Geoff Payne
Biographic Data
| ID | 100790 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Geoff Payne |
| GIVEN NAMES | Geoff |
| FAMILY NAME | Payne |
| SIGNATURE | PAYNE G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Newcastle University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0622-5388 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 68 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 523 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 66 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Illiteracy/Literacy
Although educationalists, psychologists, historians, and development economists have shared an interest in levels of literacy, their research and interventions have been bedeviled by poor definitions and measurements. Early studies relied on crude indicators of absolute illiteracy, while more recent studies have tried (with little success) to identify a level of literacy necessary for everyday life, that is, “functional literacy.” Despite major i…
‘Poor Cousins’
Enhancing student engagement through effective ‘customer’ evaluation
Most undergraduates’ main, hands-on involvement in student engagement is completing satisfaction surveys, such as the U.K. National Student Survey (NSS), whose findings make significant contributions to university policy formation. It is therefore important that these surveys produce reliable and valid data, but previous and current NSS versions fail to do this. This article compares the U.K.’s model of ‘satisfaction’ with that of the U.S. Nation…
A 3-Level Model of Insider Ethnography
This article discusses ethnographic insiderness. After juxtaposing insider and outsider ethnography, we suggest insider-ethnography requires a more nuanced and complete discussion for it to be better understood, theoretically and practically. Accordingly, we propose a model of insider-ethnography that suggests three relative levels of ethnographic insiderness exist. We use examples from extant ethnography to substantiate our model theoretically a…
The New Social Mobility
Geoff Payne considers a wide range of dimensions of mobility and life chances to assess the causes and consequences of mobility as social and political processes, and challenges well-established opinions of politicians, pressure groups, the press, academics and the public.
The New Social Mobility
Despite Britain in fact being a highly, if unevenly, mobile society, politicians, think-tanks and the media continue to call for ‘more social mobility’, moving it up the political agenda. Their speeches and official documents show they have misrepresented and misunderstood mobility, particularly how gender and the labour market shape outcomes, failings shared with much academic research. Placing social mobility in a context of political and socio…
Home and Nation in British Literature from the English to the French Revolutions
‘All things have a home but one’
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Research Methodology in Sociology
Sociology and Social Research (RLE Social Theory)
A social science which has become so remote from the society which pays for its upkeep is ultimately doomed, threatened less by repression than by intellectual contempt and financial neglect. This is the message of the authors of this book in this reassessment of the evolution and present state of British sociology. Their investigation analyses the discipline as a social institution, whose product is inexorably shaped by the everyday circumstance…
Research Methodology in Sociology
Despite rated second only to America in the national sociology stakes by the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC’s) 2010 International Subject Benchmarking Review, UK sociology has a track record of being more concerned, and confused, about research methodology than other social sciences. At the heart of this paradox is that today’s ‘big tent’ discipline is still recovering from being the new kid on the block. British sociology, and ther…
Distemper, Scourge, Invader
This article analyzes the unsettling role given to plague in the representational practices of Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). It focuses on how Defoe's combination of discursive frames provides a model for interpreting and understanding his complex world-view. I suggest that, by scrutinizing the mixture of discourses employed to represent plague and its effects, especially those drawn from the fields of natural philosophy, po…
Surveys, Statisticians and Sociology
While respecting the intellectual rigour of social constructionism, it is problematic that much of current UK sociology remains fixed in a qualitative research methods fugue. Despite programmes like Q-Step and its ESRC predecessors challenging this narrow approach, most sociologists are trapped by their lack of numeracy, projecting it onto new generations of undergraduates and new entrants to the profession. However, to explain why this situation…
Social Divisions
Models of Contemporary Social Class
Although conceptually distinctive, a comparison of the Great British Class Survey (‘GBCS’) and NS-SeC (taken to be illustrative of previous class schema) shows they produce basically similar pictures of class in contemporary Britain. Among the advantaged, GBCS usefully separates off a very rich class, and technical professionals, from the established middle class (although with some problems of cut-off points of financial advantage, and the conce…
A New Social Mobility? The political redefinition of a sociological problem
Although overshadowed by the global financial crisis and a general election, ‘social mobility’ has been adopted in recent years by the major UK political parties as a solution to social inequalitie
Teaching Quantitative Methods
The limits of land titling and home ownership
This paper reviews whether land titling programmes have achieved the benefits claimed by their proponents. It finds that they have generally failed to do so. Investment in land and housing, access to formal credit, and municipal revenues have not increased noticeably more than under other tenure regimes, including those that allow many unauthorized settlements, and there is no significant evidence of poverty levels being reduced. Titling does pro…
Does British Sociology Count
The research reported here is from the first national survey of British undergraduate attitudes to the methodological character of the discipline and specifically to quantitative methods.The study found that most sociology students saw their subject as closer to the humanities than the sciences. However, whilst as anticipated many students expressed anxiety about quantitative methods and 'number', a slight majority nevertheless expressed no such …
A Discussion of Aarts and Katz Rothman
Social Divisions, Social Mobilities and Social Research
As sociology diversified, and under other academic pressures, British sociologists became 'hyper-specialized' in subject expertise and methodology. Exploring multidimensional social life requires knowing about more than one field and having skills in more than one method. The retreat from quantitative methods, however good our qualitative methods, loses opportunities to contribute to important issues, particularly those in the public arena, at th…
Re-counting 'illiteracy
Recent media reports have repeated claims that there are very large numbers of illiterate people in Britain, seven million adults being the most common figure. The moral panic this engendered has helped to justify educational initiatives and greater public spending on basic skills. However, a closer investigation of definitions and measurements of illiteracy in major national studies reveals the peculiarity of this social construction of illitera…
The Social Mobility Of Women
Getting ahead of the game
Getting ahead of the game
While many of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) represent an ambitious attempt to reduce global poverty and improve the quality of life for the world’s poor, this cannot be said for the goal that concerns urban development. Goal 7 of the MDGs aims to improve the living conditions of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. However, current estimates suggest that, at present, there are nearly 1 billion people living in slums, and that this number …
The limits of land titling and home ownership
This paper reviews whether land titling programmes have achieved the benefits claimed by their proponents. It finds that they have generally failed to do so. Investment in land and housing, access to formal credit, and municipal revenues have not increased noticeably more than under other tenure regimes, including those that allow many unauthorized settlements, and there is no significant evidence of poverty levels being reduced. Titling does pro…
Urban land tenure policy options
Generalization in Qualitative Research
Earlier treatments of moderatum generalization (e.g. Williams, 2000a) explicitly addressed interpretivist sociology. This article extends that earlier argument by examining some of its implications for a wider range of qualitative research methods. It first adopts an empirical approach, providing concrete illustrations from the most recent volume of Sociology of what sociologists actually do when describing the meaning of their findings. In the l…
Methodological Pluralism in British Sociology
The dominant position on research methodology and methods among British sociologists has for many years been that of 'methodological pluralism'. However, concerns have lately been expressed about the lack of research involving quantitative methods, not least by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). A study of the four mainstream British journals over two years, together with associated sources, demonstrates national patterns of researc…
Land tenure and property rights
Housing Pathways and Stratification
Housing research has yet to achieve an adequate framework to guide research into the effects of social policy. Two concepts are outlined and used in this article to analyse one local housing market; it is hoped that these will prove generally useful. The concepts are 'housing status group' (a modification of Rex and Moore's 'housing classes' model), and 'housing pathway', which refers to the structure of housing careers. In a low-cost study of a …
Unpacking 'Class Ambivalence
Recent work on class cultures and self-identities, in particular Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst (2001), demonstrates respondents' reluctance to use class in personal terms even while using it to explain wider social conditions. They call this 'class ambivalence', or 'defensiveness'. A new study demonstrates that this crucially depends on how data are collected and interpreted. It proposes an alternative frame of reference which recognizes that res…
Declining racial disadvantage in the British labour market
The recruitment of black and Asian migrant workers in the 1950s and 1960s to the least desirable sectors of the British labour market arguably - for some commentators - set in motion a cycle of cumulative disadvantage, with the disadvantage experienced by migrant workers inhibiting the opportunities of their sons and daughters. While some of the more recent commentators have concentrated on the persistence of disadvantage, others have begun to in…
Does British Sociology Count
The research reported here is from the first national survey of British undergraduate attitudes to the methodological character of the discipline and specifically to quantitative methods.The study found that most sociology students saw their subject as closer to the humanities than the sciences. However, whilst as anticipated many students expressed anxiety about quantitative methods and 'number', a slight majority nevertheless expressed no such …
Getting ahead of the game
While many of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) represent an ambitious attempt to reduce global poverty and improve the quality of life for the world’s poor, this cannot be said for the goal that concerns urban development. Goal 7 of the MDGs aims to improve the living conditions of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. However, current estimates suggest that, at present, there are nearly 1 billion people living in slums, and that this number …
A New Social Mobility? The political redefinition of a sociological problem
Although overshadowed by the global financial crisis and a general election, ‘social mobility’ has been adopted in recent years by the major UK political parties as a solution to social inequalitie
Improving tenure security for the urban poor in Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Socio-economic re-structuring and employment
The consequences of major changes in employment, due to the decline of manufacturing and the growth of the service sector, have not been well-documented, nor theorized, in the sociology of ethnic relations, even in recent studies. For example, Blumer's classic argument that economic development adapts to 'race relations', rather than the reverse as predicted by the modernization school, has not been either empirically resolved or conceptually app…
Opening and Closing the Gates
Sociological understanding of social mobility in Britain has depended heavily on the 1972 Nuffield Mobility Study. In the virtual absence of more recent data, analysis has drawn on this single study with its reliance on cohorts of males as the indicator of changes in mobility. One of the central conclusions has been that relative mobility rates, the key marker of class inequalities, remain unchanged. A new analysis of data from recent British Ele…
Social Divisions, Social Mobilities and Social Research
As sociology diversified, and under other academic pressures, British sociologists became 'hyper-specialized' in subject expertise and methodology. Exploring multidimensional social life requires knowing about more than one field and having skills in more than one method. The retreat from quantitative methods, however good our qualitative methods, loses opportunities to contribute to important issues, particularly those in the public arena, at th…
Investing in Class Analysis Futures
Contrary to Pahl's criticism, Goldthorpe and Marshall's class analysis programme is a theoretical one. A re-formulation of their position shows how it sets key elements in structured relationships with each other. However this also shows several limitations in their model, which fails fully to account for changes in class positions, or social mobility. Their model says very little about education, cultural values, or events (like the Second World…
The Living City
Models of Contemporary Social Class
Although conceptually distinctive, a comparison of the Great British Class Survey (‘GBCS’) and NS-SeC (taken to be illustrative of previous class schema) shows they produce basically similar pictures of class in contemporary Britain. Among the advantaged, GBCS usefully separates off a very rich class, and technical professionals, from the established middle class (although with some problems of cut-off points of financial advantage, and the conce…
Lowering the ladder
A major proportion of urban housing in developing countries, and also in some European countries, is developed outside officially sanctioned processes. This is less a reflection of a global desire to break the law than of the existence of inappropriate planning regulations, standards, and administrative procedures. Many countries have inherited or imported their regulatory frameworks from outside, and these were designed to meet very different co…
A 3-Level Model of Insider Ethnography
This article discusses ethnographic insiderness. After juxtaposing insider and outsider ethnography, we suggest insider-ethnography requires a more nuanced and complete discussion for it to be better understood, theoretically and practically. Accordingly, we propose a model of insider-ethnography that suggests three relative levels of ethnographic insiderness exist. We use examples from extant ethnography to substantiate our model theoretically a…
Surveys, Statisticians and Sociology
While respecting the intellectual rigour of social constructionism, it is problematic that much of current UK sociology remains fixed in a qualitative research methods fugue. Despite programmes like Q-Step and its ESRC predecessors challenging this narrow approach, most sociologists are trapped by their lack of numeracy, projecting it onto new generations of undergraduates and new entrants to the profession. However, to explain why this situation…
Getting ahead of the game
Inclusion or exclusion? Reflections on the evidence of declining racial disadvantage in the British labour market
Considers the position of ethnic minority groups in Britain in relation to economic exclusion. Suggest that earlier research overemphasised the extent to which these groups were economically excluded. Discusses recent evidence which implies that during the 1990s convergence was seen. Re‐examines the evidence and cites that there is much more to be done and that there are many different experiences between and within different ethnic groups. State…
Landlord and Tenant
Occupational and Industrial Transition in Social Mobility
Social mobility has normally been measured as moves between occupational statuses, but mobility researchers have not taken the economic dimension sufficiently into account because of their prior interest in stratification. A proper explanation of mobility needs to be based on an analysis of the occupational processes of modern capitalism: labour market forces, industrial mix, occupational transition, wars and depressions, etc. One example of this…
Comparative Sociology
Typologies of Middle Class Mobility
The social consequences of geographical mobility are usually conceptualized in terms of unidimensional dichotomies, such as those of Merton ('locals' and 'cosmopolitans'), Stacey ('traditionalists' and 'non-traditionalists'), and Watson ('burgesses' and 'spiralists'). Despite their different meanings and limited generality, these typologies are applied and misused by current writers such as Bell, Frankenberg and Pahl. Typologies, even correctly a…
The Urban Future
Understanding Occupational Transition
Occupational Transition in Advanced Industrial Societies
Housing Pathways and Stratification
Housing research has yet to achieve an adequate framework to guide research into the effects of social policy. Two concepts are outlined and used in this article to analyse one local housing market; it is hoped that these will prove generally useful. The concepts are 'housing status group' (a modification of Rex and Moore's 'housing classes' model), and 'housing pathway', which refers to the structure of housing careers. In a low-cost study of a …
Urban Housing in the Third World
Social Research and Market Research
Social Research and Market Research
I endorse this statement without reservation. My only regret is that what I wrote could be interpreted as an attack on survey research per se , which manifestly must be a valid criticism of my work as both Harrop and Abrams take me to task for this. Quite the reverse was intended. Contrary to appearances, I believe that all three of us are united on three points: first, that survey research is a valuable methodological tool for the sociologist; s…
Occupational and Industrial Transition in Social Mobility
Social mobility has normally been measured as moves between occupational statuses, but mobility researchers have not taken the economic dimension sufficiently into account because of their prior interest in stratification. A proper explanation of mobility needs to be based on an analysis of the occupational processes of modern capitalism: labour market forces, industrial mix, occupational transition, wars and depressions, etc. One example of this…
Ankara
The ervaluation of aid projects and programmes
Social Researching
Employment and Opportunity
De-Industrialization and Occupational Mobility
Lovatt and Ham (BJS 1984) have argued that changes in the industrial and occupational structure do not modifjz patterns of inequality as measured by occupational mobility, but instead conMirm existing patterns. However, a careful examination of their evidence shows that their data are not in a form which makes comparison with other mobility studies easy, nor do they provide an unequivocal basis for generalizations. This review of their argument h…
In the Beginning
Employment and Opportunity
In the shadow of the city
New Directions in the Sociology of Health
The Living City
The Social Mobility of Women
Origins and destinations, Pamela Abbott and Geoff Payne women's social mobility - the conventional wisdom reconisdered, Pamela Abbott and Geoff Payne the mobility of women and men, Tony Chapman a re-examination of the The Theses Re-examined, Pamela Abbott the changing pattern of early career mobility, Geoff Payne, Judy Payne and Tony Chpaman gender and intergenerational mobility, Robert Miller and Bernadette Hayes the career mobility of women and…
Landlord and Tenant
Sociology in Action
Housing without houses
Social Mobility and Social Structure
Sociology (49 works) · Political science (30 works) · Social science (26 works) · Economics (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Business (14 works) · Geography (13 works) · Economic growth (12 works) · Social mobility (12 works)