Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to fill a gap left by orthodox textbooks in economics, which reject the need for a discussion of class and its contemporary importance. In the first part we discuss the main uses of the concept ‘class’: first, in the context of a Marxist theory of society where class analysis is concerned with the relationship between groups of people who are defined in relation to their part in the process of production; second, as the concept of social class which refers to ranked (occupational) groupings who have a number of mainly distributional characteristics such as range of income or length of schooling in common.
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References
See especially K. Davis and W. Moore,‘Some Principles of Stratification’, American Sociological Review (Apr 1945).
H. F. Lydall and D. G. Tipping,‘The Distribution of Personal Wealth in Britain’, Bulletin of the Oxford University Institute of Statistics (Feb 1961).
M. Barratt Brown,‘The Controllers of British Industry’, in Can the Workers Run Industry?, ed. K. Coates (London: Sphere, 1968).
J. H. Goldthorpe, D. Lockwood et al., The Affluent Worker (Cambridge University Press, 1968–9) 3 vols.
M. Meacher,‘The Coming Class Struggle’, New Statesman (4 Jan 1974).
These studies include B. Abel-Smith and P. Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest (London: Bell, 1965);
A. B. Atkinson, Poverty in Britain and the Reform of Social Security (Cambridge University Press, 1969);
K. Coates and R. Silburn, Poverty: The Forgotten Englishmen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).
Robbins Report, Higher Education (London: H.M.S.O., 1963) appendix 1.
Plowden Report,Children and Their Primary Schools (London: H.M.S.O., 1967). The policies mentioned are designed to change or to‘enrich’ the disadvantaged child’s cultural background. Aspects of working-class culture are held responsible for the poor scholastic record of most working-class children.
C. Jencks, Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (New York: Basic Books, 1972). The book is based on U.S. data but the conclusions are also pertinent for Britain.
The major study of patterns of social mobility in Britain in which the index of association that measures self-recruitment within a social class was developed is D. Glass, Social Mobility in Britain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954).
The first results of a more recent large-scale social-mobility study have been published in K. Hope (ed.), The Analysis of Social Mobility Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).
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© 1977 Sam Aaronovitch, Bettina Berch, Monika Beutel, Ben Fine, Andrew Glyn, Francis Green, Laurence Harris, Sue Himmelweit, Rhys Jenkins, Simon Mohun, Petter Nore, Bob Sutcliffe
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Beutel, M. (1977). Class in Contemporary Britain. In: Green, F., Nore, P. (eds) Economics: An Anti-Text. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15751-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15751-8_3
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