Studies of Affluent Workers (AQA GCSE Sociology)

The embourgeoisement thesis

• According to some sociologists, wealthy working-class families were adopting middle-class norms and values in the late 1950s and early 1960s

• This embourgeoisement thesis claims that their affluence caused them to:

  • support capitalism

  • have aspirations centred on consumerism

  • embrace individualistic, privatised lifestyles focused on themselves and their family

• Traditional working-class values of solidarity, criticism of capitalism, and support for trade unions and the labour movement had disappeared

Goldthorpe & Lockwood's affluent worker study

• Goldthorpe and Lockwood's study testing the embourgeoisement thesis was carried out in Luton in the early 1960s

• The researchers used structured interviews to question affluent manual workers and their wives from three different companies

  • They were asked about their attitudes to work, lifestyles, aspirations and political views

• Goldthorpe and Lockwood's findings led them to reject the embourgeoisement thesis

• However, they argued that affluent workers might be part of an emerging 'new' working class who were similar to the middle class in the following ways:

  • They had privatised, home-centred lifestyles

    • Goldthorpe and Lockwood called this privatised instrumentalism

  • They were similar in terms of their instrumental collectivism

    • i.e. they joined in collective actions through trade unions but only to improve their own pay rather than to change society for the benefit of everybody

  • They had an instrumental attitude to paid work, meaning that work was just a means to living a comfortable lifestyle

Key study: Devine (1992): The affluent worker revisited

• Fiona Devine (1992) has a critical perspective and revisited Luton and the ideas of Goldthorpe and Lockwood two decades after their study

• Since the early 1960s, the town had experienced a recession

Aim

• Devine's aim was to explore privatised instrumentalism

  • i.e. how far working-class lifestyles centred on the immediate family in the home in the 1980s

• Devine interviewed a sample of male manual workers employed at the

  Vauxhall car plant in Luton and their wives

• By returning to Luton, she was able to make a direct comparison with the work of Goldthorpe and Lockwood in the 1960s, which she was critical of

Findings

• Devine compared her own findings with those of Goldthorpe and Lockwood:

Conclusions

• Devine concluded that working-class lifestyles , norms and values have not changed as much as Goldthorpe & Lockwood's affluent worker study suggested

• She also rejected the idea of the ‘new working class’ and suggested that affluent workers were critical of capitalism

• There was limited evidence to support the idea of embourgeoisement and privatised instrumentalism