The middle classes in rural England 1971–1991

This paper examines the issue of whether the English countryside has been ‘captured’ by the service classes. It examines this issue with regard to three questions: the role of the service classes in deciding dominant rural images; their role in controlling change processes in the countryside; and their share of the rural population. For the first two, doubts are raised about the importance that is being attached to middle class ‘capture’ ideas. The demographic takeover of the countryside is examined empirically, using census data on individuals from the Longitudinal Study. This shows that notions of a demographic dominance by the service classes are exaggerated and largely apply to SE England. Extending class membership to include those who have ever been in a class indicates that there is a comparatively slight tendency for migration into rural areas to be associated with downward social mobility amongst service class members. Inward movement was more closely allied to longer term service class membership. In gender terms rural areas were not distinguished from other zones in the same region in terms of the likelihood that female in-migrants would stay in full-time employment or leave the paid workforce.     

Sociology and the Englishness of English Social Theory

Although England has a rich tradition of social and political thought, sociology does not figure strongly in this tradition. Several influential accounts—such as those by Noel Annan, Philip Abrams, and Perry Anderson—exist to explain this fact. I examine these accounts and, while largely agreeing with the explanations, question whether we should accept the authors' conclusions. In particular, we need to ask whether England was so different from other countries in this respect. Moreover, even if sociology was weak in England, does this mean that the contribution of English social theory was also weak? What alternative traditions of social thought might exist? In examining the English case, we may get some insight not just into the "peculiarities of the English" but also into the way in which the history of sociology has come to be written and into some of the assumptions underlying the nature of sociology as a discipline.     

Working‐class participation,middle‐class aspiration? Value,upward mobility and symbolic indebtedness in higher education

This paper interrogates the relationship between working‐class participation in higher education (HE) in England and social and cultural mobility. It argues that embarking on a university education for working‐class people has been construed in governmental discourses as an instrumental means of achieving upward mobility, or of aspiring to ‘become middle class’. Education in this sense is thus not only understood as having the potential to confer value on individuals, as they pursue different ‘forms of capital’, or symbolic ‘mastery’ (Bourdieu, 1986), but as incurring a form of debt to society. In this sense, the university can be understood as a type of ‘creditor’ to whom the working‐class participants are symbolically indebted, while the middle classes pass through unencumbered. Through the analysis of empirical research conducted with staff from working‐class backgrounds employed on a university Widening Participation project in England, the article examines resistance to dominant educational discourses, which understand working‐class culture as ‘deficient’ and working‐class participation in HE as an instrumental means of securing upward mobility. Challenging the problematic notion of ‘escape’ implicit in mobility discourses, this paper concludes by positing the alternative concept of ‘fugitivity’, to contest the accepted relationship in HE between creditor and debtor.     

The comfort of strangers: social work,modernity and late Victorian England—Part II

This is the second of two related articles on the history of social work in late Victorian England. In the previous article I showed that the emergence of social work was best understood by aligning it with the complex cultural system of modernity. In this paper the influence of modernity on the formation of social work is taken further by focusing on the way that regimes of practice were shaped by material, physical and visual elements. A distinctive set of spatio-temporal elements are identified that have hitherto been overlooked in ‘histories of social work’. The paper shows how the power of place, and the power over place in early social work, relates directly to the modern experience of Victorian England while shaping the remit of contemporary social work. Home visits, for example, meant that social workers could for the first time attempt to ‘regulate at a distance’, and involved what is referred to as the ‘domestication of stranger relations’. The paper further explores the way in which the history of social work can benefit from exploring the experience-content of early social workers and how organizational imperatives for charity relief were often formed from the bottom-up during this period. At the end of the paper there are some considerations about the way in which a European approach to the history of social work can be instructive and beneficial.     

Irish immigration and the ‘condition of England’ question: The roots of an historiographical tradition

This article argues that the study of Irish immigration in nineteenth‐century Britain has focused for too long ‐ and often uncritically ‐on what the Victorians themselves wrote about the Irish. It is argued here that historians have taken their lead from Condition of England writers, like Kay, Engels, Mayhew and A. B. Reach, with the result that our understanding of the emergence of Irish communities in Britain has been distorted in two ways. First, historians have concentrated upon ‘apartness’ and ‘settlement’ and have made little effort to assess ‘development’. Secondly, such writings have until recently focused especially on the years 1830 to 1870 to the exclusion of others. This article examines some of the key writings of contemporaries and argues that they represent the beginnings of an historiographical tradition which scholars must now look beyond.     

‘Between authenticity and pretension’: parents', pupils' and young professionals' negotiations of minority ethnic middle‐class identity

Despite an increasing sociological interest in the middle classes and their educational practices, research has largely concentrated on the white middle classes. This paper considers the case of the minority ethnic (ME) middle classes through empirical data from a small, exploratory study conducted in England with 36 minority ethnic, ‘middle‐class’ individuals (parents, pupils and young professionals) from a range of ME backgrounds. It is argued that participants experienced ME middle‐class identity as a profoundly conflictual and precarious space, negotiated through a matrix of relational classed and racialized positionings. ‘Authentic’ middle‐classness remains the preserve of white society due to racial inequalities and the dominance of whiteness as the popularly legitimated marker of middle classness. Moreover, attempts to define an acceptable, legitimate and principled ME middle‐class identity are compromised by the discursive threats of ‘inauthenticity’, ‘pretension’ and ‘misrecognition’.     

‘Our young people are worse’: family backgrounds,educational progression and placement options in public care systems

Introducing continental European approaches to UK child welfare practice raises a problem of comparison: to what extent are the problems and issues similar to or different from one country compared to another. Social pedagogues trained in continental Europe and working in English residential care services often encountered the phrase ‘our young people are worse’ from their English colleagues, with the implication that the social pedagogic approach was not suitable for the client group. This paper examines two propositions: (1) that in the context of introducing the continental European approach of social pedagogy into children's residential care services in England, young people are ‘different’ in England compared to other European countries and (2) that the placement options and practices for young people living away from their birth parents in continental European countries differ from those in England. Using data from a five nation study of young people from public care backgrounds, the paper argues that while family backgrounds are remarkably similar there are marked differences in the child welfare systems that might account for the perception that young people in care are ‘worse’ in England.     

DEEWAANA (the mad one): the lover of music

The notion of deewaanapan or madness (as in being crazy about something) is deployed in this essay to make sense of musicophiliac behaviour in twentieth century Mumbai. I argue that new insights into the formation of ‘publics’ in the non-western metropolis can be gained through a focus on phenomena that embody ‘social subjectivity’. A major phenomenon of this kind is the devotion to Hindustani or North Indian classical music which spread through Mumbai starting from the late nineteenth century. The affective response of musicophiliacs is forged not in solitude but in a space of sociality. This idea also encompasses the actual performance of the khayal genre which became prominent in the twentieth century. The khayal represented a sense of intimacy and interiority which also needs to be understood as ‘social’ and ‘public’.     

State Form, Social Order and the Social Sciences: Urban Space and Politico-Economic Systems 1760–1850

Abstract In The Pristine Culture of Capitalism , Ellen Wood argues that the English urban landscape is characterised by lack of elegance, absence of charm and neglect of public services. She traces the origins of this impoverishment to the eradication of pre-industrial capitalist urban culture in the eighteenth century. The paper investigates the claim that English urban culture underwent a significant transformation in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century. A concern with the public magnificence of London as a means of representing the wealth and power of England is characteristic of eighteenth century treatise on urban improvement. The most influential of which, John Gwynn's London and Westminster Improved , published in 1766, draws upon the spatial linkage of economy, government and power typical of mercantilist thought. The paper argues that as the principles and practices of mercantilism were displaced by the spread of industrial capitalism and the liberal state, a concern with grandeur, elegance and embellishment in urban form was subordinated to the provision of the physical and social infrastructure necessary for the reproduction of labour.     

‘The Sunshine of Manly Sports and Pastimes’: Sport and the Integration of Jewish Refugees in Britain, 1895–1914

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jewish refugees arriving in Great Britain were exposed to an ‘anglicisation’ campaign designed to aid their integration into British society and their assimilation of British character traits and cultural values. Within this campaign, especially the element focusing on the children of the migrants, interest and participation in sport was consciously ‘transferred’ through the medium of youth and sporting organisations in order to help in their ‘anglicisation’. This essaywill show how physical recreation was promoted by the English Jewish establishment and how participation in sport amongst young Jews grew.     

CULTURAL STUDIES IN GERMANY REVISITED

By drawing upon the insights of the Bakhtin Circle, this paper explores the extent to which the public sphere can open up possibilities for resistance to dominant social relations through ‘traces of meaning’. The author wishes to show how a public space for execution in seventeenth and eighteenth century London opened up a place at different levels of abstraction for a popular plebeian public sphere to flourish. When this public sphere disappeared in 1783, it is shown how its traces of meaning still survived in popular culture. These traces of meaning were re-combined through a royal crisis by more political labouring movements in the early nineteenth century that, in the main, unintentionally re-accentuated the same seventeenth- and eighteenth century-public space in London. By exploring the changing form of this public sphere it is shown how a dominant discourse changes over time and how this dominant discourse can be rendered in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin as ‘heteroglossic’ and refracted into modes of public resistance in specific spaces. To demonstrate this, the ideological form of the public sphere in early nineteenth century Britain is outlined and is then shown how it became refracted within the royal scandal which, in turn, came to be refracted within a specific space in London.     

Making education count: the effects of ethnicity and qualifications on intergenerational social class mobility

This paper examines the role of social class and ethnic group background in determining individuals' social class destinations. It explores the extent to which these background factors are mediated by educational achievement, and the role of educational qualifications in enabling intergenerational class mobility. To do this, it uses the ONS Longitudinal Study. These data allow us to observe parents' characteristics during childhood for a group of children of different ethnic groups growing up in England and Wales in the same period and who had reached adulthood by 2001. Results show that the influence of class background on these children's subsequent social class position varied with ethnicity: it was important for the majority, even after taking account of educational qualifications, but had a much smaller role to play for the minority groups. The minority groups made use of education to achieve upward mobility, but to greater effect for some groups than for others. Among those without educational qualifications, minority groups suffered an ‘ethnic penalty’ in relation to higher class outcomes; but for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, this penalty persisted at all levels of education. These findings challenge the notion that a more equal society can be achieved simply through promoting equality of opportunity through education.     

‘It just feels English rather than multicultural’: local interpretations of Englishness and non‐Englishness

Who, or what, is English? Drawing on qualitative interviews with white majority interviewees in three locations in England, this article explores local interpretations of English and Englishness. The article investigates the way members view their local environment as being ‘English’, and examines the criteria underpinning such interpretations. While various meanings are identified, it is found that Englishness is more often accomplished through talking about people and ethnicity rather than through the use of geography. That is, members defined the Englishness of place by referring explicitly to people. Rather than moving away from social categorical accounting, the category English was interpreted through the mobilisation of ‘non‐English’ others. In this rhetorical context, an English place is antithetical to a multiethnic place. Instead the term English is used to refer to white majority people. Although Englishness was defined in opposition to multiculture, this was not necessarily done in such a way as to exclude non‐English ‘others’. Above all, it reflects ambiguity amongst the white ethnic majority about how they can, and should, be named.     

Translating Bourdieu: cultural capital and the English middle class in historical perspective

This article examines the ways in which Pierre Bourdieu's work on culture and cultural capital can be applied to the study of the English middle class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on a wide historical literature, the article argues for the significance of culture as a constitutive element of middle-class identities in England since 1800. It goes on to examine Bourdieu's ideas of 'objectivated', 'instutionalized' and 'incorporated' cultural capital, in the context of family, inheritance, education and the body. The article identifies changes in the historical forms which cultural capital has taken and emphasizes the importance of analysing family processes of intergenerational transmission.     

The body in sociology: tensions inside and outside sociological thought

The human body has in recent years become a ‘hot’ topic in sociology, not just in empirical research but also in sociological theorizing. In the latter context, the body has been variously a resource for broadening the parameters of traditional sociological thought deriving from the nineteenth century, and for overturning that paradigm and fundamentally reorienting the assumptions and concepts of sociological thinking. Attempts to abandon the old paradigm and foster a new one through the means of thinking about bodies are many and manifold, and in this paper we trace out the intricate history of moves towards a ‘corporeal sociology’. We identify the dilemmas that have attended these developments, especially as concerns the ways in which new modes of thinking sociologically have tended to founder over the classical sociological dichotomy between social structure and social action. Through tracing out the various moves and counter‐moves within this field, we identify a central contradiction that affects all contemporary sociological practice, not just that dealing with the body: an oscillation between judging the utility of conceptual tools in terms of criteria derived from the discipline of Cultural Studies, and evaluating the arguments created by those tools on the basis of the incompatible criteria of classical sociology. The paper challenges sociologists to choose one set of criteria or the other, for sociological practice cannot be based on both such antagonistic paradigms.     

Sensorial Place-Making in Ethnic Minority Areas: The Consumption of Forest Puer Tea in Contemporary China

This article examines sensorial place-making through analysing the taste and other sensory experiences of forest Puer tea in its consumption among the urban middle class in mainland China. In the process of creating the ‘terroir’ of forest Puer tea, sensorial experience has been frequently linked to its place of origin. I argue that ethnic minorities who cultivate the tea play a vital part in the imagination of the tea's terroir. Trips by consumers to the mountains where the tea is cultivated, which aim at facilitating a ‘full experience’ of the tea and its culture, have generated a special pattern of interactions between the urban middle class who consume the tea and the ethnic minorities who cultivate it. The consumption of Puer tea, which brings about social imaginary and transcendent economic value, has become a driving force for producing the locality of ethnic minority areas.     

Social Work Academics as Humboldtian Researcher‐Educators: Discussion of a Survey of Staff Profiles from Schools in Denmark,England and Germany

A survey of social work academics' education profiles in Denmark, England and Germany is discussed. Material was collected in 2004, mainly from schools' Internet websites. Findings were classified by highest achieved level of qualification, using British terminology: ‘diploma’, ‘degree’ and ‘doctoral’. Findings are discussed with reference to the status of social work knowledge and social work education. This discussion is framed by drawing on the model of the teacher‐researcher developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). The German sample showed the highest proportions of social work academics with doctoral qualifications, with the lowest levels being found in the Danish sample and the English sample being situated in‐between.     

The birth of the queen/the modern homosexual: historical explanations revisited

In this paper I review a number of explanations for the emergence of the modern homosexual category in Western (mainly Northwest European) cultures. I suggest there are four different emphases in respect of the social and cultural factors given priority in interpretations of the formation of the homosexual category. Of course, individual studies have often taken into consideration more than one single factor (most notably, Greenberg, 1988; Chauncey, 1994), and the grouping of previous studies that I here suggest only indicates where the focus of a given study is. The social and cultural factors emphasized in these four approaches are: 1) the effects of competitive capitalism on the bourgeois/middle class political economy of sexuality and sexual morals; 2) the rise of expert knowledges, controlling systems, and modern bureaucracies; 3) tensions within gender order and the struggle over new definitions of gender roles; 4) the rise of free wage labour, the proliferation of urban anonymity, and the unfolding of new modes of existence in the life-world of modern pluralist urban society. Finally, the article briefly considers the potential erosion of the homosexual vs. heterosexual divide in the light of the historical background. Almost thirty years have passed since ‘The Homosexual Role’, by Mary McIntosh (1968), the first notable contribution to the historical sociology of homosexuality operating within a social constructionist view of homosexuality. Since then, there have been numerous studies of the formation of the conceptual category and social aggregate of ‘modern homosexual’. Researchers have differed about whether the pedigree of ‘homosexual’ and homosexual identities and subcultures in Western societies can be traced back to the late nineteenth century or to the early eighteenth century, and whether or not some notion of ‘homosexual’ was established in the cultural imagery before the last fifty years or so. It might be fruitful to distinguish between the historically older categories of ‘molly’, ‘queen’, and ‘fairy’ on the one hand, and the more recent ‘homosexual’ on the other hand. It can be argued that the decisive feature of the first-mentioned ‘deviant men’ was their status as gender-crossers (which as a side-effect entailed an interest in homosexual conduct), whereas the modern term homosexual does not necessarily suggest gender-crossing or more generic ‘sexual inversion’(cf. Chauncey, 1994). However, allusions to gay men's purported effeminacy and lesbian women's purported masculinity continue to surface frequently also in contemporary culture. Hence, for the sake of brevity, I here use the term modern homosexual, by which I refer to a notion that there is in some people an inherent sexual desire exclusively for persons of the same sex, and that this so-called sexual orientation is to some degree intertwined with a tendency to gender-crossing conduct. ¹ 1 Historically there has been a mutually re-enforcing dynamics between the forma-tion of the conceptual category and the social aggregate of homosexual(s). Methodological considerations and also certain presumptions about the dynam-ics of culture and society help explain why, until recently, most studies have focused on the trajectory of concepts, identities, and social roles, rather than on the experiential, embodied aspects of the social aggregate of homosexual(s). The idea of sexual inversion predicates that homosexual desire is evidence of a faulty combination of body and soul: there is ‘a female soul in a male body’, or vice versa. On the distinctions between sexual orientation and sexual role see, King, 1984.
     

Literary perceptions of the aborigine after 1838∗

This paper traces the emergence in nineteenth‐century ethnographic thought of a three‐tiered classification of society and history following the appearance of Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842). Adaptations of Comte's new formula to a variety of historical and social settings in fictional and other prose works paved the way for its eventual use by Achebe as the ground plan for his interpretation of the African past in Things Fall Apart. Works paving the way for this reconstruction include novels and other texts by D. H. Lawrence and various early twentieth and nineteenth century novelists as well as the ethnographic, critical and scholarly work of Matthew Arnold, Sir Edward Tylor, and Jane Harrison. Perceptions of the hunter‐gatherer phase of African social organization and the nineteenth‐century use of the term ‘aborigine’ to designate this ancient condition of society are suggested as the probable origins of a much used, versatile paradigm. Its applicability to the southern African situation in Bessie Head's Maru stems, it is suggested, from the origin of the three‐tiered system itself in early processes of communication between Europe and southern Africa.     

Social Change,the middle class and the emergence of ‘new social movements’: a critical analysis

Most recent analyses of New Social Movements (NSMs) by British sociologists have concentrated on broad social changes or the middle classes as the key explanatory factors. This paper criticizes recent contributions to the analysis of NSMs which emphasize the development of ‘post-Fordism’ and ‘disorganized capitalism’, and recent attempts to understand NSMs as a reflection of ‘middle class’ interests or values. An alternative theoretical approach is outlined which places at the centre of the analysis the social relations in which NSMs are grounded, and which NSMs seek to transform. In this alternative account the middle classes play the role of ‘traditional intellectuals’, that is, they provide the key social resources for mobilization of NSMs and all social movements.