Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CASSPIN (Comparative Analysis of Social Spaces in Post-Industrial Nations)
Teaser
The proposed research has two overarching objectives. First, it aims to examine whether it is possible and appropriate to extend a novel way of measuring social class recently devised for the United Kingdom to other post-industrial nations for the purposes of effective...
Summary
The proposed research has two overarching objectives. First, it aims to examine whether it is possible and appropriate to extend a novel way of measuring social class recently devised for the United Kingdom to other post-industrial nations for the purposes of effective cross-national comparative research. This measure, influenced by the pioneering work of Pierre Bourdieu, is designed to capture not only hierarchical differences in economic, cultural and social resources (or \'capitals\'), but horizontal differences too, that is to say, divisions between those possessing a greater weight of economic resources to cultural resources and those with the opposite profile. These two facets of differentiation and inequality are referred to as the \'capital volume\' and \'capital composition\' principles respectively. If it is possible to extend this measure, the project will begin to explore, through secondary and primary analysis of large-scale survey data, the different shapes, trajectories and effects of the class structures – or ‘social spaces’ – of various nation states.
Second, the project aims to explore, through both statistical analysis and qualitative interviews, how social class is actually lived, experienced and balanced against other pressures and sources of recognition in everyday life, with a focus on three specific nations: the United States, Germany and Sweden. Of particular interest in this respect is the balancing of desire for recognition through money and education – the two cornerstones of social class in post-industrial capitalist societies – and their associated lifestyles with desires for recognition and love within the family.
Work performed
Since the project began a series of tasks has been undertaken:
A. Work package 1, secondary analysis.
1. The class scheme developed in the UK was translated into a measure usable in cross-national research via the four-digit International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) code.
2. The second task was to validate the new ISCO-based schema through secondary analysis of existing datasets. Initial efforts centred on analysis of the European Social Survey, progressing from basic tabular analysis to the construction of several models of class structures, or social spaces, through geometric data analysis (GDA). After some time constructing and refining these models, it was concluded that the variables available were not sufficient to produce satisfactory models or therefore validation of the class scheme.
3. Focus moved on to the 2009 Social Inequality Module of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). Work was undertaken to develop models of social spaces for 17 nations using GDA, establishing for the first time that capital composition is a seemingly universal feature of social spaces across developed capitalist societies alongside capital volume, yet that it varies in degree and form from nation to nation. The success of these analyses encouraged extension of the research to cover six post-socialist nations too.
4. With 23 GDA models constructed, the next task was to assess how well the ISCO schema could proxy the divisions they reveal across nations. In fact, surprisingly, it was found to be a very inconsistent and often poor fit. Some work was thus undertaken to see if a new measure of class with broad applicability, based on ISCO codes, could be constructed. After much experimentation, a modified version of the two-digit iteration of the ISCO code was designed which seemed, at the aggregate level, to approximate the differences across national GDA models, but it was still so variable in its fit from model to model that, ultimately it was deemed not to be a reliable measure.
5. After some reflection, it was decided that the research could - and indeed should - proceed without an occupation-based proxy. Thus the national GDA models were converted into a transposable categorical variable by cutting each of their two core axes (capital volume and capital composition) into terciles and combining them into nine classes, or \'class fractions\'. This has then been used to explore the shape and effects of class structures as measured by the ISSP module. These include: (i) the gender composition of the social space, revealing that women and men consistently fall on opposites sides of the capital composition divide; (ii) the age composition of the social space, finding that cultural capital is consistently associated with the young and economic capital with older respondents; (iii) social mobility, confirming the association of cultural capital with social stasis or downward mobility and economic capital with short-range upward mobility; (iv) political outlooks and party preferences, unveiling the consistent leftwards-lean of fractions richer in cultural capital than economic capital no matter their capital volume or gender/age composition; (v) the sense of one\'s place in the class structure, showing that the cultural fractions always rank themselves lower than economic fractions, thus demonstrating the salience of money as a measure of worth in capitalist societies; (vi) indicators of what is called \'symbolic violence\', or the acceptance among the bottom class that their position is down to such things as low intelligence or work ethic rather than their social position, which ultimately confirms the widespread belief that people are where they are due to their own effort and ambition; (vii) and the sense of justice regarding pay and private education, where it is revealed that those at the bottom, but also those richer in cultural than economic capital, consistently feel injustice on these. There are frequent
Final results
1. Progress beyond the state of the art:
The major contribution so far has been to confirm, for the first time, that the class structure, or social space, takes the same form across a wide range of capitalist societies, but that the power of capital composition as a source of differentiation differs according to measurable national characteristics. This is something which, until now, has only been guessed at or conjectured in research on a small selection of specific nations, particularly Norway, Denmark and the UK. On top of that, however, the research has: (i) unveiled the consistent intersections between class, gender and age; and (ii) documented, in an innovative fashion and on a scale never before achieved, cross-national patterns of social mobility, political attitudes, self-identity and symbolic violence.
2. Expected results until the end of the project:
(a) The first set of expected results relates to the surveys delivered in the US, Germany and Sweden.With working models of the social spaces constructed, cluster analysis will be deployed to derive proxy class fractions. These will then be used to explore differences of lifestyle between the various sections of the social spaces, looking for cross-national convergences and divergences. The surveys also contain some measures tapping into the balance between work, consumption and family. leading to the next component of the research.
(b) The second set of expected results relates to the qualitative interviews for work package 2. Two themes will be examined: (i) the interplay of class with family dynamics and other social forces in shaping major life decisions; (ii) and the current interplay of class and family in shaping the tensions, conflicts and schedules of everyday life. In both cases attention will be fixed on themes that transcend and are refracted by national political and economic contexts.