute to delineate their ‘horizons for action’. This suggests that by failing to adequately recognise how structural inequalities inform differential access to valued capital, prevailing policy and practitioners’ approaches attribute excessive responsibility to students and their parents. The notion of ‘known routes’ is in this respect put forward as a way to make sense of aspirations, expectations and pathways, and the role of institutions in forging possible futures is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a substantial switch in approaches to the study of British voting behaviour in recent decades, with much less attention being paid to individual voters' social positions. This paper argues that such approaches can mis-represent the contexts within which voters are socialised and mobilised and are also technically problematic because social positions and attitudes may well be collinear – in which case ‘true’ relationships are difficult to uncover. Further, regression models that include variables representing social positions almost invariably look at the main effects only and pay no attention to the interactions among those variables. Using a newly-developed multilevel modelling approach to the analysis of multi-way contingency tables, this paper explores the relationships between respondents' age, sex and qualifications and their voting at three recent general elections in England, using a large data set. It indicates that, contrary to recent work, respondents' social positions are linked – through their attitudes – to their partisan choices, and that exploration of the interactions among those variables identifies important differences in how they voted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hidden barriers, or 'gender pay gap', preventing women from earning equivalent incomes to men is well documented. Yet recent research has uncovered that, in Britain, there is also a comparable class-origin pay gap in higher professional and managerial occupations. So far this analysis has only been conducted at the national level and it is not known whether there are regional differences within the UK. This paper uses pooled data from the 2014 and 2015 Labour Force Survey ( N = 7,534) to stage a more spatially sensitive analysis that examines regional variation in the class pay gap. We find that this 'class ceiling' is not evenly spatially distributed. Instead it is particularly marked in Central London, where those in high-status occupations who are from working-class backgrounds earn, on average, £10,660 less per year than those whose parents were in higher professional and managerial employment. Finally, we inspect the Capital further to reveal that the class pay gap is largest within Central London's banking and finance sector. Challenging policy conceptions of London as the 'engine room' of social mobility, these findings suggest that class disadvantage within high-status occupations is particularly acute in the Capital. The findings also underline the value of investigating regional differences in social mobility, and demonstrate how such analysis can unravel important and previously unrecognized spatial dimensions of class inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racist hate speech on UK university campuses remains an increasing concern. This article examines the widespread problem of racist hate speech through a multilayered theoretical approach; and suggests that a fuller appreciation of the problem can only be gained through a race-centred analysis. Drawing on Fraser's work on the problematics of misrecognition and identity-reification, the article extends Levine-Rasky's theoreticisation of power dynamics in the intersectionality between whiteness and middle-classness to intersections of whiteness with both middle-classness and working-classness as a contributing factor to mobilisation of lad cultures which is termed as white-laddism. The article advances the understanding of racist hate speech through a conjoined analysis of these concepts through a Critical Race Theory (CRT) lens. The conjoined analysis is informed by the Deleuzian 'rhizomatic' approach in order to examine the process by which multiple, diverse and non-hierarchical lines of connection between the concepts shape, dislocate, modify each other in variable ways. The detail behind the bigger picture helps further our understanding of the inadequate nature of equality policies and strategies that often look at issues in isolation, and thus fail to address the inequality and injustice being perpetuated on campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the influence of the burgeoning global 'super-rich' on contemporary sociospatialization processes in London in the light of a contemporary re-reading of Pahl's classic volume, Whose City? It explores if a turn to 'big data' - in the form of commercial geodemographic classifications - can offer any additional insights to a sociological approach to the study of the 'super-rich' that extends the 'spatialization of class' thesis further 'up' the class structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intersectionality is the study of overlapping social identities and related systems of oppression, discrimination and domination. From an intersectional perspective, aspects of a person’s identity, for example race, class and gender are understood to be enmeshed. To understand how systemic injustice operates and is produced, a multi-dimensional framework which captures how forms of oppression intersect and are shaped by one another, is necessary. Although the merits of an intersectional approach in criminology have been widely shown and discussed in US scholarship, within British criminology, there have been few analyses that have implemented an intersectional lens – either explicitly or implicitly. Correspondingly, close examination of the social construction of race within the criminal justice system has been largely absent in British criminology. In the following paper, I suggest that these two developments are co-constitutive – that British criminology’s unwillingness to engage with race has resulted in the reticence towards an intersectional approach and vice versa. This is both problematic and a missed opportunity. At a time when much criminological research convenes around the intersection of race, class, religion and gender, the absence of intersectional approaches and the lack of discussion about the racializing consequences of the criminal justice system serve to stymie meaningful debate and advancement of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets changes in Britain's class structure since 1945 alongside the parallel sociological controversies about class. Since the 1970s, the class scheme developed by John Goldthorpe and colleagues for initial use in their study of social mobility in Britain has become sociology's standard template for thinking about and researching class. Versions have been adopted by the UK government and the European Union as their official socio-economic classifications. This paper does not dispute that the Goldthorpe scheme is still the best available for classifying by occupation, or that occupation remains our best single indicator of class, or that a constant class scheme must be used if the purpose is to measure trends over time in rates of relative inter-generational mobility. Despite these merits, it is argued that the sociological gaze has been weakened by failing to represent changes over time in the class structure itself and, therefore, how class is experienced in lay people's lives. There has been a relative neglect of absolute social mobility flows (which have changed over time), and a pre-occupation with the inter-generational and a relative neglect of intra-career mobilities and immobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1873,The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazineextolled the values of swimming for women and gave advice on the best form of bathing dress, one which preserved modesty and met the demands of contemporary fashion. This essentially impractical type of bathing outfit has been the subject of much of the historiography surrounding female swimming costumes but it was not the only swimming dress on show during the “long” Victorian period. The women of all classes who participated in more serious swimming required something functional rather than fashionable while working-class professional natationists, who appeared regularly in water shows throughout the country, wore attire that combined functionality, tight to the body while allowing freedom of movement, with public appeal, a critical consideration for female exhibitors. Their activities and costumes challenged prevailing notions of “separate spheres” and this paper explores Victorian aquatic dress in the context of class, gender and social space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of the twentieth century, the UK ‘art school’ was widely seen as an accessible alternative to University. InArt into Pop, Simon Frith and Howard Horne revealed how this state-funded art and design training, linked to manufacturing industries and backed by relatively low or informal entry requirements, offered the prospect of social and economic uplift for hitherto marginalised working-class youth. More recently, however, while enrolments have expanded, art schools have become absorbed into conventional universities and the class profile, at least at the more prestigious colleges, has changed significantly. Simultaneously, art schools, together with other forms of higher education (HE) have been yoked to a broader public policy agenda of the ‘creative economy’ – one that often marginalises working-class people. This paper takes the changing nature of the art school as its starting point for discussion of class, HE and the creative economy workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once societies embarked on programmes of mass education home schooling became essentially a middle-class project and remains so. This paper looks at the educational experiences of some lower middle class women at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for whom the resources of the middle-class home were simply not available. It explores both their experiences of formal schooling and of the educational provision they chose to seek and found among other groups and institutional frameworks in their society. The range and extended chronology of their educational experiences highlight the need to reconceptualise education as extended processes of physical, intellectual and moral socialisation not necessarily limited to the years of childhood and/or adolescence or time-stopped in any way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Professor Savage and his colleagues have shifted intellectual ground and changed the intellectual focus of the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) from the provision of 'a comprehensive map of class in Britain' to an examination of what they call the British 'elite'. I argue that this 'elite' is no such thing and that whatever it is, it is not well defined by the procedures that are used to identify it. At the heart of all the papers the GBCS team present in this issue of the journal is an unavoidable incoherence which arises from the bias in responses to the original survey. Despite protestations to the contrary this response bias has not been dealt with properly and the resulting empirical analysis is without much value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper looks at social mobility in China and Britain. It explores whether the rapid economic development in China in the last thirty years has brought its mobility closer to that in Britain. It also examines the effects of China's household registration system (hukou) on people's mobility chances. Using national representative surveys in the two countries, we found a convergence in total mobility in the two countries but higher levels of inequality in China in terms of relative mobility. Chinese women faced the greatest disadvantages. The prime driver for social inequality in China was the hukou system. Rural people in China had very limited opportunities for education but even those who had similar levels of education were still very much hampered by the hukou penalty in trying to gain access to advantaged positions. Both societies are highly unequal but China has an additional barrier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates E. P. Thompson and the attraction and influence of his major study,The Making of the English Working Class(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), within his insistence on constructing history as argument. Often polemical, Thompson's approach to history also appreciated paradox. In writing as he always did, against the grain of conventional wisdoms, be they of the right or the left, Thompson understood that he would always be situated awkwardly in terms of how his interpretation challenged established orthodoxies. This awkwardness, and its rootedness in refusal to accommodate too easily to established analysis, has proven Thompson's lasting contribution. It nurtured unique historical sensibilities, creative and rigorous use of source materials, and writing marked by panache and passion. The result is thatThe Making of the English Working Classremains as relevant today as it was 50 years ago, a landmark study whose arguments and their implications are with us yet, and whose suggestions have spawned countless fresh studies and endless research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of Andy Furlong's abiding concerns was to show how the problems of working-class youth are often, straightforwardly, the outcome of inequalities in employment opportunities. On rarer occasions, however, this explanation fits less well. Some young people grow up in families where poverty seems more deeply embedded and inherent to those families. Here, old ideas about a cultural 'underclass' can be tempting to politicians and policy makers. Our qualitative research, with 20 families living in extremely deprived U.K. neighbourhoods, showed that neither a simple lack of job opportunities nor 'cultures of worklessness' explained why hardship persisted for them. Our argument is that circumstances which appear to fit with the idea of an inter-generational, cultural 'underclass', in fact, have their provenance in a semi-permanent constellation of external socio-economic pressures bearing on successive generations of families over decades. Examples did include a shared context of declining job opportunities but extended to a contracting and disciplinary Welfare State, punitive criminal justice systems, poor-quality education and the physical decline of working-class neighbourhoods. We take one example – the destructive impact of local drug markets – to uncover the complex, obscure processes that compound the disadvantage faced by working-class young adults and their families over generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses four examples of bookplates printed in Edwardian Britain (1901–1914) to demonstrate how the adoption of an ethnohistorical approach to social semiotics can vastly strengthen multimodal analysis. It argues that situating choices of image, colour, typography and materiality in archival research and the broader sociohistorical context of the Edwardian period can help to uncover the external motivations for a bookplate's structure. The case study reveals that bookplate designs were primarily influenced by the social status and wealth of owners, as well as the specific, well-established norms of the bookplate genre. It also highlights the significance of connecting semiotic choices to the traditions of Edwardian society and the ways in which meanings can shift over time. The findings demonstrate the importance of grounding hypotheses concerning the function and form of artefacts in concrete historical documents, in addition to the vast potential of this methodology for exploring other texts within a particular historical period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research in the UK has shown a close relationship between family position and educational attainment. Yet, this association seems to apply to whites rather than to children from ethnic minority backgrounds who are usually found to outperform whites in spite of their poorer family situation. The classical theories do not give an adequate account of this apparent mismatch as they were designed for the general population. I propose a thesis of ‘reinvigorated ambition’ to try to explain the second-generation drive for success. Drawing data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, I show that multiple disadvantages faced by ethnic minorities in the labour market give pervasive signals to the second generation that they have to aim higher and work harder in order not to fall too low in their life trajectory. The educational success of children from ethnic minority heritages can thus be seen as a determined effort to shield off cumulative discrimination in the labour market and in wider society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is politics dominated by wealthy men, and how do gendered and class barriers to running for office intersect? This article addresses these questions using the UK as a case study. Drawing on interview data, I highlight the formal and informal institutions that shape the class and glass ceilings in electoral politics. I identify how the high personal costs of running for office, especially in relation to candidates' time, present a barrier to those without significant financial resources. These costs are gendered, as women typically have less time and money than men. These resource barriers are compounded by additional gendered obstacles including discrimination, abuse and gendered family roles. I find that the intersection of the class and glass ceilings creates cumulative barriers that are particularly prohibitive for working-class women. The findings extend our understanding of class and gender gaps within politics and, crucially, the intersection between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks why classical music in the UK, which is consumed and practiced by the middle and upper classes, is being used as a social action program for working-class children in British music education schemes inspired by El Sistema. Through exploring the discourse of the social benefits of classical music in the late nineteenth century, a particular classed and gendered morality in relation to music can be traced that has parallels today. This paper argues, first, that classical music educationfits with a middle-class disposition by rewarding investment in a future self; second, that it cultivates an ideal of hard work as a moral project; and third, that classical music allows young women to perform a "respectable" female identity. UK Sistema-inspired programs, in drawing on Victorian ideas of the "civilising influence" of culture, symbolise hope for the continuation of the bourgeois social project into the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We contribute to the literature on social reproduction and the International Political Economy of the everyday. We focus on how the global economy rests on domestic foundations not just including state institutions but micro-social structures such as households and families. We employ data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study exploring the way different types of household (using proxies for social class) parent – as one aspect of their social reproduction strategies. We argue that under conditions of increased global competitiveness, the UK state has successfully embedded a politics of competitiveness at the household scale. Households of all types are aspirational for their children and invest parental time in helping their children with educational activities. However, parents in middle-class occupations, with higher levels of qualifications and higher income have advantageous informational, cultural and financial resources and use these in a variety of ways to support their social reproduction strategies. The result is that agential responses to competitiveness result in 'compound inequalities'. We theorise this by demonstrating variegation across different household social reproduction strategies and the violence of social reproduction, even where this is unintended. We speculate that compound inequality may be causing a breakdown in the stable reproduction of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an ethnographic study of male manual workers in Blackpool, a large seaside town in the United Kingdom, and drawing on Bourdieu as a theoretical frame, this article explores the role of place in understanding conditions and experiences of precarity. With higher than average levels of deprivation, seaside towns have experienced particular employment challenges where precariousness is likely to be at the forefront of male manual workers' labour market condition. Results highlight the significance of the interplay between place, employment prospects, geographical 'constriction' and dispositions of 'provisionality,' which, together, produce 'uneven geographies' of labour. We develop the concept of 'place precarity' to show how precarity is fundamentally rooted in the spatial context and to capture how conditions and experiences of precarity interact with localised employment conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article demonstrates how food contributed to the Europeanisation of British culture between 1960 and 1975, the period leading up to the 1975 Referendum on membership of the European Community. The analysis identifies the meanings and values associated with Europe in cooking columns in two British broadsheet newspapers, TheTimes and the Observer, and examines how people were encouraged to make identifications with Europe. However, the article demonstrates how the meanings associated with Europe were not monolithic and were inflected by class and gender. In particular, continental culinary practices were associated with the tastes and dispositions of emergent new middle-class formations. More generally, the analysis demonstrates how these representations of European food offered middle-class people ways to experiment with feeling European in their everyday lives. In a Brexit context in which much research has asked why British people rejected Europe, the article seeks to contribute to a parallel history of how so many other British people came to identify as European through engagements with popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]