Social stratification: past, present, and future

ABSTRACT

‘Social Stratification, Past, Present, and Future’ celebrates the 50th anniversary of the annual Cambridge Social Stratification Seminar. This editorial presents a brief characterisation of the ‘Cambridge school’ approach that has featured prominently through the seminar’s lifetime. Then it discusses the domains and topics explored in this issue – education; intergenerational transmission of inequality; family, work and employment; occupations; migration for work; housing, and political preferences. While most of the papers focus on Great Britain, several papers involve international comparisons, one focuses on stratification in India, and another on China. Collectively, researchers reveal how social hierarchy influences people’s lives, and reproduces fairly stably over time. The papers also contribute to understanding the sometimes counter-intuitive outcomes that challenge those charged with policy development.

KEYWORDS:

• Social mobility
• social analysis
• divided societies
• equality
• poverty

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As this special issue was going to press, we heard the sad news of Professor Alexander Stewart’s passing. We hope that in a small way the work presented herein extends the ideas and debates that he considered vitally important over the course of his career. We are all very grateful for the many good humoured and intellectually stimulating conversations with him that helped us to better understand complex ideas about social formations.

2 For those interested in exploring the work of the Cambridge School further, some of the important contributions include Perceptions of Work, Variations within a Factory (Beynon & Blackburn, 1972), The Working Class in the Labour Market (Blackburn & Mann, 1982), Explanation and Social Theory (Holmwood & Stewart, 1991), White Collar Work (Prandy et al., 1982), White-Collar Unionism (Prandy, Stewart, & Blackburn, 1983), Locating Gender (Siltanen, 1994), ‘The Revised Cambridge Scale of Occupations’ (Prandy, 1990), Gender Inequality in the Labour Market (Siltanen, Jarman, & Blackburn, 1994), ‘Social interaction distance and stratification’ (Bottero & Prandy, 2003), Social Stratification, Trends and Processes (Lambert, Connelly, Blackburn, & Gayle, 2012), Stratification: Social Division and Inequality, (Bottero, 2004), A Sense of Inequality (Bottero, 2019) and Social Inequalities and Occupational Stratification: Methods and Concepts in the Analysis of Social Distance, (Lambert & Griffiths, 2018). A much fuller bibliography and links to current work using CAMSIS is maintained by Paul Lambert on the Stirling University website (www.camsis.stir.ac.uk).

3 The introduction to Social Statistics (Penn & Berridge, 2010) provides an excellent analysis of how these elements interacted more widely.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Jarman

Jennifer Jarman is a Full Professor and Chair of Lakehead University's Interdisciplinary Studies Department. She is a sociologist who writes about contemporary labour force issues and their implications for equality. She is the lead author of The Dimensions of Occupational Gender Segregation in Industrial Countries (Sociology, 46(6)) and a co-author of Gender Inequality in the Labour Market, (International Labour Organization). Her most recent book, The Right to be Rural, looks at issues of citizenship through a rural lens (University of Alberta Press) (with Karen Foster).

Paul Lambert

Paul Lambert is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Stirling, UK (institutional website: https://www.stir.ac.uk/people/255764). His research work focusses on the measurement and analysis of social stratification, contributing applied research on social inequalities and methodological research particularly related to statistical analytical methods and large scale data resources. He teaches courses on social inequalities and on social research methods. In recent years he has taken the lead in coordinating meetings of the social stratification research seminar as well as the distribution of the CAMSIS scales (see http://www.camsis.stir.ac.uk/stratif/).

Roger Penn

Roger Penn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Queen's. He was previously Professor of Economic Sociology & Statistics, Lancaster University, and is currently Visiting Research Professor at Cattolica University, Milan. Moreover, he was previously Visiting Professor at UCLA and at the University of Bologna. He has so far published 16 books, including Children of International Migrants in Europe, Class Power and Technology as well as Skilled Workers in the Class Structure.