The British Blue-Collar Worker.

This article attempts to indicate both the diversity of substance and the diversity of approach, which characterize sociological studies of blue-collar workers in Great Britain. The discussion hinges on four perspectives, which may be distinguished in the relevant sociological literature: 1. Institutional Empiricism; 2. Systems Analysis; 3. Social Action Studies; 4. Reference Group Analysis. These perspectives are sufficiently clear to justify organizing the discussion around them, but it should be emphasized that they are not necessarily to be seen as mutually exclusive categories Sociologists see in fact that sometimes two perspectives may be consciously utilized by an author in a mutually supportive way. They further see that sometimes the answer to a problem of research strategy posed from the standpoint of different perspectives may lead in practice to an unexpected convergence as between different writers. What has to be recognized here is that the occupational community serves as an important membership and reference group in explaining the continued working class identification. To describe these workers as privatized would, therefore, be misleading. This suggests that the occupation itself needs to be treated as a variable in assessing the extent to which one can talk of normative convergence between the working and middle classes. It provides an analytical point of contact with the work of Scott et al who, as was noted above, treated occupation as a social system variable in their attempts to explain blue-collar worker behavior.