Social Class in Modern Britain

Social class remains one of the most significant and contested concepts in British sociology. Despite claims that class is "dead," research consistently shows that class position continues to shape life chances — from educational achievement and health outcomes to income, housing, and political participation. The AQA specification requires you to understand how the class structure has changed, assess key debates such as embourgeoisement and proletarianisation, and evaluate contemporary models of class including the Great British Class Survey.

Key Definition: Social class is a form of social stratification based on economic factors — primarily occupation, income, and wealth — that divides society into hierarchical groups with different levels of resources and life chances.

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Measuring Social Class

Before examining how the class structure has changed, it is important to understand how sociologists measure class. The main approaches are:

1. The Registrar General's Scale (1911–2000)

This official government classification divided occupations into six categories:

• I Professional (e.g., doctors, lawyers)
• II Managerial and technical (e.g., teachers, managers)
• III(N) Skilled non-manual (e.g., clerks, secretaries)
• III(M) Skilled manual (e.g., electricians, plumbers)
• IV Semi-skilled manual (e.g., farm workers, bus drivers)
• V Unskilled manual (e.g., labourers, cleaners)

Limitations: It classified married women by their husband's occupation, ignored the unemployed and those outside the labour market, and blurred important distinctions within broad categories.

2. The National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC)

Introduced in 2001, the NS-SEC replaced the Registrar General's Scale. Based on Goldthorpe's class scheme, it categorises occupations according to employment relations:

Class	Description	Example
1	Higher managerial, administrative, professional	Company directors, senior civil servants
2	Lower managerial, administrative, professional	Teachers, nurses, police officers
3	Intermediate occupations	Clerical workers, secretaries
4	Small employers and own-account workers	Shopkeepers, self-employed tradespeople
5	Lower supervisory and technical	Foremen, train drivers
6	Semi-routine occupations	Shop assistants, hairdressers
7	Routine occupations	Waiters, cleaners, labourers
8	Never worked / long-term unemployed	—

Advantages: It captures differences in employment relations (contract type, autonomy, career prospects) rather than relying on subjective judgements of prestige. It also includes the unemployed.

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The Changing Class Structure

Decline of the Traditional Working Class

Britain's class structure has undergone dramatic change since the 1950s. The most significant shift has been the decline of the traditional manual working class:

• Deindustrialisation: The collapse of manufacturing, mining, and heavy industry from the 1970s onwards destroyed millions of manual jobs. Between 1971 and 2011, the proportion of workers in manufacturing fell from 34% to 8%.
• Growth of the service sector: Service-sector employment (retail, finance, healthcare, education, hospitality) now accounts for over 80% of UK jobs.
• Technological change: Automation and computerisation have replaced many routine manual tasks.
• Globalisation: Manufacturing has been outsourced to countries with lower labour costs, particularly in East Asia.

These changes have led to a shrinkage of the traditional working class — the skilled, unionised, community-based workers who formed the backbone of industrial Britain. As Hutton (1995) described, many former industrial areas became zones of long-term unemployment and social deprivation.

Growth of the Middle Class

Alongside working-class decline, the middle class has expanded significantly:

• The proportion of the workforce in professional, managerial, and technical occupations roughly doubled between 1950 and 2010.
• Rising educational participation — from the expansion of grammar schools in the 1960s to the massive growth of higher education since the 1990s — has fuelled middle-class growth.
• Women's entry into the labour market, particularly into professional and managerial roles, has also contributed.

However, the middle class is far from homogeneous. Savage et al. (1992) identified distinct middle-class groupings based on their possession of different types of capital (drawing on Bourdieu):

• Property assets — business owners, landlords
• Organisational assets — managers who derive power from their position within bureaucracies
• Cultural assets — professionals whose status comes from qualifications and knowledge

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The Embourgeoisement Thesis

Zweig (1961) and the Original Thesis

In the post-war period of rising living standards, Ferdynand Zweig (1961) argued that affluent manual workers were becoming middle-class in their attitudes, values, and lifestyles. This process was called embourgeoisement (literally, "becoming bourgeois"). As workers acquired cars, homes, televisions, and consumer goods previously associated with the middle class, Zweig claimed they were adopting middle-class identities and voting patterns — particularly switching from Labour to Conservative.

The Affluent Worker Study: Goldthorpe and Lockwood (1969)

The most famous test of the embourgeoisement thesis was conducted by John Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer, and Jennifer Platt in Luton in the 1960s. They studied relatively well-paid car assembly workers at Vauxhall and compared them with middle-class samples.

Findings:

1. Economic convergence: Affluent workers did earn comparable incomes to lower-middle-class white-collar workers.
2. Normative divergence: However, their attitudes and values remained distinctly working-class:
   • They viewed work in purely instrumental terms — as a means to earn money, not for intrinsic satisfaction or career advancement.
   • Their social networks were privatised — centred on the nuclear family and home rather than the wider community or workplace.
   • They retained a money model of society (rich vs. poor) rather than a middle-class prestige model (hierarchy of status).
3. Relational differences: Their work relationships were different from middle-class patterns — they had no career ladders, less autonomy, and weaker identification with management.

Conclusion: Goldthorpe and Lockwood rejected the embourgeoisement thesis. While affluent workers shared some consumption patterns with the middle class, they had not adopted middle-class norms, values, or social identities. They identified a new privatised instrumentalism — a working-class orientation focused on home and family rather than community.

Exam Tip: Goldthorpe and Lockwood's study is one of the most important pieces of research in the stratification module. You must be able to describe the methodology, summarise the findings, and evaluate the conclusions.