Social Class in Modern Britain

Social class remains one of the most significant and contested concepts in British sociology. Despite recurring 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 central puzzle of this lesson is whether Britain's class structure has fundamentally changed, fragmented, or simply taken new forms. 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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Spec Mapping (AQA 7192 — Paper 2, Section B: Stratification and Differentiation)

This lesson addresses the specification requirements on:

• The nature and extent of social class divisions in contemporary UK society.
• Changes in the class structure — the decline of the traditional working class, the growth and fragmentation of the middle class, and debates over embourgeoisement and proletarianisation.
• Different ways of conceptualising and measuring class — official classifications (Registrar General, NS-SEC) and sociological models (Goldthorpe, Savage and the Great British Class Survey).
• It applies the foundational theories (Marx, Weber, functionalism) from the opening lesson to the concrete reality of modern Britain.

In the exam this material supports both the 10-mark "analyse two…" question and the 20-mark "evaluate…" essay on Paper 2.

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Synoptic Links

• Theory: The Marx vs. Weber debate is the spine of class analysis — Marx's two-class model vs. Weber's market situation and Savage's Bourdieusian capitals.
• Methods: The Great British Class Survey is a superb methods case study — a self-selecting online sample of 161,000 vs. a representative survey of 1,026 raises issues of representativeness, sampling bias and the positivist preference for large quantitative datasets.
• Education: Class differences in attainment, Bourdieu's cultural capital and the reproduction of class advantage through schooling connect directly to middle-class growth.
• Families and Households: Privatised instrumentalism (Goldthorpe and Lockwood) describes a home- and family-centred working-class lifestyle.
• Globalisation: Deindustrialisation and the offshoring of manufacturing — the cause of working-class decline — are products of economic globalisation.

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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.

Limitations: Like all occupational schemes, the NS-SEC struggles to classify the wealthy elite (whose position rests on capital, not employment), the long-term economically inactive, and students. It also tells us little about cultural and social capital — the gap that the Great British Class Survey later tried to fill.

3. Marxist and Weberian Approaches to Measurement

Underlying these official schemes are two rival theoretical traditions:

• Marxist approaches define class by the ownership of the means of production — a fundamental binary between those who own capital and those who sell their labour. On this view, occupational schemes obscure the basic divide by slicing the working population into many gradations.
• Weberian approaches define class by market situation — the bundle of skills, credentials and resources a person brings to the labour market. The NS-SEC and Goldthorpe's scheme are broadly Weberian: they distinguish a service class (secure, salaried, with career prospects) from intermediate and working-class positions.

This theoretical choice is not merely technical — it determines what counts as "class" and therefore what inequalities we can even see.

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Wealth and Income Inequality

Class inequality is not only about occupation; it is about the distribution of income (the flow of earnings) and wealth (the stock of assets — property, savings, investments). The two are distinct, and wealth is far more unequally distributed than income:

• A small elite owns a hugely disproportionate share of national wealth, much of it held in property and financial assets, while the bottom half of the population owns very little.
• Marxists (e.g. Westergaard, 1995) argue this concentration of capital is the fundamental fact of class society, reproduced through inheritance — wealth is passed down, entrenching advantage across generations independently of merit.
• The Office for National Statistics and bodies such as the Equality Trust consistently report that wealth inequality dwarfs income inequality, and that the gap widened from the 1980s onward following tax changes and the decline of redistribution.
• This material reality underpins the "glass floor" (Lesson 3): parental wealth cushions the affluent against downward mobility.

Exam Tip: Distinguish income (a flow) from wealth (a stock). Wealth inequality is the stronger evidence for the Marxist case, because it is inherited rather than earned.

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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 in his "30-30-40 society" thesis, the labour market had fractured into the privileged (40%), the insecure (30%) and the marginalised/disadvantaged (30%); many former industrial areas became zones of long-term unemployment and social deprivation.

The transformation of the class structure can be summarised as a shift in the balance between occupational sectors:

flowchart LR
  A["Industrial Britain (1950s): large manual working class, small middle class"] --> B["Deindustrialisation + service-sector growth + globalisation"]
  B --> C["Post-industrial Britain: shrinking traditional working class"]
  B --> D["Expanding, fragmented middle class"]
  B --> E["New insecure groups: the precariat (Savage)"]

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.

Criticisms of the Affluent Worker Study

• The study was conducted in one atypical town (Luton) with high-earning factory workers — the findings may not generalise to the wider working class.
• It was conducted in the 1960s; the class structure has changed dramatically since then.
• Devine (1992) re-studied Luton workers and found that their social networks were less privatised than Goldthorpe and Lockwood had suggested — they maintained significant kin and neighbourhood connections.

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Braverman and Proletarianisation

While Zweig argued that workers were becoming middle-class, Harry Braverman (1974) argued the opposite: that white-collar workers were being pushed down into the working class through deskilling.

The Deskilling Thesis

Braverman, drawing on Marx, argued that capitalism has a built-in tendency to deskill work. Management seeks to increase control over the labour process by:

1. Breaking complex tasks into simple, repetitive operations (Taylorism / scientific management).
2. Replacing skilled workers with machines or unskilled labour.
3. Separating the conception (planning) of work from its execution (doing).

Braverman argued that this process, originally applied to manual work, was increasingly affecting white-collar occupations:

• Clerical work had been transformed from a skilled, relatively autonomous occupation in the 19th century to routine, mechanised data processing.
• Secretarial work was being standardised through word processing and typing pools.
• Even professional work was subject to routinisation and managerial control.

The result was proletarianisation — formerly middle-class occupations were losing their autonomy, skill, and rewards, and their holders were effectively becoming working-class.

Evaluation of Braverman

• Braverman's thesis has been partly supported by the growth of call centres, where workers follow scripts, are electronically monitored, and have minimal autonomy.
• However, Gallie (1991) found that overall skill levels in the UK had increased, not decreased, between the 1960s and 1990s.
• Crompton and Jones (1984) found that female clerical workers had been proletarianised but male clerks had retained career ladders and autonomy — deskilling was gendered.
• The growth of knowledge-intensive industries (IT, biotech, consulting) suggests that upskilling, not deskilling, is the dominant trend in many sectors.

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The Great British Class Survey: Savage et al. (2013)

The most significant recent contribution to class analysis in Britain is the Great British Class Survey (GBCS), conducted by Mike Savage and colleagues in collaboration with the BBC.

Methodology

The GBCS used an online questionnaire completed by over 161,000 respondents, supplemented by a nationally representative face-to-face survey of 1,026 people. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of capital, it measured three dimensions:

1. Economic capital — income, savings, house value
2. Cultural capital — engagement with highbrow and emerging cultural activities
3. Social capital — the number and status of social contacts

The Seven Classes

Savage et al. identified seven social classes in contemporary Britain:

Class	% of population	Economic capital	Cultural capital	Social capital
Elite	6%	Very high	Very high	Very high
Established middle class	25%	High	High	High
Technical middle class	6%	High	High (but emerging)	Moderate
New affluent workers	15%	Moderate	High (emerging)	Moderate
Traditional working class	14%	Moderate	Low	Low
Emergent service workers	19%	Low	High (emerging)	High
Precariat	15%	Very low	Low	Low

Key Findings