New Labour, Class, and Social Change

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Focus Group ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Wide Distribution ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Community Action ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines how ideas about class, community, and individualism figured in the modernization of the Labour Party in the 1980s and 1990s. It examines the development, under Kinnock and Blair, of a new imagined constituency for Labour—a ‘new working class’ or, as Blair put it, ‘new middle class’. The sources of this vision lay partly in academic theorizing, but also in the backgrounds of key modernizers, and in new polling and focus group techniques for researching social attitudes. Modernizers understood the new majoritarian constituency in society as united by aspirations, and reoriented socialism to emphasize the use of community action—through the state—to secure a wide distribution of opportunity and security throughout society, in order to enable individuals to achieve those aspirations. The chapter concludes by examining the impact of these beliefs on policy relating to poverty, inequality, trade unionism, and community.

Sex in the Cinema: War, Moral Panic, and the British Film Industry, 1906–1918

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 422-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Rapp
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Leisure Activity ◽  
Young Audiences ◽  
Police Action ◽  
Separate Identity ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time

The film era in Britain commenced in early 1896, but its moral impact on viewers was not considered very much during its first decade. This was primarily because film was dispersed in a variety of venues like music halls and fairgrounds where other entertainment was provided, or in unused shops and other premises that were temporarily rented. Film thus had no permanent, separate identity as a leisure activity that took place in one particular type of public space, hence it was difficult for moralists to recognize, much less discern and evaluate its moral influence. Moreover, many of the middle class (from whom most moralists came) dismissed the early film industry as a passing, vulgar fad of the working class that need not be taken seriously.But moralists did begin to notice the impact of the industry when film acquired a conspicuous new identity of its own in the years after 1906 when thousands of purpose-built cinemas were constructed. The tremendous growth of both the cinemas and their mostly working-class, youthful audiences led some middle-class moralists to focus their attention on film for the first time. They soon concluded that the cinemas undermined the morality of their young audiences and launched a crusade against the film industry. The general outlines of the campaign are well known. Moralists charged that the darkened cinemas provided cover for couples to court and for some men to abuse children. They also asserted that many films were sensational ones about sexual indecency, crime, and violence. Such fare, they contended, encouraged immorality and incited juvenile delinquency among youth who imitated the crimes they saw enacted on screen. The moralists therefore demanded censorship of the films, brighter lighting in the cinemas to discourage sexual misbehavior, and police action against indecency. Moreover, Sabbatarians opposed the opening of the cinemas on Sundays as a further desecration of that holy day of rest.

Social Structure and Voting Choice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oddbjørn Knutsen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
New Left ◽  
Social Cleavages ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Geographical Regions ◽  
Linguistic Groups ◽  
Service Environments ◽  
Voting Choice ◽  
The Impact

The linkage between voters and political parties is to some degree based on stable social cleavages. Such cleavages express important and lasting societal divisions, allow parties and voters to establish long-term ties, and provide incumbents with clear representative and policy-making tasks against which they can be evaluated. Most research on cleavages has been based on the classic cleavages that were outlined in the Lipset-Rokkan model for social cleavages in industrial societies. These are: (1) the center–periphery cleavage, which is anchored in geographical regions and related to different ethnic and linguistic groups as well as religious minorities; (2) the religious conflict between the Church and the State, which pitted the secular state against the historical privileges of the churches; this cleavage has more recently polarized the religious section against the secular section of the population; (3) the class conflict in the labor market, which involved owners and employers versus tenants, laborers, and workers; and (4) the conflict in the commodity market between buyers and sellers of agricultural products, or more generally, between the urban and the rural population. Other social cleavages, such as gender, educational differences, and new divisions within the large new middle class, have been focused upon during the last decades. The new divisions within the new middle class are “horizontal” conflicts and can be conceptualized as a basic conflict between public and private employees, and as an alternative way of conceptualization, between those who work within technical, organizational, or interpersonal service environments. Some of the cleavages have declined in importance over time, while others have increased. Some cleavages have changed character such as the class cleavage where part of the new middle class has voted for the New Left and part of the working class has voted for the New Right in the last decades. Changes in the impact and character of different cleavages have resulted in strategic reconsideration of important policies and changing location of the parties in the political space.

‘Social Change, Friendship and Civic Participation’

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaojun Li ◽  
Mike Savage ◽  
Andrew Pickles
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Civic Participation ◽  
British Household Panel Survey ◽  
Panel Survey ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
The Social

This paper studies the changing distribution of social capital and its impact on class formation in England and Wales from a ‘class structural’ perspective. It compares data from the Social Mobility Inquiry (1972) and the British Household Panel Survey (1992 and 1998) to show a distinct change in the class profiling of membership in civic organisations, with traditionally working-class dominated associations losing their working-class character, and middle-class dominated associations becoming even more middle-class dominated. Similar changes are evident for class-differentiated patterns of friendship. Our study indicates the class polarization of social capital in England and Wales.

scholarly journals Culture versus class: towards an understanding of Māori poverty

Race & Class ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-96
Author(s):  
Toon van Meijl
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Cultural Turn

Interrogating why class has been demoted as a useful concept within anthropology, the author examines the ways in which issues of inequality and ethnicity have been used to explain both the enduring impact of settler colonialism on, and contemporary forms of discrimination against, New Zealand Māori. He weighs up the impact of the cultural turn in academia, the Māori Renaissance, the impact of neoliberalism, and the assumption that class coincides with ethnicity and hence the emphasis on affirmative action in education. The assumption that poverty is either class- or ethnicity-based is false. Māori themselves have been affected by social change: a few making it into a middle class, while, despite growing intermarriage, identification as Māori, appears enhanced by both enduring poverty and racism.

scholarly journals Paralympic Broadcasting and Social Change: An Integrated Mixed Method Approach to Understanding the Paralympic Audience in the UK

2021 ◽  
pp. 152747642110044
Author(s):  
Emma Pullen ◽  
Daniel Jackson ◽  
Michael Silk
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Focus Group ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Mixed Method ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Mega Event ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Method Approach

Despite the successful transition of the Paralympics from relative obscurity to global mega-event, we still know little about how it is consumed by audiences. Using a methodological approach that draws on survey ( n = 2008) and focus group ( n = 216) data from Paralympic audiences across the UK, this study provides the first mixed method and integrated empirical analysis of Paralympic audiences to date. We attempt to identify who the UK Paralympic audience is, before examining audience perceptions of Paralympic coverage, and the impact of watching the Paralympics on audience sentiments toward disabled people in sporting and everyday contexts.

scholarly journals Don’t Glottal Stop Me Now

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-43
Author(s):  
Jessica Göbel
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Data Set ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Glottal Stop

This paper analyses the speech of Edinburgh speakers from a range of ages and socioeconomic backgrounds: established middle class (EMC), new middle class (NMC), and working class (WC). Findings were compared to previous studies, particularly Titheridge (2020), which examines the same data set collected in 1975. The results show that /t/-glottaling significantly correlates with social class but not age. The following phoneme and position of /t/ within the word were shown to be significant predictors of /t/-glottaling. Evidence of an interaction between the following phoneme and the speakers’ social class was found, which could suggest that NMC has a different ordering hierarchy of the aforementioned factors from WC and EMC.

scholarly journals Masculinidades, yoga y espiritualidad en la cárcel Un estudio cualitativo sobre la práctica del yoga en centros penitenciarios masculinos

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-32
Author(s):  
Mar Griera
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Alternative Conceptions ◽  
Western World ◽  
Male Population ◽  
The Impact

In recent years, yoga has gained popularity as a practice oriented to the search for personal, spiritual and physical well-being. The dominant profile of the yoga practitioner has been defined, mostly, as a woman, middle class and living in cities of the western world. However, recent research shows that yoga, as well as other practices from holistic spirituality, are also gaining ground among the male population. Nonetheless, there are almost no studies that focus on investigating the intersection between masculinity and holistic spirituality. This article is a first step to fill this gap. The objective is to understand sociologically the processes of popularization of yoga in a context with a majority presence of working class men -prison institutions-, and to analyze the impact of the practice of yoga in the emergence of alternative conceptions of masculinity

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