Values and Social Change in Britain

Values and Social Change in Britain

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Yet anyone who makes even a cursory study of history is immediately confronted by the direct relationship between the cultural artefacts of any historical moment and the dominant political and moral values of that particular society. Historically power has almost always been achieved by war and conquest but has always been maintained through culture.

Historical perspective shows us that the arts and media are always packed full of intellectual, political and moral content and that any particular work of art or entertainment either reinforces or challenges the dominant political and moral values of the particular society in which it was created. And it is undoubtedly true that in the last 40 years the diversity and equality agenda has been hugely successful. Today more diverse voices from a much broader range of gender, race, religious and sexual backgrounds can be heard across the public sphere in the UK, than they ever have before.

Progressive television producers and directors like Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, Alan Clarke et al, recognised the reality of the political and social influence of television drama and comedy and purposefully sought to use this most conservative of mediums to challenge the dominant values of their time and suggest alternatives that gave expression to the needs and wants of the poor. As a scriptwriter, I have on several occasions tried to introduce trade unionists as sympathetic guest characters into mainstream dramas such as The Bill, Casualty and Holby and simply been told that such positive characterisations of such people are politically unacceptable on mainstream TV in the UK.

Indeed, I was explicitly told on one show that if I were willing to make a trade unionist character unpleasant or dishonest then it would be acceptable. It is clear to me that the issue of the ethnicity or sexuality of the character is no longer a barrier to positive representation in the mainstream media but particular dissenting, political or social dispositions absolutely are. The older style was typified by the London School of Economics, T. Marshall's work on the evolution of citizenship, and the synthetic theories of Talcott Parsons. The older style had its own models of social research based on visual observation and moral responses to the subjects of their research.

One example of this kind of research tradition is encapsulated in the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer's work, Exploring English Character. In the book, Gorer commented: 'When I was reading, with extreme care, the first batch of questionnaires which I received, I found I was constantly making the same notes: "What dull lives most of these people appear to lead!

Such views, Savage argues took the values of contemporary civilization for granted, and saw its role as seeking the means of extending citizenship and civilization to wider groups in the population.

The launch of New Society in is highlighted as a prime source driving the new specialist sociology, 'neutral, specialist, objective', implied by new technical identities within the academic social sciences during the s. Sociology is portrayed here as a social movement, challenging traditional ways of knowing through an appeal to a new rational mode of expertise that appealed to science.

English society and values over the last 75 years.

Again the new sociology had to actively compete with, and effectively overcome, the old sociology emanating from the LSE, a social science of elite administrative links with Whitehall and central to government. The new plate glass universities built during the s served, in this reading, to spread the new values of the specialist sociology which in turn undermined or questioned the intellectual underpinnings of other disciplines. This transformation of the disciplinary base of the academic infrastructure reinforced this sociological moment.

The agency of the new social sciences can be seen, Savage argues, in its quest to define the average or typical English town as the site of social change. Anthropologists, political scientists, geographers all sought to wrest descriptions of the community away from literary idioms of the inter-war years focusing on tradition. Anthropology originally led the way, and the two disciplines at first combined in their quest.

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Descriptions of communities gave way to descriptions of communities as sites of change. However, the search for change, Savage suggests, ended in failure, and as a consequence social science began to abstract class from local social relations.

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Change became less and less embedded in the landscape and became abstract. The next two chapters focus on the key social science methods: the interview, and the sample survey. Savage argues that the first of these two methods had to be wrenched from the hands of applied professionals, such as social workers and priests, in order for the social sciences to use it as a mechanism for the study of individuals abstracted from their household surroundings. What is more, the interview, it is argued, was removed from its distinctly therapeutic domain in which it was originally deployed and, in collaboration with literary narratives, was used by social scientists in order to provide, 'melodramas of social mobility'.

The rational, objective interview, free of moral values and assumptions challenged the previous role of women as interviewers, a point which Savage supports by referencing academic feminism's attack on the masculine social scientific approach in the later s.

The assertion of a feminist kind of social research was a counter-mobilization against this current. Second, governments, Savage suggests, made extensive use of the sample survey for gathering social data, and this was a crucial technology for defining the modern rational nation.

The experience of the Second World War was crucial here, and the concerns of governments with productivity, mobilization, production and destruction. The sample survey became the means of generating knowledge about popular feeling in turn bypassing accounts of the elected representatives of the people.

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The truth of the nation was guaranteed through science as the capacity to conduct large national social surveys became an important feature of the post-war state for example, the Family Expenditure Survey, began in , the General Household Survey from , and the New Earnings Survey from This process was itself complicated by four competing strands of argument as to the value of the social survey method: its significance in the development of individuals; its importance in the new interest shown to social groups; its encapsulation of the nation; and its use in embedding notions of change, through the manipulation of data.

Savage references the importance of the Royal Statistical Society and the development of the Government Statistical Service as vehicles for social research.

In the third and final section Savage considers social change and its impact on popular identities. The argument put forward is that the s and 60s saw the erosion of the cultural standoff that had previously existed between middle- and working-class identities. This process relied on the decoupling of technique from skilled workers and its appropriation by the middle classes.

Michael Gove's values and British social attitudes

This argument relies first of all on an examination of the field work of Richard Brown in Tyneside and John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood on working class identities. Savage argues that the previous conclusions drawn from this research, about the growth of a new affluent, privatised instrumental worker, are overstated. Instead, Savage suggests that working-class identities in this period remained premised on the existence of a visible, public elite drawn from the aristocracy.

An understanding, Savage suggests, that attempted to naturalise class by showing the tradition and history of such elites. This conception of class was not, however, without its tensions and the assumed extraordinariness of elites were inevitably contrasted in working-class identities with the ordinariness of working individuals, thus in turn challenging their own sense of individuality. By contrast, the growing technical and managerial professions were absent from working-class accounts of class. Consequently, with the importance of the acquisition of formal educational credentials now in the ascendancy, coupled with the decline of apprenticeships, the male manual working class lost their cultural distinctiveness.

Among the middle classes, Savage suggests, there was a shift from understanding class as something born into, to understanding it as something that was navigated by strategically mobile individuals.

Explore demographic and social change

Technocratic identities became more credentialist in orientation and shifted away from being implicit and taken for granted. Social studies of the s began to reveal some new idioms of new middle-class identity. Taking Goldthorpe and Lockwood's interviews with lower middle-class respondents Savage uses them as an evidence of a recognition of the notion of professional education leading to the possibility of social mobility.

Education and intelligence were now independent forces for good. By the s, Savage argues, significant sections of the middle classes were more confident and assertive in deployment of technocratic language, expertise, planning and class. The broader point that Savage is arguing is that those social theorists who have defined individualization as marking a break from class are misconceiving the key processes at stake. Instead, he argues for a deepening of old identities through the same process by which they are reworked. The ramifications for the contemporary social sciences of the battle over expertise are spelt out in Savage's concluding chapter.

First for contemporary popular narratives. The creation of an 'intimate, critical, and compassionate' sociology Savage remarks, revolved around the methods of the new social sciences in a reworking of who was able to speak about the present. A crucial feature was the mobilisation of the ordinary and the everyday.

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