Affluence and Social Change in the Making of Technocratic Middle-Class Identities: Britain, 1939–55

This paper uses responses to Mass-Observation Directives between 1939 and 1949 to examine the changing nature of middle-class identities during this period. I show how Mass-Observers sought to distance themselves both from the working class, and from the staid, non-intellectual members of the middle class. I then show how in the post-war years, Mass-Observers were challenged by what they saw as the improved position of the working class to develop a new kind of technocratic identity. This rejected claims to the cultural superiority of the middle classes, which seemed snobbish and at odds with post-war social democratic values, and sought to define a new role for the middle classes as efficient managers of the nation. I suggest that this emerging identity was important in leading to new interests in the social sciences as a tool of government.