Abstracts
'Young women in rollers: the reinvention of the postwar working class'
Selina Todd, Warwick University
Session 2: 12.00 - 13.30 (Day 1)
This paper introduces an ESRC-funded project on 'Living Standards and Social Identities in England, 1945-70'. It focuses on a pilot study of Merseyside, using oral histories and postwar sociological studies. It argues that shared social and economic experiences contributed to the importance of class as an identity and relationship. Cultural historians have argued that postwar representations of class are more vital to understanding its form than 'experience', but this paper demonstrates that a disjuncture existed between postwar sociologists' understandings of class and those articulated by working class respondents. Many working class individuals placed less emphasis on demarcations of roughness and respectability than did sociologists or politicians. This was partly due to a rise in living standards, but was also influenced by the poverty cycle, which gave manual workers and their children a vested interest in expressing tolerance for the poor. This constituency did not define identity primarily through 'community' - the main focus of sociological study. Being working-class - central to most respondents' sense of self - was shaped by shared moments, such as failing the exam governing entry to selective secondary schools. A postwar political discourse of meritocracy helped shape these moments and politicised responses to them. However, working class identity was also shaped by an assumption of shared cultural values, a claim to 'authenticity'. This was characterised and strengthened by the discourse of working-class celebrity which emerged in the press in response to Merseybeat.
'Economic restructuring and informal entrepreneurship in Liverpool workplaces, 1955-1975'
Pat Ayers, Manchester Metropolitan University
Session 2: 12.00 - 13.30 (Day 1)
In the decades after the end of World War Two, regularization of pre-war employment patterns, post-war boom in the older industries and the movement of new industries to Merseyside eradicated much of the unemployment of the interwar years. For a relatively brief moment, large numbers of Liverpudlians had access to industrial employment. Local factories were never, though, simply places where people worked and earned money. They were micro communities that incorporated formal and informal elements, encouraged the development of complex relationships both social and economic, provided a range of support services and, crucially, as vibrant market places, offered those employed there, opportunities for penny capitalist enterprise and consumption. Thus, factory employment held attractions over and above the simple earning of cash wages. Moreover, goods and services particular to a workplace setting, could be significant in assisting social interaction and supporting wider community survival strategies outside the factory gate. This paper explores some of the ways in which structural change in the local economy enhanced business and consumption possibilities within workplaces. It highlights the extent to the imposition of new work disciplines, in part informed by the persistence of a moral economy of casualism into the new fordist industrial setting. It also, though, emphasizes the limitations of this sort of analysis; interpretation of what is described, simply as evidence of working-class agency would be a mistake because it omits the issue of employment collusion.
'Horsham and Distinction'
Simon Stewart, University of Sussex
Session 2: 12.00 - 13.30 (Day 1)
This research examines the degree to which social class derived cultural distinctions and taste patterns persist in contemporary British society. Central to the research is an application of Pierre Bourdieu's work on social space, social class, legitimate culture and distinction, which provides the theoretical framework. My case study, a critical analysis of cultural practices in the Horsham area of West Sussex, England, demonstrates the continuing relevance of Bourdieu's work on taste as a marker of social class. My analysis of local literature, cultural practices and demographics provides examples of various ways in which ideologically laced notions of the 'historical' and the 'rural' provide means by which social class-derived distinctions are maintained in the Horsham area. This is especially evident when the sense of distinction is used in relation to the non-prestigious. For example, Crawley, nearby town, is widely portrayed as a 'contagion' encroaching upon Horsham's 'historical' and 'rural' boundaries. The conclusions I reach provide some evidence to suggest that the cultural dimensions of social class still have considerable impact on cultural practices and beliefs. Therefore, my research challenges work by Nicholas Garnham who suggests that cultural categories based on social class have broken down significantly (Garnham 1993).
'Class Identities for Mass Observation 1939-1995'
Mike Savage, CRESC
Session 3: 14.15 - 16.00 (Day 1)
The idea that class identities have waned in importance over recent decades is a staple feature of much contemporary social theory yet has not been systematically investigated using primary historical data. This paper re-uses qualitative data collected by Mass-Observation which asks about the social class identities of correspondents of its directives in three different points in time 1939, 1947 and 1990. I show that there were significant changes in the way that class was narrated between these periods. There is no simple decline of class identities, but rather a subtle reworking of the means by which class is articulated. In the earlier period Mass-Observers are ambivalent about class in ways which indicate the power of class as a form of 'ascriptive' identity, defined by birth and family. By 1990, Mass-Observers do not see class identities as the ascribed product of their birth and upbringing, but rather they elaborate a reflexive and individualised account of their mobility between class positions in ways which emphasise the continued importance of class identities. As well as being a contribution to debates on changing class identities, the paper highlights the value of the re-use of qualitative data as a means of examining patterns and processes of recent social change.
'Researching Socio-Cultural Change from the 1950s to 2000: The Work of CRESC's Qualitative Research Laboratory'
Niamh Moore, CRESC
Session 3: 14.15 - 16.00 (Day 1)
In focusing on socio-cultural change, CRESC is not primarily interested in adding to the myriad claims already made, particularly those about change over the past fifty or sixty years. Rather, CRESC is committed to critically examining the claims being made about change. This focus has stimulated interest in how to research change. Frequently sociologists rely on making claims about change, and what is 'new', on the basis of contemporary research. In contrast, for many historians, research still ends with the second world war. As a consequence this 50 year period is actually under-researched.
By questioning the means of researching change, and making claims about change, methodology has become a substantive topic of research in its own right for CRESC (and not merely a means to an end). The purpose of the Qualitative Research Laboratory within CRESC is to examine methodological issues in relation to socio-cultural change.
This paper focuses specifically on the recent emergence among social scientists of a controversy which has a bearing on debates about researching change. The establishment of an archive of sociological research, and the requirement of the main UK funding body, the Economic and Social Research Council, that grant holders offer their data for archiving, has been controversial. Many social scientists are resistant to the archiving of sociological research, and the reuse of such data. The paper examines the assumptions implicit in this controversy. By turning to the perspectives of historians, where archiving is the accepted norm, we attempt to break the impasse, creating greater possibilites for the archiving and reuse of sociological data. This approach underlies our use of the Qualidata Archive at the University of Essex and the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, in researching the past fifty years.
'The Nuffield Social Reconstruction Survey, 1941-45'
Takao Matsumura, Keio University
Session 3: 14.15 - 16.00 (Day 1)
The Nuffield College Social Reconstruction Survey was, unofficially but with official backing, established in February 1941. The Survey was coordinated by Oxford economists and statisticians under G.D.H.Cole 's initiation. Its purpose was 'to make an objective study of pre-war trends and war-time developments in British economic and social conditions, and in doing so to provide firm foundations of the determination of policy in the field of social reconstruction.
England, Scotland and Wales were divided in 27 areas, where local investigators including doctors, university and WEA teachers and social workers did actual field work on education, social services and local governments. For the purpose of reconstruction after the war a lot of the results of the Survey were often submitted to the government. However, they were not necessarily well received. For instance, when the results were submitted to the Beveridge Committee in June 1942, they were severely criticized by the Committee civil servant members. Only Beveridge supported them. Moreover, after 1943, as the Government started its own investigation on the post war reconstruction. the Nuffield Survey was pushed aside and eventually various kinds of support including subsidy for the Survey were stopped by the Government. On the other hand, Cole organized 'private conferences' on reconstruction at week ends throughout the war. This attracted industrialists, trade unionists (such as W. Citrine), politicians, economists (such as N.Kaldor, Th Balogh, R. Harrod and J. Robinson) and more established academics (such as A.D.Lindsay, R.C.K.Ensor and Beveridge). The educational reform, the building industry and the land planning were main issues in 1941-42. Later the more controversial problems on employment policy and industrial organization were discussed. The Keynesian economists discussed about the relations between full employment, inflation, state control, producer 's self-government and economic growth. My paper aims to trace both of the Nuffield Survey and to evaluate, if there was any, to what extent the short-lived Survey contributed to the making of the policy of post-war reconstruction.
'Affluence, class and the dynamics of the culture of consumption in Britain, 1961-81'
Shinobu Majima and Alan Warde, CRESC
Session 3: 14.15-16.00 (Day 1)
There is considerable debate about how the development of mass consumption should be periodised, and about the mechanisms that drive it forward. The second half of the 20th century witnessed a pronounced shift in the culture of consumption in Britain. Contemporary analysis in the period following post-war austerity attributed shifts to greater affluence, especially of the working class, and to the emergence of youth culture. In this paper we use evidence about spending patterns in the UK to determine the timing and sources of change in consumption behaviour. The Family Expenditure Survey, which has been conducted by the UK government since the 1950s, captures the weekly spending patterns of all households, as well as their ownership of cars, televisions and other durables as these novel goods diffused throughout the population. In this paper, we analyse the spending data for the year 1961 (the first digitized data available from UK Data Archive) on detailed categories of consumer goods, e.g. from bread rolls to domestic services, with respect to differences in income, class and age. In order to look at the changing, and unchanging, consumption patterns we compare the evidence for 1971 and 1981, paying particular attention to the patterns of change among the young and the old and between social classes. We are thereby able to explore the extent to which embourgeoisement and youth culture had impact. For the purpose we use factor analyses to identify different strategies of spending by the sample households in order to relativise their positions in the society.
Keynote:'Consumer Revolutions and Sexual Revolutions: London in the 1950s and 1960s'
Frank Mort , University of Manchester (CIDRA)
Session 4 : 16.15 - 18.00 (Day 1)
Social and gender historians have identified the 1950s and 1960s as a period of profound if complex change in sexual behaviour and moral values in almost all of the western democracies. The shifting boundaries between public and private morality, the expansion of public anxieties over 'deviant' or dangerous sexualities, new social images of femininity and the cultural meanings attached to 'youth' have been among the most prominent themes. In British social history two associated arguments have also predominated; namely, the idea that shifts in the moral landscape were related to the increasing consumerisation of personal life and that metropolitan London acted as a forcing ground for such transformations.
This paper offers a detailed exploration of the interconnections between sexuality as consumption and the social and symbolic geography of London in the post-war period. In doing so it revisits historical arguments about the relationship between the genesis of liberal or 'permissive' morality and commercial culture in the metropolis. Emphasising that it was not London as a whole that was identified in this debate, but much more specific zones or quarters of the city, my study focuses one prominent site, Soho, in the West End. Since the later nineteenth century the area had been the home of English bohemianism and political radicalism, centre of a diverse range of European migrant and artisanal cultures and the focal point for a wide variety of commercialised forms of sex. During the post-war period publicans and night club owners, theatre managers and pornographic booksellers, drew on the cultural resources of this sedimented history of Soho's bohemianism in order to promote the area as a site for male homosexual cultures and the newer 'liberated' forms of heterosexuality. My paper will foreground the centrality of market-based structures in the development of the area's post-war sexual economy and their interaction with Soho's sexual consumers. In doing so it will highlight a more diffuse and mediated circuit for the consumer economy and its attendant cultural forms than has frequently been identified in recent studies of post-war consumer affluence.
'The movement of opera into the public sector in the UK in the early post-war period'
Siobhan McAndrew, HM Treasury
Session 4 : 16.15 - 18.00 (Day 1)
The paper draws on a recently-completed D.Phil. thesis to analyse a little-examined cultural phenomenon, the rise of opera as a significant art form in Britain, and the associated public subsidy. It considers the rationale for the movement of opera into the public sector in the twentieth century, using government archives and a wide range of arguments drawn from, among others, industrial economics and public choice theory. It integrates cultural and economic argument to provide a coherent defence of public subsidy for 'high art', and relates arts expenditures to increasing GDP, the fall in the share of upper-class incomes, the rise in government spending and the desire of the liberal state for representational display.
'Late developers: the morphology of cultural change in York's Citizens Theatre since 1934'
Clive Goodhead, University of Manchester
Session 4: 16.15 - 18.00 (Day 1)
My research into the Citizens Theatre at York's Theatre Royal since 1934 treats it as a qualitative case study, looking in depth at two contrasting periods, before and after World War 2. It examines the forces that sustained its continuing existence as a social and cultural organism, artistic institution, entertainment organization and business enterprise. My research shows that, for the periods in question, the salient factors were conventional, relating to social and aesthetic values; and initially markedly hierarchical, reflecting the social composition and ideologies of the various groups that held them, both locally and more widely in the country. Through a series of deconstructions of contemporary accounts, reviews and journals, alongside closely analyzed interpretations of specially collected oral histories, and examination of the theatre's repertoire, business accounts and other records, I have attempted to locate and track these values; to trace their morphology, identifying their ranges and their rates of change; and to delineate possible boundaries between the sets of values local to York and those held elsewhere. One particular feature emerging is a contrast between the provincial and the metropolitan perspectives: over such things as, on the one hand, the repertoire of plays performed; and, on the other, the moral value of play-going. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of these values had shifted, but perhaps not so markedly in York as elsewhere in England. My methodology includes the investigation of possible techniques for tracking such changes; for example, by drawing on aspects of institutional theory.
Keynote: 'The fear of fortune: the uneasy consumer in an age of affluence'
Matthew Hilton , University of Birmingham
Session 7: 10.45 - 12.45 (Day 2)
The age of affluence provoked fundamental transformations in people's relationships to the world of goods. In Europe, in the first three decades after the Second World War, the consumer society reached the vast majority of citizens. This represented profound changes in people's lives, most marked by the proliferation of semi-luxury goods. It should not be imagined that these changes in consumption patterns were simply welcomed with open arms by European consumers. Indeed, such transformations were accompanied by a deep-seated unease with the new technologies, mixed with an obvious desire to participate in the age of affluence. How these concerns manifested themselves were most obviously demonstrated in the creation of comparative testing organisations to guide consumers in the new market place. Indeed, more generally, the modern consumer movement emerged in those awkward moments of transition from poverty to affluence and was spearheaded by those insecure middle classes who experienced large disposable incomes for the first time. The emergence of comparative testing represented a new form of consumer activism, one in which the rational buyer, assisted by objective, scientific data, could overcome the information asymmetries of the modern marketplace. The model spread to western Europe during the period of reconstruction following the Second World War. Consumer testing organisations appeared in Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands and represented a more widespread desire by European consumers for protection in the marketplace.
As mass consumption expanded in the industrialised west, regimes of consumer protection emerged which fitted in with the different state-citizen relationships already in existence. This paper will provide some brief observations on these various consumer protection systems, demonstrating that despite the differences in responses from governments, the protection of the consumer was a key political tactic in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, particularly since new classes of affluent consumers emerged in several different countries seeking guidance in the marketplace.
'The Welfare State and the Affluent Society: the dog that didn't bark?'
Martin Powell, University of Stirling
Ian Greener and Nick Mills, Manchester Business School
Session 7: 10.45 - 12.45 (Day 2)
There is a major debate about the rise of consumer culture, consumer society and the mass market (see eg Clarke et al 2003; Miller 1995; Strasser et al 1998). Writers have pointed to the change from 'austerity' to 'affluence' over the period of roughly 1945 to the 1960s (see eg Black 2003). As the welfare state was born in a period of austerity, with rationing, controls, and queues, it seems remarkable that it was not affected by 'affluence'. (but see Bauman 1998). However, although not generally cited in the social policy or consumption literature, leading writers such as Marshall, Robson, Crosland and Titmuss were making the point of the difficulties of the welfare state in affluent society. As Marshall (1963: 282) put it, 'I cannot escape the conclusion that the Welfare State reigned unchallenged while linked with the Austerity Society and was attacked from all sides as soon as it became associated with the Affluent Society'.
This paper critically examines the Welfare State in the Affluent Society, which has tended to be neglected by both social policy and consumption writers (but see the work of historians such as Black, Lowe, Marwick and Morgan). Drawing on policy documents, Hansard speeches, National Archives papers, and interviews, it examines the impact of the Affluent Society on the Welfare State. It produces criteria of 'affluence' such as charging, insurance, tax relief, choice, private welfare, privatization, internal markets etc, and analyses the extent to which these appeared in services of health care, education and housing in the period from 1945. We conclude that, although there were discussions about many of these issues in the 1960s (see Lowe), it was not until the period since 1979 that they became implemented as policy. In that sense, the 'Welfare State in the Affluent Society' represents the dog that did not bark.
'The production and consumption of pharmaceuticals in an age of affluence'
Judy Slinn, Oxford Brookes University
Session 7: 10.45 - 12.45 (Day 2)
In 1950, in the wake of the development of penicillin and other new drugs then recently introduced, there were great expectations about the future of human health. The pharmaceutical industry was seen as spearheading the march against disease and ill- health and, over the next 50 years, the industry enjoyed unprecedented growth and profitability. But, at the turn of the century, its corporations were less confident about their future growth and, increasingly, consumers, regulators and even some of the medical profession questioned the safety and efficacy of some of the drugs on offer. Trust in the industry, it is widely recognized, has been dissipated.
The paper will explore this change, seeking to identify the factors and forces driving it and asking to what extent affluence and consumerism played a defining role in the change. It will focus principally on the consumption of prescription drugs in the UK, where the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948 enabled everyone to access medical care and medicines free at the point of delivery, drawing on the records of the Ministry of Health and other sources. But, as the NHS and other government-funded healthcare bodies in Europe and elsewhere, struggle to meet consumer demands for new and expensive drugs, in the wider context most of the world's pharmaceuticals are manufactured in a few industrialized countries and more than three-quarters of them continue to be sold in industrialized countries.
'Affluence and industrial relations 1950-1970'
Richard Whiting, University of Leeds
Session 7: 10.45 - 12.45 (Day 2)
Focus on the effects of affluence in industrial societies since 1945 has shifted interest away from the world of work; the growing experience of choices about consumption, association, leisure has seemed to displace work as the central fact of modern society. However, the main effect was not to displace work but to make it more complex: affluence had an impact upon the behaviour of workers, but also created a more intense juxtaposition between the claims of the market on the one hand and the priorities of labour on the other. This paper discusses both these dimensions, focusing especially on the period of the 1950s to the 1970s which saw the emergence of affluence as a phenomenon, its public discussion, and its connection with a changing system of industrial relations.
An argument that requires initial discussion is the view that affluence caused a quantitative rather than a qualitative shift in the nature of industrial relations. That is, because trade unions had always aimed at maximising the market position of workers, all that had changed under 'affluence' was the scale of the rewards on offer from such a strategy, rather than the substitution of one fundamental condition by another; for example, a collectivist approach being replaced by a more individualistic perspective as a result of the increasing personal rewards available to employees. Against this view, the paper begins by considering the way affluence affected working life, especially the organization of the working day and the persistence of overtime. Affluence was also a contributor to the growing assertiveness and independence of employees that had been encouraged by not only full employment but also improvements in education; developments which undoubtedly affected behaviour on the shop floor. Some experts referred to the declining moral basis for strike activity (because of rising living standards), and the persistence of normlessness in industrial relations.
Against these trends within working life that made labour less compliant, were exerted pressures from without, to secure improved productivity and greater economic growth that 'affluence' required for its continuation. Labour relations were always a struggle between the maintenance of acceptable conditions for workers and the pressure for change and innovation conveyed through the market. Affluence arguably strengthened both these forces. These pressures contributed to the de-stabilization of industrial relations, and governments increasingly looked to the law to try and reconcile a public interest in economic prosperity with the individual interest in work. The success of this strategy was helped by two factors: the way in which the changes in employment away from male industrial work brought into play trade unions more aware of their weakness rather than their strength, and therefore for whom the law as welcomed rather than opposed for its role in working life; that the stress on individual rights, as opposed to collective interest, itself a reflection of affluence, changed the role of trade unions in working life. By preserving the power of the market yet recognising individual claims upon work, two features of affluence, their tension was eased rather than exacerbated.
'Apostles of Americanization? J. Walter Thompson Co. Ltd, advertising and Anglo-American relations 1945-67'
Sean Nixon, University of Essex
Session 8: 13.30 - 15.00 (Day 2)
The paper explores developments in British advertising from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s within the context of a wider transatlantic commercial world. In doing this it seeks to revise what has been one of the enduring themes of social criticism of the post-war years, the idea of Americanization. The paper uses the case study of J. Walter Thompson Company Ltd, the American-owned advertising agency, and specifically the relations between its New York and London offices, to explore these issues. JWT is an instructive case because it was a classic example of an international advertising agency in the era of high American commercial expansion, and yet the organization of its London office and the relations between London and New York reveal a picture of commercial practices that complicates the Americanization thesis. As I argue in the paper, by the early 1960s JWT London was a well-established agency in the commercial life of the capital with a strong identity of its own distinct from the parent company and it often made strategic use of its Britishness in competing for the business of both American and domestic clients. At the same time, JWT London was tied to the parent company by explicit forms of control and there were porous boundaries between it and New York that allowed the movement of staff, ideas and approaches to advertising to pass from the US to London. JWT London was neither, in this sense, then, the apostle of the American vision of its parent company nor did it simply resist its American parent in order to pursue indigenous practices. The case of JWT in the local and limited field of advertising suggests the need to revise the antinomies that have dogged the 'Americanization thesis' and to grasp the processes of commercial and cultural syncretism at work in this area of trans-Atlantic commercial endeavor.
'Power to "consumers" or "the people"? American and British advertising agencies conceptualize affluence in post-war Britain'
Stefan Schwarzkopf, Queen Mary University/Birkbeck College, London
Session 8: 13.30 - 15.00 (Day 2)
My paper takes up the debate of Black and Pemperton (2004) who argued that narratives of post-war affluence need to be complicated. One way of addressing the various and often conflicting meanings and practices of "affluence" in post-war British society is to look at the way advertising agencies conceptualized issues of increased consumer expenditure and social wealth. This paper focuses on the largest British advertising agency, London Press Exchange (LPE), and the largest American agency in London, J. Walter Thompson (JWT) in the 1950s and 1960s. Both agencies engaged heavily in market and consumer research in these decades. The research reports and the competitive strategies of both agencies provide a remarkable yet under-researched source for how advertising agencies framed the future of Britain's consumer society.
The American JWT agency in London saw British society as a playing field for the application of sales campaigns that saw people essentially as self-seeking and profit-maximising consumers. The LPE's approach to the market, on the other hand, attempted to understand the role of advertising within the wider structure and the long-term needs of society. Under the aegis of its Head of market research Mark Abrams, the LPE agency developed a notion of advertising that drew on the increased spending power of an affluent society, but also responded to issues such as the balance between social mobility and social cohesion.
The main argument derived from an in-depth study of these two agencies and their marketing strategies is that there existed several, often competing notions of how an "affluent Britain" should look like. Moreover, it can be shown that JWT's approach to the challenges and opportunities of affluence, consumerism and the market was by no means more successful than that of the LPE.
This paper draws on original research conducted at the History of Advertising Trust Archive, Norwich, and the JWT papers at the Hartman Centre, North Carolina.