Social-Science Encounters and the Negotiation of Difference in early 1960s England

Fig. 1.

Domestic interior in a post-war, new-build house, c. 1960 (private collection).

Historically, most cross-class encounters that have left written transcripts have tended to involve people with limited social, economic and cultural resources seeking either benefit or mercy from people with power over them. They are transcripts of inequality, and they provide historians with rich opportunities to explore the negotiation of class and power differentials in past societies. But cross-class encounters are not always so unequal. In the social-science encounter it is the professional expert who hopes to benefit from the exchange, not his or her subject. In Britain, it was only after World War Two that social science shifted its focus from the marginalized and disadvantaged – the ‘social problem’ groups – to ‘ordinary’ or ‘average’ Britons.¹ Though they might resent the intrusion, the British poor had long been acculturated into providing accounts of their lives to power (though not necessarily full or accurate ones).² But once social investigators turned their attention to the worker-citizens at the heart of the postwar vision of a New Jerusalem they had to negotiate a fiercely independent, privatized culture epitomized by the oft-quoted axiom ‘we keep ourselves to ourselves’.³

So far, transcripts of inequality have been the primary focus of historical inquiry. Early modern historians have engaged with a wide range of administrative and legal sources to try and trace the voices and strategies of the English poor and their relations with the socially and economically powerful.⁴ In turn, social historians of nineteenth and twentieth-century America, Australia and Britain have returned to the field-notes of charity and social workers in order to explore the history of both social identity and cross-class social interaction. Such work has been subtly attentive to the need to de-construct the narratives of encounter that survive in transcripts of these cross-class interactions.⁵ Daniel Walkowitz has used these sources to trace the complex interaction of class, gender and ethnicity in shaping both the identity of twentieth-century American social workers and their role patrolling the ‘borders of class’, while Mark Peel has emphasized the ways in which interacting with the poor encouraged some social workers to destabilize dominant ideas about both poverty and the poor themselves in American, Australian and British cities.⁶ Peel uses these transcripts imaginatively to reconstruct the lives and aspirations of the poor, in the process challenging theoretical objections to any project aimed at reconstructing a subaltern voice in history.⁷

But it is not only the poor who leave little trace in the historical record. Even in advanced capitalist societies with high literacy rates and sophisticated mass communications, most people leave only fragmentary traces of their lives. The field-work records from social surveys represent one such fragmentary trace. In America it was the Lynds’ Middletown study (1929) which pioneered research into the ‘averaged American’,⁸ but in Britain the dominance of the social-problem paradigm meant that few followed their example until after the Second World War. Anthropologists were the trail-blazers in Britain, first in the amateur guise of Mass-Observation from the late 1930s, and then through established academic scholars such as Raymond Firth, John Mogey and Ronald Frankenberg.⁹ Often the original field-notes of such studies have not survived, but when they do they offer opportunities for qualitative analysis no less rich than the social workers’ case-book.

Here, the focus is on interview transcripts from two large-scale studies of so-called ‘affluent workers’ undertaken in early 1960s Britain: Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s famous Luton study of 1962–4, and their earlier pilot study of Cambridge.¹⁰ As Mike Savage has argued, in many respects it was the Luton study, with its lengthy semi-structured questionnaire about workers’ lifestyle, attitudes and behaviour, which defined sociology as a distinct discipline in postwar Britain.¹¹ Crucially, it was also the study that definitively quashed ideas that the British working class was somehow becoming ‘bourgeois’ under the influence of rising real...