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

This article argues that exploring the interpersonal dynamics of social-science interviews can help us recast the conclusions of classic social surveys. Its focus is the original fieldwork undertaken for Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s influential anti-revisionist study of affluent workers in 1960s England. In this study, the class gulf between Luton car workers and Cambridge academics mattered more than is sometimes recognized, but its effects were subtly cross-cut by the influence of age and gender. Both interviewer and respondent tended to define themselves against an older, socially-conformist and status-conscious outlook which the interviewers called ‘bourgeois’ and the respondents ‘snobbish’. This shared disavowal of bourgeois snobbery owed much to the presentational strategies that male interviewees pursued to neutralize social inequalities inherent in the social-science encounter. Male workers’ sensitivity to questions of ‘status’ led them to play down its importance when talking to university professionals (although their wives were sometimes on hand to puncture the performance). But the researchers’ relative indifference to questions of gender and self-presentation encouraged them largely to accept male workers’ testimony at face value. One consequence was that they radically exaggerated the scope for a revivified class politics based on working-class instrumentalism. Status consciousness, individualism and social aspiration were all much stronger forces than they allowed among England’s postwar ‘affluent’ workers.