Lydia Morris - Social Divisions

Cambridge Studies in Work and Social Inequality

Social divisions

Economic decline and
social structural change

Lydia Morris

First published 1995 by UCL Press

Published 2013 by Routledge
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Lydia Morris 1995

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-857-28202-3 (pbk)

Typeset in Palatino.

Women's employment histories
(Sarah Irwin and Lydia Morris)

My greatest debt in producing this book is to Sarah Irwin, who worked as my Research Officer for the second year of the project. She displayed extraordinary diligence and creativity in mastering a new data set and embarking on some difficult analysis. of the book are based on original work jointly authored with Sarah.

Many other people have assisted me at different stages of this research, from the application for funds, through to the collection and analysis of data, and finally in the writing and publication of this book. Much of the impetus for the study came from my experience as a researcher in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Swansea, where I worked with Chris Harris on a study of the impact of redundancies at the British Steel Corporation. I was advised and encouraged in my application for funding by Chris, and also by Richard Brown, then Head of the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at Durham. The ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) was good enough to provide the money. The early work of questionnaire design and data gathering owes much to Gary Crozier, my Research Officer, who later left the project to move into local authority research. I also received considerable help and support from Clive Vampleu and Geoff Sharpe, of the Research and Intelligence Unit at Cleveland County Council, and I am grateful to the fieldforce of that unit for their local knowledge, interviewing skills and sheer persistence. Finally, many thanks to Bob Blackburn in the Department of Social and Political Science at Cambridge, for encouraging me to turn a series of journal articles into a book, and for his detailed and sympathetic comments and advice on the final draft. The errors are all my own.

Social class, a concept at the heart of the British sociological tradition, has come under increasing criticism in recent years. Much of this criticism has focused on Marxist approaches, which see class as the motor of world history, and as a basis for collective awareness and emancipation, but disenchantment has now been extended to non-Marxist conceptualizations of class, based on occupational groupings derived from male employment patterns (Holton & Turner 1994). The validity of such groupings arguably has been undermined by changes in the structure of the British economy, the terms and conditions of employment, and the gender composition of the workforce, alongside high levels of male unemployment, all of which constitute a challenge to conventional understanding and representation of social structure. Indications of this challenge may be found in the clusters of literature surrounding debates on employment flexibility, gender and social class, household strategies, and the underclass. Each of these issues points, in a different way, to the inadequacy of full time male employment as the key to understanding and depicting the major social divisions in society.

Changes in the structure and terms of employment through redundancy, early retirement, fixed-term contracts, self-employment and part-time employment, have eroded the normative status of stable, full-time employment, while high levels and increasing duration of unemployment have led to speculation and debate about a growing underclass. None of these changes is easily incorporated into conventional models of the social structure based on a sole or principal male earner for each household. Nor are the circumstances of a principal earner any longer held to be a valid indicator of the material circumstances of the house-hold, given the growing participation of women in the workforce, as well as evidence of inequity in the distribution of resources within the home.

One analytical response to changing patterns of employment has been to argue for a household-based approach to the examination and representation of social structure, which could incorporate different combinations and types of both male and female employment. It is therefore no surprise that throughout the 1980s there was a growth of research interest in the effects of social and economic change, focusing variously on male unemployment, married women's employment, self-provisioning, informal activity, etc., and taking the household as the unit of investigation. This approach is exemplified by Ray Pahl (1984), and features prominently in the work of Harris et al. (1987), as well as in the Social Change and Economic Life Initiative (e.g. Gallie et al. 1993)

The fruits of much research of this kind have been reviewed elsewhere (Morris 1990). One undisputed finding to emerge from the British work to date is that women are not taking over from unemployed husbands as principal earners, and instead of role reversal we have seen a process of social polarization (Pahl 1984:277). Pahl's findings on the Isle of Sheppey show a concentration of opportunities for work in some households, and the total absence of such opportunities from others, confirmed at national level by statistics from the General Household Survey (GHS). It is this polarization of household circumstances which has in part been the stimulus for debate about an emergent underclass, and supplies further support for the view that the household rather than the individual is the appropriate unit of consideration in attempts to trace social structural divisions.

There is a major problem involved in treating the household as a unit, and an alternative approach is implicit in the work of Jan Pahl (1980, 1983). This approach emphasizes inequality within the home, and has more recently been incorporated into a concern with labour market activity (e.g. Morris with Ruane 1989; Vogler and Pahl 1993). This problem aside, the evidence of polarization has been used as one basis for the assertion that social class is no longer the best vehicle for analyzing social structure. Whether a household has any employed members at all is thus argued to be more important than the particular occupational ranking of any one of them (Pahl 1988). Yet the notion of polarization gives us no means of understanding or analyzing the changing terms and conditions of employment, increasing casualization, insecurity and what in Third World economies would be termed underemployment. Nor are social class categories particularly helpful in elucidating the incidence and significance of this change. One of the objectives of the research reported here will be to investigate the nature and extent of broken employment. Another focus is the consideration of aspects of the polarization thesis as yet undeveloped.