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Is football no longer a working-class game? [NSFW - SWEARING]

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Is football no longer a working-class game? [NSFW - SWEARING]

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This clip is from 2017 of a Liverpool fan talking about the 'sanitation' of football. He links this to the increasing ticket prices. Interesting to watch in the context of the current issues with TV broadcasting of matches.

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Liverpool v Southampton 0-1 | ‘Liverpool Is Like A Tourist Club!’ | LFC Fan Cam

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An excerpt from Morrin, K. (2015) ‘Unresolved Reflections: Bourdieu, haunting and struggling with ghosts’

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An excerpt from Morrin, K. (2015) ‘Unresolved Reflections: Bourdieu, haunting and struggling with ghosts’

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This piece contains a biographical element I thought students might find useful for this week's seminar

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Excerpt from chapter Morrin, K. 2015. Bourdieu, haunting and struggling with ghosts 

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What does the contents of your refrigerator say about your social class? In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath explains how the contents of a fridge might indicate something about one's social class position.
Scrolling through my Facebook feed the other day, I saw this image shared by a friend:

The intent of the person who created this image is to reinforce the image of the working person as going without while the unemployed person is literally getting fat off the government (as if there are no valid reasons why a person might be unemployed and in need of asssitance). The focus of today's post, is to disucss how this image illustrates the meaning of social class in America and enables to think about research methods.

If a person believes they are middle class and they really do have an empty fridge because they can not afford the food to fill it, they probably are not actually middle class. See, in America, everybody thinks they are middle class, though that perception is declining. No one should be blamed for their own misperception. I did a quick google image search for "middle class family on TV" and the families from The Middle, The Cosby Show, Modern Family, and Roseanne all showed up. I distinctly remember an episode of Roseanne where their power was cut after not paying their bill. I don't ever recall money problems on The Cosby Show. Can a family that can't pay their power bill and a family that can really be in the same social class grouping?

Let's consider what social class even means. As a budding sociologist, you know that sociologists give very specific meaning to terms such as social class and middle class. This is called operationalizing our variables. Sociologists typically measure a person's social class based on income, education, and occupation. Instead of using the term social class, sociologists use the term socioeconomic status (SES).

Why do sociologists use income, education, and occupation to measure SES? Why don't we just use the content of a person's refrigerator to measure it or whether or not their power has been cut?

While most people immediately think of income and maybe wealth when they think about SES, research shows that education and occupation are also good markers of social class groupings and they often correspond with income based groupings. Sociologists are often forced to use education and occupation to measure social class because people really don't like telling us how much money they make. In many ways it is taboo to discuss our income with others. In fact, some companies discourage employees from discussing salaries among coworkers. Given that we can't talk about our income in polite conversation, we rely on status symbols (e.g. fancy cars, nice clothes, lavish vacations, etc.) to communicate to our income to others. One way to think about the picture above is, refrigerators and the contents inside it are status symbols.

If fridges are status symbols, then we should consider how sociologists might use a household's refrigerator to measure socioeconomic status? As the photo above indicates, a researcher might begin by looking at the contents of the refrigerator. But, would the researcher stop there? What else should they consider?

The researcher should consider:

Time: What day of the month was the fridge observed? The researcher should take multiple photos over the course of the month. In particular, the researcher should take photos right before and after a person recieved a paycheck or government assistance and the day before and the day after a person shopped for groceries.

Food inventory: What types of foods were in the refrigerator? Why these foods? Were the foods mostly perishables? Foods with a shorter shelf life have to be purchased more frequently. This in turn, may lead to a fridge that is less full than one full of processed foods. A food inventory also helps get around the fact that refrigerators come in different sizes influencing how full they appear.

Other food in the home: I would ask to see a second fridge, deep freeze, office fridge, and cabinets. I would want to see all the places that the household stores food to make sure I had an accurate accounting of all available food.

Eating meals out/take-out: I would ask about how many meals the household eats out each week. I've already eaten two meals out this week and it's only Tuesday. More food eaten out, means less food I purchase for my fridge.

Using a refrigerator as an indicator of socioeconomic status is possible, but not with the photo above. Without additional information, one can not reach the conclusion that the person with "no job" has significantly more food than the "middle class" person.
Dig Deeper:

1. Sticking with the fridges as a measure social class idea, what other aspects of the fridge or it's content could we look at to measure a household's social class?

2. In your own words, define what it means to operationalize a variable? Why don't sociologists just use income to measure socioeconomic status?

3. Do different types of foods indicate different class positions? Explain. Give three examples of food that indicates a particular social class position.

4. Explore Peter Menzels' photography project, What I Eat. What are other variables he includes in his descriptions of each photo? Would any of these variables be useful to our sociologist studying food and socioeconomic status? Why or why not?

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What Your Fridge Says about Your Social Class?

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What does the contents of your refrigerator say about your social class? In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath explains how the contents of a fridge might indicate something about one's social class position.

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Here's how middle class you are, based on the things you took to uni

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Today's post-crash era of financial capitalism affects everyday life in profound and mundane ways. We are submitted to the logic and language of value, measured by big data, subject to metrics and, under austerity, we are forced to shoulder the problem of public debt, individually. All of this impacts our work in universities. It affects knowledge production and how we practice the craft of sociology and leads to what Ros Gill calls the 'hidden injuries of the neoliberal university'. Just as many others before me have advocated, we ought to recalibrate the sociological imagination in these new conditions: a contemporary reimagining of our craft which draws upon current pressures and uncertainties to provoke an imagined future as David Beer recently encouraged. A reimagining of our craft is critical today because, as Lisa Adkins suggests, debt defers the present by sacrificing the future. So, in Sociology, if we defer the present and don't think about our current practice critically, we risk sacrificing a lot.

I characterise three ways in which I recalibrate the craft in my own practice in response, which involves 'getting real', 'DIY' and 'going Live'. This is inspired by Beer's call for a 'punk ethos' in reimagining sociology; being inventive and creative in the face of austerity. There's a mirroring of social research practice and the social world. Looking at how people manage restructuring and austerity tells us much about how we might manage our own practice. Maybe that's more Gramscian rather than punk but Antonio Gramsci strikes me as the ultimate punk Marxist: a pessimist of the intellect but an optimist of the will. And where there are hidden injuries to be exposed there are also hidden rewards.

Getting Real: exploring everyday life

'Getting real' captures my approach to sociology which is about seeking to understand capitalism by exploring the lived experience of it. In my research I try to make sense of the complex changes of global capitalist restructuring through the everyday. This is conveyed through my own biography and some recent history. I began my PhD research into the impacts of gentrification in Glasgow in 2005, so pre-crisis and under New Labour when things were said to only get better. This was ESRC CASE research which meant that I was working with third sector organisations WestGap (West Glasgow Against Poverty) and Oxfam UK who had come together with a shared concern over the impacts the luxury housing monolith, Glasgow Harbour would have on neighbouring working-class Partick. The initial research question related to displacement. My task was to chart, map and evidence this. Of course capturing displacement is no mean feat, no less because processes are often invisible. Proxy indicators are often used from census data, which in 10 year cycles would not capture the process, experience or causality of changes in Partick. Plus, social housing in the UK, then, provided secured tenancies, which protected residents in the neighbourhood from being evicted. Added to these limitations, I found from talking to residents that there was much ambivalence. The story of Sylvie became what Les Back calls a 'primal scene' in research.

19 year old Sylvie was living with her gran in Partick and was registered with the local housing association for her own flat. She loved the neighbourhood. We met in one of the new bars where she sat at an outside table with a glass of wine, sunning herself. Sylvie chose the place because she liked it and rejected the more traditional locations where I usually conducted interviews. And it's Sylvie who then presses me for details about the Harbour flats, what they are like inside and asks how much one would cost to rent which, I tell her, at the lowest end for a two bedroom apartment, £700 per month. As a flatshare this is attainable for a young person who is not debt averse. So Sylvie, raised in social housing and facing limited housing choices due to gentrification, is a potential future Harbour resident. Quite the sleight of hand.

I use this example to show the complexity of gentrification and urban restructuring which is received and negotiated by the post-industrial working class. Sylvie didn't oppose this development nor was she displaced by it, she enjoyed its trappings and wanted to participate. The effects run deeper than physical displacement and these relate to changing lives in post-industrial cities, which people can at times negotiate on their own terms. I theorised up, drawing from Gramsci to understand why people might not resist and might sometimes consent, and negotiate the changes instead. And these voices of people living in Partick unlocked theories, solving intellectual problems such as the deadlock in gentrification between economic versus cultural explanations. This was achieved through a shift in perspective, from macro and middle-class views of gentrification to that of the working class and of everyday experiences. The importance of people's experience in making sense of global change and the political economy cannot be overstated.
DIY
This perspective can also help reimagine the way sociological work can be done; with improvisational tendencies. This draws from Beers' notion of a punk sociology with a DIY ethic of 'finding new ways to use the opportunities which are out there to create insights [...] to ask new questions, and to find new means of communication' ( Beer p57). I took the research back to Partick in 2010 for a community meeting (I had a book launch disco too but I'm not sure it's punk to go disco?) where I met a group of women from the East End of Glasgow who'd formed Save the Accord Centre. I told them I wanted to do similar research on the impact of the Commonwealth Games on the East End if I was able to get funding. I was swiftly put right when they replied 'no offence, but we'd rather not have a research event like this after the fact telling us that we got displaced by the Games'. Bingo. They saw limitations of academic practice before I had. The speed of response required to understand social issues is not matched by that of funding processes. Yet I was able to get some funds through collaboration with a colleague Gerry Mooney at the Open University. This gave us enough money to buy diaries, and we asked residents to record their thoughts and day-to-day experiences of the Games. Another colleague on the project, Vikki McCall, lives in the East End and was on the ground keeping fieldwork going, popping round collecting diaries, texting participants. We even held our research meetings in Vikki's living room; really DIY. And the beauty of the diaries and blog was that they captured how residents' thoughts and feelings evolved in relation to their experiences of the Games. They made choices about what to report and how, such as including unsolicited photos and even poems. This DIY became a kind of co-production which produced a snapshot of everyday life in austerity Britain.

I took a similar DIY approach to explore post-crisis conditions under the Coalition government, where things could only get worse, and did. My friend and colleague Vickie Cooper was, like me, interested in the lived impact of austerity. So in November when I was in Liverpool, Vickie suggested we visit a welfare advice clinic, Reclaim. We were invited to listen to stories and we learned that evictions were the key issue faced by clients, which was most often due to arrears, which were the result of welfare cuts and reforms. We also learned of the regularity of ' eviction watches' and how through group efforts, not the state, communities can protect people from evictions. These evictions could be described as state-led, induced by both a retraction of welfare benefit payments and the removal of statutory protection through secured tenancies. The lack of physical displacement in my earlier research in Partick was now clearly a reality, an injury, as the long-time buffer against displacement, social housing, is undermined in post-crash times.
Going Live
This brings me to my final aspect - going live. This speaks to a liveliness in the practice, being inventive and responsive. Today we have the opportunity to do this more than any other time in the discipline's history with new forms of data and media and devices. By 'live' I also mean temporal and the possibility of more immediate research response. Social media has been central to galvanising campaigns in housing and evictions. It has also been invaluable for rallying people for eviction watches. Call outs circulate: 'Jan and her kids are set to be evicted at 4pm tomorrow, who can be at X-address?' and people mobilise. The immediacy lets us see these events as social researchers, learn, get involved and record. And it means we are not recording impacts after the fact as the Save the Accord Centre women rightly critiqued: we are there. And in terms of communicating the research, digital resources yield influence. Writing about this for online pieces gave legitimacy to Vickie and me as outsiders to these organisations and groups. Liveliness also means engaging with developments in data. The increasing availability of big administrative datasets presents unique opportunities to potentially map and evidence displacement that is born out of welfare reforms. Evictions today are at record levels in the UK, 115 a day, most of which are due to rent arrears. Combining datasets which show changes in housing benefits with those on postcode changes could provide hard evidence which correlates with anecdotal evidence from housing activists. It evidences the coercive phase of this hegemonic project. And so I come full circle in exploring my initial research question about displacement through putting what Les Back has called 'a bit of craftiness back in the craft': getting real, DIY and going live.

Sociology is a discipline with radical ambitions in-built to its task and promise and so what I've outlined is not a new or futuristic imagining. But the contours of inequality are being recast and the problems in the discipline are mirrored with those in the wider social world. Through financialisation and austerity, we are submitted to the logic of value and capital and its injuries but through opening up our practice there is scope for opportunity and resistance. We can do research under austerity and have dialogues with publics that needn't cost money, without huge grants or through monographs. And these are often as effective and productive, if not more so. I'm conscious of the dangers of advocating that 'research needn't cost money' or 'just do it yourself' as academic workers, many of whom are precariat. But there are ways to weather austerity, to resist neoliberal and conservative practice, to revive radical ambition and be creative in the face of such pressures. The future of sociology begins now with our creative resistance: by engaging critically with the present rather than deferring it and contesting the pessimisms of individualisation, value and indebtedness - as optimists of the will. With a little bit of added punk spirit.
Kirsteen Paton is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leeds. You can follow her on twitter at .

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The Future Imagination: Going Live, Getting Real, DIY

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Today's post-crash era of financial capitalism affects everyday life in profound and mundane ways. We are submitted to the logic and language of value, measured by big data, subject to metrics and, under austerity, we are forced to shoulder the problem of public debt, individually. All of this impacts our work in universities.

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The story of Adrian Street from Grit to Glamour

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He was Kid Tarzan, The Nature Boy, and The Exotic One - a man who flirted with a flamboyant and sexually ambiguous persona for the public.

And for more than 50 years, Adrian Street goaded grapple fans as he wrestled his way from Wales to the USA.

Not bad for a boy from Brynmawr who ran away from valley's life down the pit - only to return to pose with his father in an iconic picture.

"They say one picture is worth a thousand words, that picture was worth a million words, because it hasn't shut its gob - just like myself - ever since it was taken," reflects the wrestling legend.

Now 73 - he has finally given up the professional game - but only just, competing in his last bout in Alabama last year.

"I've had fifteen thousand professional wrestling matches - most of which I've won," he said. Fighting, it seems was in his south Wales blood.

"My Great Grandfather, Big Jim Arnold, was a mountain fighter. They used to go out into the mountains where they would fight with bare knuckles. He once had a fight that lasted one and a half days."

Born in 1940 in Brynmawr to a mining family, at 15 he was taken out of school to work in Beynon's Colliery in Blaina.

"I hated that, I wanted to be a professional wrestler, so when I was 16 I ran away from home," he said.

The other miners ridiculed his ambition and told him: "Little guys like you can't be a pro wrestler - they'll rip you in half."

Leaving the mine for the last time, he made it clear he was not coming back: "My father was standing there, the other miners asking if he thought I'd make it in London."

His father joked that not only was he too small to make it in the profession "he likes his mother's cooking too much - he'll be back".

"The thing is, they didn't realise how much good that did me, I would've starved to death, I would've died in London, rather than come back and give them the satisfaction," acknowledged Street.

In London, he started out boxing at a fairground booth, having up to seven fights a day.

He had his first professional wrestling match on 8 August 1957.

But to distinguish himself from the other wrestlers he felt were 'drab', he decided to become more flamboyant.

The reaction he got from the crowds was not what he was expecting.

"I thought they'd say, 'What a terrific looking athlete Street is', instead it was like 'Ooh Mary, ooh isn't she cute'," explained the fighter.

"I was used to ridicule - from the coal miners to the other wrestlers - so there was no way I was going to let everyone see how disappointed I was, so I stepped it up and started blowing kisses to people, skipping and hopping round the ring."

Winning the European Middleweight title in 1973 caught the attention of the national press who sent a photographer to cover his story. There was only one place Adrian wanted his picture taken - back at the coal mine where they had laughed at his ambition.

The subsequent result is described as "shocking" by the Turner prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller.

"That photograph is a revenge photograph, it's him going back to the pit, where he'd worked and been bullied, teased and laughed at, to show his father and the guys in the pit what he'd made of himself and how proud he was of how he looked," Deller told the BBC's The Culture Show.

"His journey is symbolic of the one Britain took at the time. To go from a country that relied on industry, to one that has since relied on entertainment and services. And he was a trailblazer for that route."

His journey, as Deller put it, was only just beginning. He moved to the United States in 1982, just as the British wrestling fans began to fall out of love with the likes of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks.

And while his star kept on rising in the US - that pithead picture kept his feet on the ground, when he wasn't being thrown around a ring.

"That photo is my way of making a two-finger salute to the lot of them," added Street.

"I think by now I've proved my Dad and the other coal miners wrong."

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He was Kid Tarzan, The Nature Boy, and The Exotic One - a man who flirted with a flamboyant and sexually ambiguous persona for the public. And for more than 50 years, Adrian Street goaded grapple fans as he wrestled his way from Wales to the USA.

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'Working-class children get less of everything in education - including respect' Diane Reay talks about her own class position and her work on education www.theguardian.com/education/2017/nov/21/english-class-system-shaped-in-schools

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'Working-class children get less of everything in education - including respect' Diane Reay talks about her own class position and her work on education www.theguardian.com/education/2017/nov/21/english-class-system-shaped-in-schools

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C Wright Mills The Sociological Imagination outlines the task of Sociology - connecting personal troubles to public issues, history to biography See a PDF version here

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We live surrounded by inequality. Some have wealth, health, education, satisfying occupations. Others get poverty, ill-health and drudgery. The Conservative reaction, personified by David Cameron, is to promote social mobility and meritocracy.

History shows this will fail to increase mobility rates. Given that social mobility rates are immutable, it is better to reduce the gains people make from having high status, and the penalties from low status. The Swedish model of compressed inequality is a realistic option, the American dream of rapid mobility an illusion.

How do we know we cannot change the rate of social mobility? One piece of evidence is what happened to social mobility rates as England moved from the pre-industrial world of squire and servant, to the modern noisy meritocracy of the rude boys of finance. What happened as the political franchise was extended in the early 19th century? What happened as mass public education was introduced later in the century? What happened as education, healthcare and pensions for the poor were financed by taxation of the incomes of the wealthier? The answer is that social mobility remained at its slow pre-industrial pace. Tracking the status of rare surnames across generations we can measure social mobility rates for wealth and education in England from 1670 to 2012. The descendants of earlier elites only become average after about 10 generations, or 300 years. Status persists as strongly in the Cameron meritocracy as in pre-industrial England. Lineage is destiny. At birth, most of your social outcome is predictable from your family history.

An illustration of the power of lineage even in modern England comes even from the first names children receive at birth. Naming your daughter Jade means she has one hundredth the chance of attending Oxford as a girl whose parents chose for her Eleanor. Similarly for Bradley versus Peter.

Is this just the survival of sclerotic olde England, where the dead hand of the past exercises an especially powerful grip? No. The modern US has rates of social mobility that are no higher than those of England. Elites and underclasses endure just as strongly as in the UK.

Even more surprising, in the model social democracy of Sweden, social mobility rates again are as slow as in England. Sweden has a class of people descended from its 18th century aristocracy who have distinctive, and legally protected, surnames: Leijonhufvud, Gyllenhaal, Rosencranz and von Essen, for example. Someone with such a surname is still, eight generations later, three or four times more likely to be a doctor or attorney, or to be in the royal academies, than the average Swede. The descendants of 18th century aristocrats are still wealthier than average, and live in the more expensive areas of Stockholm. Sweden is a better society to be lower class in, not because it offers rapid upwards mobility, but because the living conditions of the poor are better. Since the material gains from achieving high status are much less in Sweden, it also shows that you do not need the wide earnings inequalities seen in the US or UK to incentivise people to high professional performance.

More surprising even than the immobility of England, the US and Sweden is that of China. In 1949 the Communist revolution drove out, killed, or expropriated the old upper classes. Their descendants were subject to further persecution in the cultural revolution, where those of suspect background were even denied higher education.

Yet surname evidence again shows that the descendants of the pre-revolution elites crop up unexpectedly frequently among high government officials, university professors, and students at elite universities.

Why is social mobility so resistant to change? The reason is the strong transmission within families of the attributes that lead to social success. Given this, government policy can do no more than nibble at the fringes of status persistence.

Marriage is highly assortative in all societies. Even in 19th century England, where women had no formal educational status and little control of wealth, women married men who were very like their fathers or brothers in wealth and education.

With parents having such similar attributes, children resemble strongly their parents in social capabilities. Now in a world where women have as many status markers as men, we may even see more highly assortative mating, and even a decline in social mobility rates.

How then can we reduce the inequalities associated with status? There is the obvious mechanism of redistribution through the tax system. Provide minimum levels of consumption to all, funded by transfers from the prosperous.

But also you can create labour market institutions that compress wages and salaries, as in the Nordic societies. In Denmark, for example, workers in fast-food chains such as McDonald's earn the equivalent of nearly £14 an hour under collective bargaining, more than double the average UK fast-food wage. Economists worry that such interventions in the free market will reduce output. Income per capita in Nordic societies, however, is just as high as in the UK.

You can also structure educational systems to narrow the social rewards to those at the top of the ability distribution, or to amplify these rewards. In the UK we choose at present to admit to Oxford and Cambridge the top 0.4% of each cohort based on academic performance. This is a highly meritocratic system. But it is also a system that ensures that Oxbridge attendance confers high status. The beneficiaries of this status are mainly the children of the English upper classes, given limited social mobility.

A perfectly feasible alternative would be to define a much larger share of students equally able to benefit from an Oxbridge education - all those with 3 A grades at A-level, for example - and then admit from this pool at random. This system, similar to the one used in Dutch medical schools, would widen the pool from which the Oxbridge elite are drawn to 3% of each cohort. Proportionately more students without elite family lineages would be admitted. Oxbridge would be less elite, and we would have a less socially divided society. Other European societies - Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy for example - have maintained much less hierarchical education systems. There are important choices we can make about how hierarchical we make our educational systems, and consequently how much status differentiation we build into society.

The message here is that while mobility seems governed by a social physics that defies easy intervention, the magnitude of social inequalities varies considerably across societies, and can be strongly influenced by social institutions. We cannot change the winners in the social lottery, but we can change the value of their prizes.
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Social mobility barely exists. So don't expect it to solve inequality | Gregory Clark

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We live surrounded by inequality. Some have wealth, health, education, satisfying occupations. Others get poverty, ill-health and drudgery. The Conservative reaction, personified by David Cameron, is to promote social mobility and meritocracy. History shows this will fail to increase mobility rates.

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Traditional British social divisions of upper, middle and working class seem out of date in the 21st Century, no longer reflecting modern occupations or lifestyles.

The BBC teamed up with sociologists from leading universities to analyse the modern British class system. They surveyed more than 161,000 people and came up with a new model made up of seven groups. To find out where you fit in use this calculator below.

In order to see this dynamic content you need to have Javascript enabled. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions.

Your personal information is safe - all calculations are carried out on your computer

BBC Lab UK's Great British Class Survey was launched in January 2011. More than 161,000 people took part, making this the largest ever study of class in the UK

The Great British Class Survey was designed and the data analysed by Professors Mike Savage and Fiona Devine and their teams at the London School of Economics and the Universities of York and Manchester

The class calculator provides you with an approximate position in the new class system compared with the full Great British Class Survey

Produced by: Steven Atherton, Kathy Neal, Harjit Kaura, Christine Jeavans and Applied Works

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Traditional British social divisions of upper, middle and working class seem out of date in the 21st Century, no longer reflecting modern occupations or lifestyles. The BBC teamed up with sociologists from leading universities to analyse the modern British class system. They surveyed more than 161,000 people and came up with a new model made up of seven groups.