Lydia Morris
Biographic Data
| ID | 89676 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lydia Morris |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lydia |
| FAMILY NAME | Morris |
| SIGNATURE | MORRIS L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Essex |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-6153-4624 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 73 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 535 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 72 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Classification and Control
This article engages Douglas caution against an ‘unsociological view of cognition’ that fails to recognise classification as an epistemological issue. In so doing, it offers a conceptual framework for addressing this linkage in relation to British attempts to define asylum all-but out of existence. Taking Zetter’s account of the fragmentation of refugee status as a starting point, and outlining the relevance of civic stratification for his argume…
Through their eyes
In the UK, when people with dementia are regarded as a risk to themselves or others, they are usually admitted compulsorily onto a National Health Service dementia inpatient ward, under the 1983 Mental Health Act. Remarkably little is known about the experiences of informal (family) carers supporting these individuals with dementia during their stay; this study is the first to explore those experiences. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews wit…
Citizen Rights, Migrant Rights and Civic Stratification
This book explores the concept of civic stratification and examines its contemporary relevance for analysis and understanding of the functioning of rights in society. David Lockwood’s (1996) concept of civic stratification outlines the way in which the rights associated with citizenship can be a source of inequality by virtue of their formal granting or denial by the state, or by informal impediments to their full realisation. The purpose of this…
Communication skills training for family caregivers of people living with dementia
Family caregivers of people with dementia can find the impairments in their relative’s ability to communicate an enormous challenge. Peer facilitated educational interventions are a potentially efficient and effective way to address these complex communication issues. This paper examines the processes required to support the development of peer educators and the impact this has had on facilitators and course attendees. Semi-structured interviews …
Self-reported benefits for care partners of attending a person-centred dementia cafe
Informal care partners of individuals with dementia are often referred to as the ‘invisible patient’, whose needs are under-represented in research. The physical, mental and emotional responsibilities of caring for someone with dementia can be both rewarding and challenging. This qualitative study explored how attending a dementia cafe affected care partner well-being. The co-designed cafe adopted a person-centred approach, valuing members’ uniqu…
Perspectives of people living with dementia and their care partners about the impact on social health when participating in a co‐designed Dementia café
Those diagnosed with dementia and those who provide care and support often feel socially isolated with limited opportunities for social engagement, increasing the potential for loneliness and further isolation that is detrimental to social health. This study examined how a co-designed dementia café impacted on the self-reported social health of community dwelling people with dementia and their care partners in the North-West of England. Semi-stru…
Moral economy from above and below
In 2010, Britain’s newly elected Coalition government ushered in a ‘moral mission’ of welfare reform. This paper considers its extension to the management of non-EEA migration and asylum, viewed here in the context of Fassin’s conception of moral economy and related debate. The paper argues that the ensuing policy regime can be analysed as a moral economy ‘from above’, in terms of its underlying objectives and rationale, which is then challenged …
The topology of welfare–migration–asylum
Starting from the observation that recent immigration controls seem ‘hewn from the same rock’ as the welfare reforms, this article seeks to identify commonalities of approach, technique and effect across both fields. These can usefully be viewed through the concept of topology – a process of folding and filtering that challenges clear distinctions between inclusion and exclusion. Alongside a stratified system of rights based on conceptions of des…
Activating the Welfare Subject
While accepting Banton's recently expressed view that sociology and social policy are distinct disciplines, this article argues that times of radical change can profitably bring the two into closer dialogue. Considering an argument from Emirbayer and Mische that agency becomes especially apparent in unsettled times, it focuses on conceptions of agency at play in the design and implementation of recent UK welfare reforms, and in subsequent legal c…
Reconfiguring Rights in Austerity Britain
This paper addresses policy change in Britain since 2010 across the three fields of domestic welfare, migration and asylum, and analyses the association between welfare, conditionality and control through the lens of civic stratification. Drawing on the work of Richard Munch and Mary Douglas, it moves beyond existing literature in this area to show that the more complex the classification in play, and the more severe its boundary implications, th…
Moralising’ Welfare and migration in austerity Britain
This article begins by examining UK government discourse on welfare and migration for the period 2010–2016, viewed here as the expression of a distinctive process of moralisation. This discourse is characterised by claims to fairness, responsibility, and austerity, and explicitly sets domestic welfare dependency and migration in opposition to each other. Its operationalisation is traced through a formal mapping of civic stratification in relation…
Obituary for Robert Fine - 1945-2018
Rights
This entry begins with a view of rights as the outcome of social and political processes, and provides a brief account of the relationship between citizenship rights and universal human rights. It outlines key elements of civil, political, and social rights respectively, and moves on to examine the challenge posed by universal human rights. In this context it discusses transnational migration, postnationalism, civic stratification, and cosmopolit…
Gender Relations in Public and Private
The moral economy of austerity
This paper notes the contemporary emergence of 'morality' in both sociological argument and political rhetoric, and analyses its significance in relation to ongoing UK welfare reforms. It revisits the idea of 'moral economy' and identifies two strands in its contemporary application; that all economies depend on an internal moral schema, and that some external moral evaluation is desirable. UK welfare reform is analysed as an example of the forme…
Squaring the circle
Domestic welfare reform and the management of international migration in Britain have been described by David Cameron as ?two sides of the same coin?. Heightened conditions and sanctions for the benefit-dependent domestic population, both in and out of work, are being harnessed as a means of promoting labour market change and reducing demand for low-skilled migrants ? often EU workers, whose own access to benefit is being curtailed. Arguments abo…
Sans Papiers
This is a book about the lives of young undocumented migrants in the UK. It is based on seventy-five qualitative interviews with young people (aged eighteen to thirty-one) from Brazil, Zimbabwe, Uk
Human Rights and Social Theory
This book examines the contribution social theory can make to understanding different human rights which operate in a variety of settings. Including an introduction to the theoretical issues raised by the study of rights, it covers a range of individual and collective rights, illuminating the relationship between social theory and human rights
Cosmopolitanism — Beyond the ‘Beautiful Idea’
This article outlines the key features of the ‘big idea’ of cosmopolitanism (Beck 2002), which are viewed against a set of commonly recognised countervailing forces. The article then argues for both conceptual elaboration and empirical observation to be focused on the social processes which mediate between the normative ideal and concrete manifestations of cosmopolitanism. Examples are provided in relation to three issues: the allocation of right…
Understanding torture
This article explores the contribution that social theory can make to an understanding of the practice of torture. After a contextual introduction it addresses the idealist–realist divide, and the use made of Durkheim and Weber to respectively support two irreconcilable positions, thus displaying the limits of theory. The article then argues that social theory may be better suited to a more modest aim of analysing the social relations, social str…
Citizenship and human rights
In her Debate article (Soysal 2012), Yasemin Soysal outlines a now familiar argument. As Jessop (1999) cogently puts it, challenges to the Keynesian Welfare National State model driven by a changing global division of labour have produced a Schumpeterian Workfare Postnational Regime of permanent innovation, flexibility and competitiveness. These broad structural changes are commonly argued to have been accompanied, and in part facilitated, by a s…
Rights, Recognition and Judgment
This article begins with Marshall's essay on citizenship and its significance in confirming equal social standing, seen here as a precursor to work on rights and recognition. Taylor and Honneth are taken as exemplars of a dialogical perspective, whereby recognition through rights can provide a source of identity formation, though Honneth's approach is broader in scope, being less confined to the issue of cultural rights. This work is argued to be…
Asylum, Welfare and the Cosmopolitan Ideal
Asylum, Welfare and the Cosmopolitan Ideal: A Sociology of Rights puts forward the argument that rights must be understood as part of a social process: a terrain for strategies of inclusion and exclusion but also of contestation and negotiation. Engaging debate about how ?cosmopolitan? principles and practices may be transforming national sovereignty, Lydia Morris explores this premise through a case study of legal activism, civil society mobilis…
Sociology and the Two Faces of Human Rights
This article begins with a reference to Turner and Water’s debate over a foundational versus constructionist approach to human rights. Noting some scope for complementarity between the two, it moves on to consider a different divide; human rights discourse as the driver of expressive and expansive social movements; and human rights practice as deployed in the interests of power and control. The former is explored in relation to rights, recognitio…
Welfare, Asylum and the Politics of Judgment
This article examines 14 judgments over a ten-year period of challenge to the removal of welfare support from 'late claimers' for asylum. The case history spans a period of transition in Britain from the general principles of the Common Law to the implementation of the Human Rights Act (HRA) (Home Office, 1998), but indeterminacy is to the fore in such a developing area of law, allowing considerable scope for judicial interpretation. The focus of…
Managing Contradiction
Political and academic interest in cross-national migration has generated two very different and potentially polarized positions. One perspective emphasizes the continuing power or the nation state, while the other sees migration, and more specifically migrants’ rights, as the manifestation of an emergent ‘post-national’ society. This article offers a conceptual framework which addresses this polarization through the concept of civic stratificati…
Dangerous classes
Provides an authoritative and critical review of British and American debates about the underclass, set in the context of historical material and policy developments
Globalization, Migration and the Nation-State
This paper begins by noting a number of recent trends which challenge the self-contained autonomy of the nation-state and the recent conceptualization of such trends in terms of `globalization....[It is] a preliminary exploration of the issues raised by international population flows and policy responses in the context of the European Union (EU). Minimally it proffers an account of the global/national tension noted in much of the globalization li…
Local Social Networks and Domestic Organisations
This paper applies the seminal insight of Elizabeth Bott (1957) to an analysis of the domestic organisation and local social networks of 40 redundant steel workers and their wives. Certain methodological problems which arose in the course of the research prompted a reconsideration of particular aspects of existing work in this field, and a more detailed specification of the possible patterns of interaction resulting from the independent and joint…
The moral economy of austerity
This paper notes the contemporary emergence of 'morality' in both sociological argument and political rhetoric, and analyses its significance in relation to ongoing UK welfare reforms. It revisits the idea of 'moral economy' and identifies two strands in its contemporary application; that all economies depend on an internal moral schema, and that some external moral evaluation is desirable. UK welfare reform is analysed as an example of the forme…
Constraints on Gender
In this paper, using data gathered from 40 married or cohabiting couples in Hartlepool, I argue that despite challenges to the 'family wage' through long-term male unemployment, growing job insecurity, increased economic activity of married women, and the demonstrable importance of their earnings for the household, a wife's role as earner or potential earner continues to be viewed as peripheral. This is largely to be explained by an interaction b…
Social Divisions
Britain's asylum and immigration regime
This paper addresses the question of how to advance the sociology of migrants' rights, in the context of universalist claims with regard to the emergence of 'post-national' rights. It is argued that attention should be paid to a more traditionally sociological approach which emphasises boundary drawing and the varied processes of inclusion and exclusion in the construction and implementation of rights--such as to constitute a system of 'civic str…
Unemployment and Informal Support
This paper reports on research carried out in Hartlepool, and is based on a comparison between four groupings; couples in which the man is long-term unemployed; couples in which the man is securely employed; couples in which the man was recently recruited to employment; and couples in which the man is out of the labour-force. The paper asks the question of to what extent the social polarization between households detected by Pahl and others, exte…
Patterns of Social Activity and Post-Redundancy Labour-Market Experience
This paper examines the post-redundancy labour-market experience of forty redundant steel workers. The data presented suggest that poor conditions of employment, associated with a relative increase in the use of contractors by large scale enterprise has encouraged an increase in informal means of recruitment, minimizing cost to the employer and maximizing co-operation from the workforce. The effects of special provisions for redundants are discus…
Civic Stratification and the Cosmopolitan Ideal
Beck (2006) has suggested that trans-national migration and the consolidation of human rights are features of an emergent cosmopolitan society in which we see a blurring of distinctions with respect to the rights of citizens and non-citizens. This paper argues that the presence of noncitizens on national territory has rather been accompanied by an expansion of distinctions in a system of civic stratification. It outlines the construction of asylu…
Is There a British Underclass
Household Strategies
Recent treatments of the household effects of economic change have tended to focus on household outcomes with reference to the use of resources of time and labour, paying scant attention to differences of power and interest within the home. It is suggested here that the most fruitful focus for the investigation of such intrahousehold divisions is the management of household finance. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate, by reference to exi…
Local social polarization
Redundancy and Patterns of Household Finance
This paper examines the nature and implications of different patterns of income flow within households in the critical situation of redundancy for the male main earner. In a sample of forty households a number of different patterns of resource allocation were found, and may be divided into four general types: one based on female control, two on male control, and one on dual control. A normative tendency to attach priority to items of collective h…
Stratified rights and the management of migration
This article offers a comparative study of rights and controls with respect to migration, based on research in Germany, Britain and Italy. These three countries were chosen both for their differing histories and for their contrasting contemporary circumstances, as a means of identifying the problems which confront any attempt at harmonization. The analysis offers an approach midway between an exaggerated view of national closure and control, and …
An emergent cosmopolitan paradigm? Asylum, welfare and human rights1
This paper addresses the recognition in cosmopolitan debate of a possible disjuncture between the normative ideal of cosmopolitanism and its realization in practice. Taking as its focus the potential conflict between human rights commitments and national concern about immigration control, it reflects on a series of legal challenges to UK government attempts to withdraw support from asylum seekers who do not claim on entry into the country. Set in…
Informal Aspects of Social Divisions
The workings of the household
A Cluster of Contradictions
The increasing scale of transnational migration is sociologically one of the most interesting features of contemporary life, not least because of the analytical challenges posed by the complexity of this phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to explore the contradictions inherent in policy approaches to migration in the EU - the logic of the market is weighed against welfare protectionism; welfare and labour market regulation against demands for c…
New Labour's Community of Rights
This article shows how a conditional approach to rights dominates New Labour's perspective, not only in the delivery of welfare for full citizens but also in relation to immigration, where rights are a privilege to be earned by meeting labour market needs. This approach does not readily address the position of asylum seekers, who are claiming an absolute right of protection, but an erosion of entitlement during status determination has been used …
Employment Histories and the Concept of the Underclass
This paper reports on research carried out in Hartlepool, based on data from three groups of male respondents: (1) those employed for at least the last twelve months; (2) those recently recruited to employment, (i.e. within the last twelve months); (3) those currently employed and having held the same job for the last twelve months. By comparing the work histories and characterising features of these three groupings the paper sets out to explore …
The Attenuation of Class Analysis
The work of Marshall, Roberts and Burgoyne makes an important contribution to current debates on class, but it is argued that its theoretical basis is in need of further development. Specifically, it is argued that the 'Nuffield programme' of class analysis has lost sight of its Weberian roots. The approach departs from a view of social classes as real social groups and moves towards a nominalist view of class in which categories are justified on…
The Ambiguous Terrain of Rights
In a period marked by heightened interest in the domain of rights, this article focuses on the delivery of rights with respect to cross-national migrants and, in particular, on the position of non-EU migrants in Italy. Italy is chosen as a special case, having moved quickly and recently to establish a regime of both rights and controls with respect to migration, culminating in its 1998 legislation. The article considers the emerging picture of ri…
Squaring the circle
Domestic welfare reform and the management of international migration in Britain have been described by David Cameron as ?two sides of the same coin?. Heightened conditions and sanctions for the benefit-dependent domestic population, both in and out of work, are being harnessed as a means of promoting labour market change and reducing demand for low-skilled migrants ? often EU workers, whose own access to benefit is being curtailed. Arguments abo…
Women without Men
Relating household forms to socio-economic status in El Bajo, Puerto Rico, I give a summary of the economic situation there, and detail the roles of various forms of public assistance. I show how half the male household heads and 21 of 2 7 female household heads are dependent on aid. Comparisons within E1 Bajo are made, showing an increase in unstable marriage associated with the introduction of assistance to single mothers; and a lower rate of i…
Women in Poverty
This paper is based on a consideration of the resources available to women living in conditions of poverty in Mexico City. In a sample of 50 households 4 separate housing clusters randomly selected from impoverished areas within the metropolitan zone I outline patterns of employment as related to household composition and the domestic economy. Women were commonly found to work outside the home, both in the absence of a resident male in the husban…
Renegotiation of the Sexual Division of Labour
Redundancy and Patterns of Household Finance
This paper examines the nature and implications of different patterns of income flow within households in the critical situation of redundancy for the male main earner. In a sample of forty households a number of different patterns of resource allocation were found, and may be divided into four general types: one based on female control, two on male control, and one on dual control. A normative tendency to attach priority to items of collective h…
Patterns of Social Activity and Post-Redundancy Labour-Market Experience
This paper examines the post-redundancy labour-market experience of forty redundant steel workers. The data presented suggest that poor conditions of employment, associated with a relative increase in the use of contractors by large scale enterprise has encouraged an increase in informal means of recruitment, minimizing cost to the employer and maximizing co-operation from the workforce. The effects of special provisions for redundants are discus…
Local Social Networks and Domestic Organisations
This paper applies the seminal insight of Elizabeth Bott (1957) to an analysis of the domestic organisation and local social networks of 40 redundant steel workers and their wives. Certain methodological problems which arose in the course of the research prompted a reconsideration of particular aspects of existing work in this field, and a more detailed specification of the possible patterns of interaction resulting from the independent and joint…
Local social polarization
Constraints on Gender
In this paper, using data gathered from 40 married or cohabiting couples in Hartlepool, I argue that despite challenges to the 'family wage' through long-term male unemployment, growing job insecurity, increased economic activity of married women, and the demonstrable importance of their earnings for the household, a wife's role as earner or potential earner continues to be viewed as peripheral. This is largely to be explained by an interaction b…
The Local State and Uneven Development
Local policy, local state and local social relations uneven development and the local state centralizing the local government system - finance centralizing the local government system - policy destroying local government autonomy the local government problem won't go away the regional state
Household Strategies
Recent treatments of the household effects of economic change have tended to focus on household outcomes with reference to the use of resources of time and labour, paying scant attention to differences of power and interest within the home. It is suggested here that the most fruitful focus for the investigation of such intrahousehold divisions is the management of household finance. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate, by reference to exi…
The workings of the household
The Youth Review
A Decade of Change
The Workings of the Household
Locality Studies and the Household
One aspect of the growth in enthusiasm for locality studies has been the idea that they provide a focus for understanding local variation in all aspects of life, even down to the experience of the household. The author takes issue with that contention. The locality has usually been defined with reference to the rounds of investment and production decisions which have been central to the construction of local labour markets. This is not the level …
Workings of the Household
The Social Segregation of the Long-Term Unemployed in Hartlepool
This paper reports on research designed to investigate the nature and implications of the social segregation of the long term unemployed in a Northern UK town suffering high rates of unemployment. The project is designed to test the hypothesis that the social polarisation identified by Pahl (1984), confirmed by this writer's small scale research, and apparent in national statistics, reaches beyond the household to the extended family, and to frie…
Unemployment and Informal Support
This paper reports on research carried out in Hartlepool, and is based on a comparison between four groupings; couples in which the man is long-term unemployed; couples in which the man is securely employed; couples in which the man was recently recruited to employment; and couples in which the man is out of the labour-force. The paper asks the question of to what extent the social polarization between households detected by Pahl and others, exte…
Employment Histories and the Concept of the Underclass
This paper reports on research carried out in Hartlepool, based on data from three groups of male respondents: (1) those employed for at least the last twelve months; (2) those recently recruited to employment, (i.e. within the last twelve months); (3) those currently employed and having held the same job for the last twelve months. By comparing the work histories and characterising features of these three groupings the paper sets out to explore …
Is There a British Underclass
Domestic Labour and Employment Status among Married Couples
This article, partly in response to Wheelock's article in Capital & Class (1990), examines the issue of flexibility, with regard to domestic labour, between married couples with different patterns of employment/unemployment. Morris argues that women's role within the home will not be strengthened so long as they are restricted to part-time work-which, in essence, is designed to accomodate their 'domestic obligations
Household Finance Management and the Labour Market
This paper reports on the results of a survey carried out in Hartlepool towards the end of 1989. It considers the problems posed by data collection through survey methods to enquire into the management of household finances, and adopts a procedure which first examines treatment of the man's wage, and follows with additional questions about use of the woman's wage, access to personal spending money, and the location of final authority over spendin…
Migrants and Migration
The fourth volume of Work, Employment and Society, published in 1990, carried a review article by Robert Miles, entitled 'Whatever Happened to the Sociology of Migration?' The absence of any fully developed British interest in the topic is attributed, in part, to the dominance of a race relations paradigm within British sociology, and one of Miles' principal concerns in his 1990 article was to challenge the equation of 'immigrant' with 'coloured …
Social Security or Economic Insecurity? The Concentration of Unemployment (and Research) Within Households
The social security structure has been seen as a serious disincentive to the employment of women married to unemployed men. The implied significance of this disincentive is not apparent from verbal accounts, where only a minority of such women cite social security considerations as having any direct relevance in their own labour force experience. Recent research, critical of the social security model, has been conducted with a view to exploring t…
Are the Poor Always with Us
Sociology (53 works) · Political science (50 works) · Law (39 works) · Economics (29 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (24 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (24 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Law and economics (18 works) · Human rights (16 works)