stratification: defining and measuring social class

• Used from 1911-2000
• ranked thousands of jobs into six classes based on occupational skill of the head of household
• has underpinned any studies (education and life expectancy)

• Class I: Professional
• Class II: lower managerial, professional and technical
• Class IIINM: skilled non-manual
• Class IIIM: skilled manual
• Class IV: semi-skilled manual
• Class V: Unskilled manual

• assessment of jobs was made by own staff who tended to see non-manual occupations as higher status.
• marxists- call centres are the new factories.
• unemployed missed out (classed by previous job)- much bigger group now.
• women were classes the same as husbands or fathers.
• workers allocated to the same class often varied widely in pay and conditions.
• no distinction between employed and self employed
• 'black economy'

• conducted in 1972, published in 1980
• recognised the growth of middle-class occupations, especially the self employed
• based his classification on market position (income but also economic life changes such as promotion prospects, sick pay and control of hours worked, employment relations such as authority over others)
• acknowleged that manual and non-manual workers may share similar experiences of work- created an intermediate class

• was still based on male ead of household which overlooked the significance of dual-career households.
• ignores higher paid female partners and single women of every description (who were classed according to their ex-partners or fathers occupation)

• women are classified by own occupations.
• the gendered nature of work in the contemporary UK is accounted for

• women tend to be more varied and change more often (part time, career breaks for children)

• a variation on the Hope-Goldthorpe scale
• replaced the Registrar Generals scale. Based on:
• employment relations (employers, self-employed or employed)
• Market conditions (salary scale, promotion, sick pay, control over working hours etc)

strengths

• some catagories contain both manual and non manual workers
• there is a class for the long term unemployed (underclass)
• women are also recognised

• still based on occupation not perception of social class
• those with great wealth who dont work arent included
• still obscures differences in status and earning power

• people dont always identify themselves as being in the same class as these scales (many teachers say they are working class)
• those who identify themselves within the traditional three tier class system tend to have strong ideas about the characteristics of each class
• these may not relate to the official scales which are based on occupation

• Reay states we should abondon large-scale quantitative analysis and use small-scale ethnographic studies of how class is 'lived' and experienced alongside gender and ethnicity.
• Marshall found that 53% of their sample saw themselves as 'working class'.
• Bradley says this is because people want to seem 'ordinary'
• Savage: many identify themselves as middle class because its the 'loaded' of the options offered.