Social Surveys

Question 1

Social Surveys - Primary Literature

Ray Pahl, Divisions of Labour (1984) pp. 280-304 [25pp] (Linda and Jim)

Answer 1

• Sociologist, specialising in work and friendship in post-industrial communities.
• Londoner, Cambridge and LSE.
• Investigation of informal economy on Isle of Sheppey, influential at highest levels of government. Emphasised that work was not neatly divided between home and workplace. (I.e. Industrial sociology did not extend beyond workplace)

Linda and Jim

• Concerning the economic life of Linda and Jim, a couple who met in the 60s and suffered financial hardship throughout the 70s and 80s. Demonstrates a mixture of gender progressivism from within the couple, and gender discrimination from without.
• Council house residents, Linda -> talkative, outgoing wife; Jim -> quiet husband. Linda lacked secondary education. Marriage to Jim was disapproved by parents (as would lose income stream). Linda could, but chose to not, rely on her sister in law. Demonstrating degree of pride and insularity.
• Application to Family Income Support was denied because “underlined twice in red biro - ‘your family does not include a man who is normally in remunerative full-time work” Gender discrimination was the latest barrier prevent Linda and Jim from getting by through their own efforts”
• “The state defined the divisions of labour”
• ‘Linda is fortunate in that Jim too does substantial cooking and cleaning and child care’.
• By 1980s, Linda had to give up job as it paid more to be unemployed.
• Pahl’s style of interview was directed - esp. Towards anti-Thatcherite sentiment.
• Also was not neutral - involved himself in County Council affair; difficult to consider as objective.
• Lawrence: how far is an objective interview possible?

Question 2

Social Surveys - Primary Literature

John Goldthorpe et al, The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (1969)

Answer 2

• Objective of study was to understand the phenomenon on embourgeoisement in relation to Britain - specifically, whether class had been displaced “by more ‘integrated’ modes of industrial life.”
• Only a minority of affluent workers found their work rewarding - whilst not in occupation for want of alternatives, a sizeable proportion (66% of machinists, 59% of assemblers, 44% of process workers) preferred previous job
• These men saw jobs in an instrumental light
• Ties to current job:
• 1. High level of pay
• 2. Job security
• In no occupational group did as many as a third of affluent workers make any mention of staying in their jobs because they liked the work they did.
• Few found the road to affluence an easy one. More importantly, while in the white collar world the achievement of tiger pay is usually associated with taking on a more complex, autonomous and responsible job, something like the reverse of this happened in the case of the affluent manual workers.
• “It is thus important to recognise the fact that the weekly pay packets of £20 or more that were quite commonly reported by our respondents were usually the achievement of an actual working week of near to 50 than 40 hours”
• “Zweig has concluded that industrial work is now far more positively evaluated by those who perform it than ever before, and the majority of men on the shopfloor are enjoying or liking or good humouredly tolerating their job“
• From observational studies it appeared that tightly knit groups were something of a rarity in the shops and departments with which we are concerned; and this conclusion was supported by the finding from our interviews that 76% of the more skilled men in our sample and 66% of the semi-skilled felt that they would be ‘not much bothered’ or not bothered at all if moved to another job away from the men they presently worked with.
• Majority of AW unconcerned about personal relationships with supervisors
• “Thus what is indicated here is that appreciable differences exist between our affluent manual workers and then men in our white collar sample not only in their immediate work experience but further, at the normative level, in what they look to their work to provide. Consistently with the findings of other research, the white collar employees we studied appeared not to define their work in an almost exclusively instrumental way. For these men, certain work associates at least were likely to be ‘significant others’
• “If the wants and expectations that workers have of their employment are sharply focused on economic returns, with other possible forms of satisfaction in work being accorded relatively little importance, then there are obvious difficulties in the achievement of a high level of employee integration in the sense of the question”
• The main conclusion - “That a factor of decisive importance in determining whether or not industrial workers are likely to become increasingly integrated into their employing organisation is their own definition of their work situation and, underlying this, the particular pattern of wants and expectations that they have in regard to their employment.
• In other words, our findings would suggest in some opposition to the theory of embourgeoisement that for the industrial worker of the present day, affluence and typically middle class attitudes towards work itself are in no way directly related, but that, on the contrary, they may often be difficult to reconcile.
• “To generalise from our findings, therefore, we would maintain that so far at least as the world of work is concerned, the thesis of working class embourgeoisement can have little relevance to present British society.

Question 3

Social Surveys - Primary Literature

L.R. England, ‘Little Kinsey: An Outline of Sex Attitudes in Britain’, Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter pp. 587-600, (1949)

Answer 3

• The Kinsey Report of 1948 reported on American sexual behaviour. MO researchers in 1949 conducted a “Little Kinsey” report into British sexual behaviour, however the results were suppressed for 50 years, until revealed by the BBC.
• The Report found ¼ men had sex with prostitutes, 1/5 women had an extra-marital affair, while the same proportion of both sexes said they had had a homosexual experience.
• Survey was highly invasive, but all part of the group’s plan to document and understand ordinary people’s lives. Investigation was ambitious - 24 full-time observers, 450 volunteers.
• Although the ideal of the virgin bride pervaded in those days, more than half of those interviewed admitted to having had pre-marital sex. 1/3 pregnancies were conceived before marriage. Men’s reluctance to use birth control - the Pill had not been invented - meant married women often feared their husbands, who saw sex as a marital right.
• Men and women resorted to adulterous affairs and men to prostitutes, with whom they could act out the sort of fantasies they could never tell their wives about.
• War contributed to high no. of homosexuality experiences logged in the survey. 1/5 respondents - male and female - had had one, a higher number than today. This, at a time, when homosexuality was both illegal and an utter taboo in most circles.
• Dr Hera Cook: That meant that people could go on denying pre-marital sex existed,” she says, “that men had homosexual experiences, that they went to prostitutes, that the old sexual morality was still intact when in fact it was crumbling all around them and a new modern sex world was emerging.”

Question 4

Social Surveys - Secondary Literature

What is the core argument of Mike Savage - The Moment of Sociology?

Answer 4

• Suggests that sociology came to the fore in the 1960s - specifically 1962, with the rise of the weekly journal, New Society, which had a star-studded list of contributors (Lockwood and Goldthorpe, Powell). Celebrated figures of the New Left were however marginalised from the magazine. New Society was a ‘proselytising’ force which made a new space for sociology.
• Plateglass universities such as Essex would become the vanguards of new types of study which moved away from a traditional focus which marginalised the social sciences. Indeed, only 5% of Oxbridge were social scientists. 48% were arts.
• Zeitgeist opinions set the mood of scientific analysis and social investigation.

Question 5

Social Surveys - Secondary Literature

What is the core argument of Jon Lawrence - Social Science Encounters

Answer 5

• Revises Make Savage’s review of the Goldthorpe and Lockwood Luton/ Cambridge studies. Savage uncovers the class differential between Cambridge and Luton, where the affluent workers of Luton rejected hierarchical models of social and occupational class. Savage underestimated the role of age and gender; concluding workers remained untouched by middle class aspirations
• Lawrence focuses on the interaction between worker and interviewer to highlight that signs that male interviewers may have been more willing to praise plebeian ‘taste’. Females demonstrated greater propensity for class difference. the affluent worker team worked with a narrow, preconceived model of what constituted ‘bourgeois’ striving which was rooted in their palpable dislike for overt markers of class distinction and social snobbery. The researchers tended to valorize individuality over conformity, and reviled the perceived mediocrity and pretension of ‘petit bourgeois’ taste.
• ‘Doing masculinity’ required the disavowal of overt interest in status or social aspiration, especially when the dialogue was between men who normally inhabited very different social and cultural worlds.

Question 6

Social Surveys - Secondary Literature

What is the core argument of Jon Lawrence - Inventing the Traditional Working Class

Answer 6

• Reviewing the field notes from Wilmott and Young, Lawrence concludes that the projection of the ‘traditional working class’ that did not want to leave Bethnal Green was a fallacy: Willmott and Young intentionally marginalised narratives which emphasised atomism and a desire to escape. Mainly because they saw networks of working class kinship as building blocks for a more mutualistic socialism.