Abstract
The issue of mobility speaks directly to the social historian’s core concern with the structuring of society as a dynamic process of interaction between individuals, social groups and institutions. All the more disappointing, then, that the subject has been largely neglected by historians in this country, and all the more important that recent calls for the study of social mobility to form the basis of a new agenda for social history are heeded. This book may be seen as a first systematic attempt to lay the groundwork for such an agenda. It is a benchmark study not just in terms of its subject matter but also in its methodology. In order to establish and explain the long-run pattern of mobility prior to 1914 it has employed a previously untried combination of sources, and is among the first to subject such historical data to the powerful new tools of analysis developed within the dominant, sociological tradition in mobility research.
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Notes
and Paul Johnson, The Employment and Retirement of Older Men in England and Wales, 1881–1981, Economic History Review, 47, I, 1994.
R. Trainor, Black Country Elites. The Exercise of Authority in an Industrialized Area, Oxford 1993, p. 167.
Booth, Life and Labour, Vol. VII, p. 278, where he writes that ‘the profession of clerk does seem to lead to a genuine rise in the social standard of living’. See also Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. II, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 561–2.
See Glass and Hall, ‘Social Mobility in Britain’, ibid., pp. 184–8, and, for example, the scathing comments of Frank Musgrove, School and the Social Order Chichester, 1979, pp. 123–4.
J.M. Ridge, ‘Fathers and Sons’, in his (ed.), Mobility in Britain Reconsidered, Oxford, 1974.
Jean Floud, ‘The Educational Experience of the Adult Population of England and Wales as at July 1949’, in Glass (ed.), Social Mobility, pp. 120–1. See also Alan Little and John Westergaard, ‘The Trend of Class Differentials in Educational Opportunity in England and Wales’, British Journal of Sociology, 15, 1964.
On hierarchies in the emerging secondary school system, see Hilary Steedman, ‘Defining Institutions: the endowed grammar schools and the systematisation of English secondary education’, in Detlev K. Müller, Fritz Ringer and Brian Simon (eds.), The Rise of the Modern Educational System. Structural Change and Social Reproduction 1870–1920, Cambridge, 1989.
John Westergaard and Henrietta Resler, Class in a Capitalist Society. A Study of Contemporary Britain, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 327, n. 5.
Hobsbawm, ‘The Making of the Working Class 1870–1914’, in his Worlds of Labour. See also, Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London. Notes on the Remaking of the Working Class’, in his Languages of Class, and Ross McKibbin, ‘Why Was There No Marxism in Great Britain?’, in his The Ideologies of Class. Social Relations in Britain, 1850–1950, Oxford, 1990.
See B. Waites, A Class Society at War. England 1914–18 Leamington Spa, 1987, Chapter 2, McKibbin, pp. 81–5; Ideologies of Class pp. 270–5.
For example, Waites, ibid., chapters, 4 and 5; James E. Cronin, Labour and Society in Britain 1918–1979, London 1984, chapters 1 and 2
James Hinton, Labour and Socialism. A History of the British Labour Movement, 1867–1974, Brighton, 1983, pp. 96–7.
David Vincent, ‘Shadow and Reality in Occupational History. Britain in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, in D. Bertaux and P. Thompson (eds.), Pathways to Social Class. A Qualitative Approach to Social Mobility, Oxford, 1997.
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© 1999 Andrew Miles
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Miles, A. (1999). Social Mobility and Class Structure in Historical Perspective. In: Social Mobility in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373211_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373211_9
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