‘Educative leisure’ and the art museum

This paper argues that although museums have increasingly changed their mission to embrace ‘spectacular’ and ‘commercial’ goals in recent decades, their audiences resist this redefinition of the museum’s role. Based on a structural equation model derived from a survey of 1,900 visitors of the six main galleries of modern and contemporary art in Belgium, it shows that different kinds of visitors tend to share the same conceptualization of what museums signify, as a kind of ‘educative leisure’. They continue to differentiate museums from more commercial forms of leisure, and associate them with schooling and educational processes. We demonstrate that this appreciation of ‘educative leisure’ is shared by visitors from different socio-demographic backgrounds and is affected by other dimensions of the visitors’ profiles, such as the practice of creative activities or recent experiences of other art places (commercial galleries, fairs, contemporary art centers)

The fall and rise of class analysis in British sociology, 1950-2016

This paper considers the changing nature of class analysis in Britain, focusing on three generations, and with a particular interest in the reasons for the revival of class analysis in the past 15 years. I show how the ‘heroic’ approach to class in Britain, which was very strong between 1950 and 1975, depended on emphasising the role of the working class as agents of progressive social change. Whilst this was a powerful force during this period, it locked class analysis into a historical moment which was fast being eclipsed given the scale of de-industrialisation in Britain during this period. During 1975-2000 class analysis faded in Britain because the white, male, industrial working class seemed much less significant in shaping British society. The most recent period since 2000 has seen the remarkable revival of ‘cultural class analysis’, strongly associated with the influence of Pierre Bourdieu, and I sketch out its appeal, and its potential to enhance the study of class more broadly in the final part of this paper

The Great British Class Survey: calculating economic, social and cultural capital in order to analyse social class

The largest ever study of class in the UK, the Great British Class Survey, is set to release results next month. Mike Savage explains that the novel approach, which measures an individual’s resources in economic, social and cultural terms, provides a more accurate depiction of social class

The making of the Great British Class Survey and its essential capacity to communicate through digital modes

The Great British Class Survey was launched on 3 April 2013 and quickly became one of the most popular stories on the BBC website. Mike Savage gives his account of how the project was organised and reflects on whether this model has wider potential take up for social science research, or whether it is likely to be an idiosyncratic exception to normal patterns

Successful societies – “self, individualism and moral communities under neo-liberalism.”

Personal Reflections on Successful Societies meeting, London, January 30-31 2015 by Mike Savage. This blog reports on a fascinating seminar held at the end of January in London, part funded by my ESRC Professorial Fellowship. This seminar was an unusual opportunity to allow interchange between eminent European and North American social scientists to address the relationship between “Self, Individualism and Moral Communities under Neo-Liberalism.” The over-arching concern was to consider how profound neo-liberal restructuring has been associated with the remaking of personal identities and how we can thus better understand the links between change at the macro and micro level as they are occurring today

Are we seeing a new ‘inequality paradigm’ in social science?

Social scientists have long been concerned with inequality, yet the focus has often been on its theoretical and political aspects. This is now starting to change, writes Mike Savage. Thanks to research interventions by scholars, together with attempts to institutionalise cross-disciplinary work, the focus is shifting from normative debates and towards the more technical, empirical and historical problems of inequality

The British class system is becoming more polarised between a prosperous elite and a poor ‘precariat’

Mike Savage discusses the results of the largest British class survey ever conducted. It shows that class divisions remain very powerful and are becoming more entrenched. There is a growing gulf between the elite and the lower classes, and what used to be termed the middle and working classes seem to be splintering into social classes with systematically differing amounts of cultural and social capital

Revisiting classic qualitative studies

Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht methodologische Aspekte der Sekundärnutzung 'klassischer' qualitativer Studien. Klassische Studien werfen besondere Probleme auf, die über diejenigen einer typischen Sekundäranalyse qualitativer Daten hinausgehen. 'Klassisch' bedeutet, dass die Ergebnisse und Argumente einer solchen Studie einen 'Kanon' theoretischer und methodologischer Wissenschaftlichkeit implizieren und daher in der Folge das Denken der Forschenden formen, die Sekundäranalysen durchführen wollen. Eine Sekundäranalyse sollte daher nicht nur die archivierten Daten selbst, sondern auch die publizierten Arbeiten einbeziehen; jedoch ist damit eine Menge an komplexen methodologischen und ethischen Problemen verbunden. Der Autor untersucht mögliche analytische Strategien für eine Reanalyse, eingeschlossen die 'Enthüllung' als Gegenstück zu einer 'Sakrosankt-Erklärung' und Wege, mit denen Originaldaten 'gegen den Strich' gelesen werden können. Hierfür verwendet er seine eigenen Reanalysen von Elizabeth Botts 'Family and Social Network'-Archiv und von John Goldthorpe und David Lockwoods 'Affluent Worker Collection'.This paper explores methodological issues regarding the revisiting of 'classic' qualitative studies. Classic studies pose particular issues for secondary analysis. By virtue of being 'classic', the findings and arguments of such studies define a subsequent 'canon' of theoretical and methodological scholarship, and hence shape the thinking of subsequent researchers conducting secondary analysis. Secondary re-analysis therefore should be not only of the archived data itself, but of the published work itself, but this raises a host of complex methodological and ethical issues. Using his own reanalysis of Elizabeth Bott's 'Family and Social Network' archive, and John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood's 'Affluent Worker collection', the author examines possible analytical strategies for re-analysis, including 'debunking', the alternative of 'sacralisation', and ways in which original data can be read 'against the grain'