The extraordinary but longstanding over-representation of those educated in the private sector, most conspicuously in the major ‘public’ schools, in, for example, politics, the judiciary, newspapers and the commentariat is well documented and well know. This is the very stuff of elite recruitment and the reproduction of class relations. Less appreciated, perhaps, is the salience… Read More »
Since the putative decline in the (party-)political significance of aristocratic land ownership, attention to who owns what land has faded. But it is now resurfacing, and the targets still include, but now extend far beyond, aristocratic estates and the grouse shooting season. Recent headlines have noted that half of England is now owned by less… Read More »
When I was a child – adolescent too – in Worthing I used to attend the two annual Sussex CCC matches played on the Broadwater pitch, that is, before it was deemed unfit for purpose. I also used to travel to nearby Arundel to see that year’s vising tourists play the Duke of Norfolk’s XI… Read More »
This is second of a two-parter, and cannot be properly grasped on its own. In the last blog in this seemingly interminable series I drew on Bokadi and Goldthorpe’s excellent research to show the changes of absolute social mobility over the course of my lifetime (I was born in 1948). But as these authors make… Read More »
I have long been fascinated by the propensity we humans have for what I am here calling ‘malleability’. What I have in mind goes beyond the subject matter of previous blogs, though doubtless it has been intimated or alluded to now and again. In my last book (‘Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society’, p.107) I… Read More »
The notion of ‘erotic capital’ is in some respects more interesting than it has been given credit for. This is in no small measure down to its provocative framing in the writings of Catherine Hakim (in her book Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital) and the assiduity with which she publicised her work. Her… Read More »
In an excellent new book by Erzsebet Bukodi and John Goldthorpe, entitled Social Mobility and Education in Britain, the class (as defined by NS-SEC) distributions of economically active men and women are calculated at the census years of 1951, 1971, 1991 and 2011. Why is this relevant to my ‘sociological autobiography’? And does this Weberian… Read More »
My parents live on as consociates or contemporaries in defiance of their status as predecessors. I have in frames in my bedroom photos of them attending my wedding (back in 1972), plus an assortment of portraits of them singly or together stretching back to the 1930s. While I’ve not yet reached the stage of talking… Read More »
Oxfam’s latest report exposes and estimates the extent to which the world’s wealth is becoming ever more concentrated. I draw below on Larry Elliott’s summary (Guardian 21 Jan 2019). The figures are truly astounding, even allowing for a public sense of data-fatigue around the assets of the super-rich. The 26 richest billionaires now own as… Read More »
For no sensible reason I can conjure up in my defence I was disappointed in 2017 to read (just) under two books a week. Well, 2018 went that little bit better: as it happened, I read 107 compared with 2017’s 102. Ok, I entirely accept that doing such sums is strange, maybe a little worrying.… Read More »