Is There a Status Order in Contemporary British Society?: Evidence from the Occupational Structure of Friendship

(2004) - T. W. Chan

Journal: European Sociological Review
Link:: https://academic.oup.com/esr/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/esr/jch033
DOI:: 10.1093/esr/jch033
Links::
Tags:: #paper #SocialClass
Cite Key:: [@Chan2004]

Abstract

This paper considers whether it is still possible to identify a status order in contemporary Britain. We analyse the occupational structure of friendship and present empirical results which show that there is one dimension of this structure that can be plausibly interpreted as reflecting a hierarchy of status. This status hierarchy is gender-neutral, and displays clear continuities with that depicted for the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries in historical and earlier sociological research. We examine the connection between status and both income and education and show that the status order we identify is distinct either from income or education or from ‘socioeconomic’ status as determined by income and education in combination. As regards status and class, we find that, while some classes show a rather high degree of status homogeneity, in other classes status stratification is quite extensive. Our results suggest that the Weberian distinction between status and class remains valid and potentially highly revealing. By retaining this distinction in social stratification research, a range of questions on the articulation of the class structure and the status order and of their effects on life chances and life choices is opened up.

Notes

"We analyse the occupational structure of friendship and present empirical results which show that there is one dimension of this structure that can be plausibly interpreted as reflecting a hierarchy of status" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:383)

"As regards status and class, we find that, while some classes show a rather high degree of status homogeneity, in other classes status stratification is quite extensive." (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:383)

"Weberian distinction between status and class remains valid and potentially highly revealing" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:383)

"class structure, in contrast, we would see as being grounded specifically, and quite objectively, in the social relations of economic life - i.e. in the social relations of labour markets and production units" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:383)

"alised kind, attaching not to qualities of particular individuals but rather to social positions that they hold or to certain of their ascribed attributes a status order we understand a set of hierarchical relations that express perceived and typically accepted social superiority, equality or inferiority of a quite gener-" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:383)

"doubts have arisen over whether in the more advanced societies of the present day welldefined status orders still exist" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:384)

"sociologists would seem to have become attracted to 'one-dimensional' understandings of social stratification, which discount or override the status/class distinction as much out of methodological or theoretical predilections as of any responsiveness to actual social change" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:384)

"In Europe, in contrast, a more important influence has probably been the theoretical efforts of Bourdieu (1984) to 're-think', and indeed overcome, Weber's 'opposition' of status and class: that is, by treating status as the symbolic aspect of class structure, which is itself seen as not reducible to 'economic' relations alone." (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:384)

"Can status orders still be identified in modern societies, even if of a less overt, less sharply demarcated and less localised kind than previously existed, and as a form of stratification that can be empirically as well as conceptually differentiated from class structure?" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:384)

"In so far as this is so, what is the relative importance of these two forms of stratification as determinants of individuals' experience and action in different areas of their social lives - or, in other words, of the pattern of their life-chances and life-choices?" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:384)

"Laumann's approach depends on two basic assumptions, both of which we believe are defensible. The first is that in modern societies occupation is one of the most salient characteristics to which status attaches" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:385)

"The second assumption is that recurrent association is a good indicator of a state of social equality between individuals and is, moreover, a better indicator of such equality, the 'freer' the choice of associates and the closer or more intimate the association - which would appear to be the reason for Laumann's eventual decision to work with data on friends only." (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:385)

Whether the revised 'CAMSIS' scale that is based on such marriage data is essentially the same as the original Cambridge scale based on friendship data, as Prandy and Lambert claim, is, in our view, debatable; and they indeed concede that '[c]ertainly, the strength of the relationship between marriage partners is less, statistically speaking, than it is between friends' (Prandy and Lambert, 2003: 401). But what must be recognised here is that a fundamental theoretical difference exists between our position and that of Prandy and his associates. In an early statement, they assert that 'the Weberian distinction of classes ... from status groups ... is neither useful nor necessary' (Stewart et al., 1980: 28). More recently, Bottero and Prandy (2003: 180) maintain that 'social interaction distance is taken as a stratification order in its own right' and that 'research has tended to eliminate the distinction between class and status, or the economic and the cultural, which was once seen as central analytically to conventional stratification theory'.4 The implication then is that their scale reflects 'stratification arrangements' in some quite general and undifferentiated sense. In contrast, we would believe that the Weberian distinction between class and status is conceptually clear and potentially highly important; that it cannot be rejected by fiat; and that whether or not a status order is still identifiable in contemporary British, or any other, society must be treated as an empirical question

"is relevant to refer the work of Prandy and his associates, who have also sought to apply Laumann's approach to the British case. In their initial work in constructing a stratification scale, the 'Cambridge Scale', (Stewart et al., 1973, 1980), this group also rely on occupationally linked data on friendship, but define friendship in a deliberately loose way so as to allow even" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:385)

"relatively transient associations to be included. However, for the purposes of a revision and updating of the scale (Prandy and Lambert, 2003), they then abandon analysis of data of this kind in favour of data on the (current) occupations of married couples, mainly because they can then draw on samples of census data and gain the advantage of working with large numbers of cases" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:385)

"revised 'CAMSIS' scale that is based on such marriage data is essentially the same as the original Cambridge scale based on friendship data, as Prandy and Lambert claim, is, in our view, debatable; and they indeed concede that '[c]ertainly, the strength of the relationship between marriage partners is less, statistically speaking, than it is between friends' (Prandy and Lambert, 2003: 401)" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:385)

"The implication then is that their scale reflects 'stratification arrangements' in some quite general and undifferentiated sense. In contrast, we would believe that the Weberian distinction between class and status is conceptually clear and potentially highly important; that it cannot be rejected by fiat; and that whether or not a status order is still identifiable in contemporary British, or any other, society must be treated as an empirical question" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:385)

"The data we use come from wave 10 (year 2000) of the British Household Panel Study (BHPS" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:385)

"The idea of a status order from which we begin could be described as 'gender neutral" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:385)

"In wave 10 of the BHPS, respondents were asked to think of three people they considered to be their closest friends. Information about these friends, such as their age, sex, employment status, and their relationship to respondents was recorded." (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:386)

"These data were coded to the three-digit unit groups of the UK standard occupational classification (OPCS, UK, 1990) and could thence be allocated to the 77 twodigit minor occupational groups (MOGs" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:386)

"We have further shown that the status order that we have derived cannot be understood as simply an epiphenomenon of the distribution of income and education" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:397)

"Finally, as regards status and class, we have argued that it is important to treat these as two distinct concepts and then to consider as an empirical question in what way, in any particular society at any particular time, the status order and the class structure relate to each other." (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:397)

"To the extent that in this regard we can show that the effects of status clearly outweigh those of class - and our preliminary results indicate that they in do24 fact - then the validity of the status order that we have proposed will be further confirmed" (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004:397)