Friedman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3971 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Friedman |
| FAMILY NAME | Friedman |
| SIGNATURE | FRIEDMAN |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0629-1761 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1291 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Common people? The elite market for ordinariness and how it legitimises income inequality
Recent research has established that elites in many contexts are keen to portray themselves as ordinary and that such strategies of impression management have distinct reputational pay-offs. In this article, we draw on a range of experiments with a representative sample of the UK population to explore what happens when elite expressions of ordinariness are undermined. Our results suggest that elites are generally not punished when new – and poten…
A family affair: Cultural class and micro-class reproduction in academia
Academics occupy a privileged position in society. They enjoy high levels of status, above-average incomes, and play a vital role in both producing scientific knowledge and educating the future labour force. Yet, while the diversity of academics in terms of gender, ethnicity and internationalisation has long been prominent on the public and sociological agenda, the issue of class background has been comparatively absent. This gap has been partly …
Autosociobiography and social mobility: An introduction to the special issue
This introduction explains why the autosociobiography genre offers the potential for an innovative and important way to link sociological research on social mobility with literary scholarship. It introduces and contextualises the papers included in this special issue.
Beyond the ‘Scholarship Boy’ paradigm: Autosociobiography and social mobility
This article reflects on the potential of the rapidly emerging literary genre of autosociobiography to extend analyses of the personal experience and feelings associated with social mobility. We reflect on the congruence of its themes regarding the dislocating and isolating effects of upward social mobility with important recent research in qualitative sociology, which have exposed the weakness of quantitative social scientific studies for unders…
Capitalism, the Left, and Nature as it Is: A Second Reply to Victor Wallis on Covid
Reimagine Aid, Don’t Destroy It
We Didn’t Know What We Were Eating Tomorrow: How Class Origin Shapes the Political Outlook of Members of the Parliament in Britain
Most work in political science on class and political ideology is focussed on politicians’ class destination rather than class origins. Yet that is inconsistent with evidence in the case of the United Kingdom that the conditions of someone’s family upbringing do influence their politics. This article revisits the conceptualisation of class background in the current literature by redirecting attention to the sociological concept of class origin. W…
The Left is Not Immune: Some Thoughts on Covid-Related Lab Leak and Vaccine Fixations
How are cultural tastes stratified? Evidence from library borrowing for the entire population of Denmark
Research shows that cultural tastes are socially stratified. Yet, most of this research relies on small-sample surveys and includes only a few dimensions of stratification. To address these limitations, we analyse registry data on library borrowing for the entire adult population of Denmark and consider four dimensions of social stratification: wealth, education, income, and occupation. We find considerable social stratification in library borrow…
Is Misrecognition Recognised? Classed Perceptions of Occupational Status
Sociological work commonly assumes that people across the class hierarchy tacitly accept, or misrecognise, an occupational status hierarchy. In this article we interrogate this drawing on unique nationally representative Norwegian survey data (N = 4235). We find that people in all class positions do indeed perceive a clear occupational status hierarchy, although working-class respondents attribute higher average status scores to working-class occ…
Outsiders on the inside: How Minoritised Elites Respond to Racial Inequality
Given the slow progress on increasing racial and ethnic diversity at the highest levels of society, it is important to ask what role racialisation plays in the experience of minoritised individuals who do reach an elite position. More specifically, this article asks how minoritised elites respond to racial inequality in their careers. Drawing on 30 interviews with British racialised minorities who have achieved positions of notable leadership or …
Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite
The Economist , Best Books of 2024 The Times , Best Ideas Books of 2024 A uniquely data-rich analysis of the British elite from the Victorian era to today: who gets in, how they get there, what they like and look like, where they go to school, and what politics they perpetuate. Are Britain’s power brokers a conservative chumocracy, born to privilege and anointed at Eton and Oxford? Or is a new progressive elite emerging with different values and …
Who needs quantification
As The Warming Comes
The Class Ceiling in the United States: Class-Origin Pay Penalties in Higher Professional and Managerial Occupations
Gender and racial pay penalties are well-known: women (of all races) and people of color (of all genders) earn less, on average, even when they gain access to occupations historically reserved for White men. Studies of social mobility show that people from working-class backgrounds in the US have also been excluded from top professional and managerial occupations. But do working-class-origin people who attain top US jobs face a class-origin pay p…
The Meaning of Merit: Talent versus Hard Work Legitimacy
Elites often use merit to explain, justify, and make sense of their advantaged positions. But what exactly do they mean by this? In this paper, we draw on 71 interviews with elites in Denmark and the UK to compare self-justifications of meritocratic legitimacy. Our results indicate that while elites in both countries are united by a common concern to frame their merits as spontaneously recognized by others (rather than strategically promoted by t…
Is there an old girls’ network? Girls’ schools and recruitment to the British elite
Private schools have long played a crucial role in male elite formation but their importance to women’s trajectories is less clear. In this paper, we explore the relationship between girls’ private schools and elite recruitment in Britain over the past 120 years – drawing on the historical database of Who’s Who, a unique catalogue of the elite. We find that alumni of elite girls schools have been around 20 times more likely than other women to re…
Climbing the Velvet Drainpipe: Class Background and Career Progression within the UK Civil Service
Although the theory of representative bureaucracy originates from concerns about the class composition of the public sector workforce, questions of class background have been notably absent in subsequent scholarship. In this article, I take advantage of new data on the class backgrounds of UK civil servants (N = 308, 566) to, first, explore descriptively how class shapes the composition of the civil service, both vertically in terms of occupation…
(Not) bringing your whole self to work: The gendered experience of upward mobility in the UK Civil Service
Women from working‐class backgrounds face a multiplicative earnings penalty in Britain's elite occupations. In this paper, I explore one driver of this “double disadvantage”; a strong gender divide in who discusses and displays a working‐class identity in the workplace. Drawing on data from the 2019 UK Civil Service People Survey ( n = 300,788) and 104 interviews with civil servants, I find that men from working‐class backgrounds are more likely …
Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self
Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular 'origin stories' which ac…
Family Wealth and the Class Ceiling: The Propulsive Power of The Bank of Mum and Dad
In this article we demonstrate that those from working-class backgrounds face a powerful 'class ceiling' in elite occupations. Examining how class origin shapes economic returns in the Norwegian upper class (3.8% of the population), we first find that the income advantage enjoyed by those from privileged backgrounds increases sharply as they ascend the income distribution in both elite business and cultural fields. Second, we show that those from…
Justifying inherited wealth: Between 'the bank of mum and dad' and the meritocratic ideal
How do people reconcile belief in meritocracy with the receipt of unearned economic gifts? Drawing on interviews with first time homeowners who had bought property with familial gifts or inheritances, we find that many downplay the intergenerational privilege associated with gifting by reporting extended family histories of working-class struggle, upward social mobility and meritocratic striving. Interviewees also draw boundaries between their ow…
Rural risk environments, opioid-related overdose, and infectious diseases: A multidimensional, spatial perspective
Feminist Activism Confronts Covid-19
Activist Responses Feminist Studies 46, no. 3. (c) 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 629 Constanza Tabbush and Elisabeth Jay Friedman Feminist Activism Confronts COVID-19 Even the most committed of feminists may see the current global health crisis as insurmountable.1 The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare- and exacerbated-deep-seated and interlocking inequalities. Women and gender non-conforming people, particularly those without class and ethno-racia…
From Aristocratic to Ordinary: Shifting Modes of Elite Distinction
How do elites signal their superior social position via the consumption of culture? We address this question by drawing on 120 years of "recreations" data ( N = 71,393) contained within Who's Who, a unique catalogue of the British elite. Our results reveal three historical phases of elite cultural distinction: first, a mode of aristocratic practice forged around the leisure possibilities afforded by landed estates, which waned significantly in th…
A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC's Great British Class Survey Experiment
The social scientific analysis of social class is attracting renewed interest given the accentuation of economic and social inequalities throughout the world. The most widely validated measure of social class, the Nuffield class schema, developed in the 1970s, was codified in the UK's National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) and places people in one of seven main classes according to their occupation and employment status. This …
Habitus Clivé and the Emotional Imprint of Social Mobility
Increasing social mobility is the 'principal goal' of the British Government's social policy ( Cabinet Office, 2011 : 5). However, while policy perspectives present mobility as an unambiguously progressive force, there is a striking absence of studies looking at the impact of mobility on individuals themselves. Drawing on 39 lifecourse interviews with upwardly mobile respondents drawn from the UK Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Project (CCS…
The Class Pay Gap in Higher Professional and Managerial Occupations
This article demonstrates how class origin shapes earnings in higher professional and managerial employment. Taking advantage of newly released data in Britain's Labour Force Survey, we examine the relative openness of different high-status occupations and the earnings of the upwardly mobile within them. In terms of access, we find a distinction between traditional professions, such as law, medicine, and finance, which are dominated by the childr…
From Aristocratic to Ordinary: Shifting Modes of Elite Distinction
How do elites signal their superior social position via the consumption of culture? We address this question by drawing on 120 years of "recreations" data ( N = 71,393) contained within Who's Who, a unique catalogue of the British elite. Our results reveal three historical phases of elite cultural distinction: first, a mode of aristocratic practice forged around the leisure possibilities afforded by landed estates, which waned significantly in th…
The Decline and Persistence of the Old Boy: Private Schools and Elite Recruitment 1897 to 2016
We draw on 120 years of biographical data ( N = 120,764) contained within Who's Who-a unique catalogue of the British elite-to explore the changing relationship between elite schools and elite recruitment. We find that the propulsive power of Britain's public schools has diminished significantly over time. This is driven in part by the wane of military and religious elites, and the rise of women in the labor force. However, the most dramatic decl…
Cultural sociology and new forms of distinction
The Price of the Ticket: Rethinking the Experience of Social Mobility
Increasing social mobility is the 'principal goal' of the current Coalition Government's social policy. However, while mainstream political discourse frames mobility as an unequivocally progressive force, there is a striking absence of studies examining the long-term impact of mobility on individuals themselves. In British sociology the most influential research was carried out by Goldthorpe 40 years ago and argued that the mobile were overwhelmi…
Are the creative industries meritocratic? An analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey
There is currently widespread concern that Britain’s cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are increasingly dominated by the privileged. This stands in stark contrast to dominant policy narratives of the CCIs as meritocratic. Until now this debate has been clouded by a relative paucity of data on class origins. This paper draws on new social origin data from the 2014 Labour Force Survey to provide the first large-scale, representative study of …
Cultural omnivores or culturally homeless? Exploring the shifting cultural identities of the upwardly mobile
The cultural currency of a 'good' sense of humour: British comedy and new forms of distinction
Traditionally considered lowbrow art par excellence, British comedy has grown steadily in legitimacy since the 'Alternative Comedy Movement' of the early 1980s. Yet while there might be evidence of a transformation in British comic production, there is little understanding of how this has been reflected in patterns of consumption. Indeed, there is a remarkable absence of studies probing comedy taste in British cultural sociology, most notably in …
Breaking the 'Class' Ceiling? Social Mobility into Britain's Elite Occupations
In this paper we use the unusually large sample size of the Great British Class Survey to compare rates of social mobility into different elite occupations. We find a distinction between 'traditional' professions, such as law, medicine and finance, which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals, and technical or emerging high-status occupations, particularly those related to IT, that appear to recruit more widely. Second…
The Divisive Power of Humour: Comedy, Taste and Symbolic Boundaries
Using British and Dutch interview data, this article demonstrates how people from different social classes draw strong symbolic boundaries on the basis of comedy taste. Eschewing the omnivorousness described in recent studies of cultural consumption, comedy audiences make negative aesthetic and moral judgements on the basis of comedy taste, and often make harsh judgements without the disclaimers, apologies and ambivalence so typical of 'taste tal…
Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self
Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular 'origin stories' which ac…
Like Skydiving without a Parachute: How Class Origin Shapes Occupational Trajectories in British Acting
There is currently widespread concern that access to, and success within, the British acting profession is increasingly dominated by those from privileged class origins. This article seeks to empirically interrogate this claim using data on actors from the Great British Class Survey ( N = 404) and 47 qualitative interviews. First, survey data demonstrate that actors from working-class origins are significantly underrepresented within the professi…
On Social Class, Anno 2014
This article responds to the critical reception of the arguments made about social class in Savage et al. (2013). It emphasises the need to disentangle different strands of debate so as not to conflate four separate issues: (a) the value of the seven class model proposed; (b) the potential of the large web survey - the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) for future research; (c) the value of Bourdieusian perspectives for re-energising class analysi…
Family Wealth and the Class Ceiling: The Propulsive Power of The Bank of Mum and Dad
In this article we demonstrate that those from working-class backgrounds face a powerful 'class ceiling' in elite occupations. Examining how class origin shapes economic returns in the Norwegian upper class (3.8% of the population), we first find that the income advantage enjoyed by those from privileged backgrounds increases sharply as they ascend the income distribution in both elite business and cultural fields. Second, we show that those from…
Producing and Consuming Inequality: A Cultural Sociology of the Cultural Industries
Even when shocks in a firm's environment are predictable, their consequences are not. Using the relocation of the Dallas Cowboys Stadium as a rich case of such a disruption, we investigate how combinations of strategic interpretation and spatial distance influence incumbent business owners' decisions to pursue temporal adaptation as a response. Temporal adaptation (TA) comprises timing rather than content changes by the firm seeking to adjust to …
Justifying inherited wealth: Between 'the bank of mum and dad' and the meritocratic ideal
How do people reconcile belief in meritocracy with the receipt of unearned economic gifts? Drawing on interviews with first time homeowners who had bought property with familial gifts or inheritances, we find that many downplay the intergenerational privilege associated with gifting by reporting extended family histories of working-class struggle, upward social mobility and meritocratic striving. Interviewees also draw boundaries between their ow…
Mind the gap: Financial London and the regional class pay gap
The hidden barriers, or 'gender pay gap', preventing women from earning equivalent incomes to men is well documented. Yet recent research has uncovered that, in Britain, there is also a comparable class-origin pay gap in higher professional and managerial occupations. So far this analysis has only been conducted at the national level and it is not known whether there are regional differences within the UK. This paper uses pooled data from the 201…
The Meaning of Merit: Talent versus Hard Work Legitimacy
Elites often use merit to explain, justify, and make sense of their advantaged positions. But what exactly do they mean by this? In this paper, we draw on 71 interviews with elites in Denmark and the UK to compare self-justifications of meritocratic legitimacy. Our results indicate that while elites in both countries are united by a common concern to frame their merits as spontaneously recognized by others (rather than strategically promoted by t…
Cultural Capital: Arts Graduates, Spatial Inequality, and London's Impact on Cultural Labor Markets
This article looks at the degree to which spatial inequalities reinforce other forms of social inequality in cultural labor markets. It does so using the example of London, an acknowledged hub for the creative and cultural industries. Using pooled data from 2013 to 2015 quarters of the United Kingdom's. Labour Force Survey, we consider the social makeup of London's cultural labor force, and reveal the extent to which, rather than acting as an "en…
The hidden tastemakers: Comedy scouts as cultural brokers at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
(Not) bringing your whole self to work: The gendered experience of upward mobility in the UK Civil Service
Women from working‐class backgrounds face a multiplicative earnings penalty in Britain's elite occupations. In this paper, I explore one driver of this “double disadvantage”; a strong gender divide in who discusses and displays a working‐class identity in the workplace. Drawing on data from the 2019 UK Civil Service People Survey ( n = 300,788) and 104 interviews with civil servants, I find that men from working‐class backgrounds are more likely …
Resistance and Resignation: Responses to Typecasting in British Acting
This article draws on 38 in-depth interviews with British actors to explore the operation of typecasting. First, we argue that typecasting acts as the key mechanism through which the ‘somatic norm’ is established in British acting. It delivers an oversupply of leading roles for white, male, middle-class actors while ensuring that those who deviate somatically are restricted to largely socially caricatured roles. Second, we focus on the career tra…
Feminist Activism Confronts Covid-19
Activist Responses Feminist Studies 46, no. 3. (c) 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 629 Constanza Tabbush and Elisabeth Jay Friedman Feminist Activism Confronts COVID-19 Even the most committed of feminists may see the current global health crisis as insurmountable.1 The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare- and exacerbated-deep-seated and interlocking inequalities. Women and gender non-conforming people, particularly those without class and ethno-racia…
Social Change and Rank and File Newspapers
Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2009: The Year of the Anti-Comedian
Money, Drugs, and Bodies: Examining Exchange Sex from Multiple Perspectives
Research on men who sell sex has primarily focused on psychological profiles and HIV risk factors. Substantially less literature examines the consumers in the male-to-male exchange sex dyad. This article examines the perspectives of venders and consumers. Data come from a qualitative study of a group of 26 men who recently exchanged sex for money or drugs in New York City. Findings indicate that a complex set of interactions between motivation, c…
Enough
Fantasies Become
Sexual contexts and the process of risk reduction
Understanding the dynamics of sexual risks for HIV among men who have sex with men has been one of the ongoing challenges of HIV prevention. While the majority of HIV-prevention interventions target individual behaviour and decision making, multiple studies point to the importance of social context in shaping risk behaviour. Analysis of qualitative data from a study of men who have sex with men, drug use and sex found that sexual encounters were …
The cultural currency of a 'good' sense of humour: British comedy and new forms of distinction
Traditionally considered lowbrow art par excellence, British comedy has grown steadily in legitimacy since the 'Alternative Comedy Movement' of the early 1980s. Yet while there might be evidence of a transformation in British comic production, there is little understanding of how this has been reflected in patterns of consumption. Indeed, there is a remarkable absence of studies probing comedy taste in British cultural sociology, most notably in …
"Jewish History as "Historia Patria: José Amador de los Ríos and the History of the Jews of Spain
This article describes the pioneering work of José Amador de los Ríos, author of the first modern history of the Jews of Spain. Through discussion of his life and work, the article illustrates how Spain’s Jewish past became an object of debate in the nineteenth century, as Spanish scholars and politicians placed historiography at the service of rival political causes. It also explores some of the ways in which the Sephardic past figured into emer…
Ode to wisteria
Cultural omnivores or culturally homeless? Exploring the shifting cultural identities of the upwardly mobile
Russell Kane: Comic chameleon
Two years after winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award, Russell Kane has carved out a successful niche straddling the divide between high and low culture. Sam Friedman finds a man at peace with his inner contradictions
Les Dennis: Man Out of Time
Les Dennis was a stalwart of the working men's club circuit for over twenty years. Holed up in an Edinburgh boozer, he relives the ‘good old days’ with Sam Friedman
The Divisive Power of Humour: Comedy, Taste and Symbolic Boundaries
Using British and Dutch interview data, this article demonstrates how people from different social classes draw strong symbolic boundaries on the basis of comedy taste. Eschewing the omnivorousness described in recent studies of cultural consumption, comedy audiences make negative aesthetic and moral judgements on the basis of comedy taste, and often make harsh judgements without the disclaimers, apologies and ambivalence so typical of 'taste tal…
A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC's Great British Class Survey Experiment
The social scientific analysis of social class is attracting renewed interest given the accentuation of economic and social inequalities throughout the world. The most widely validated measure of social class, the Nuffield class schema, developed in the 1970s, was codified in the UK's National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) and places people in one of seven main classes according to their occupation and employment status. This …
The Godfather, Part Two
In the early 1980s, Alexei Sayle stormed the Fringe with a groundbreaking new approach to stand-up. After 17 years away from the stage, he has returned to reinvigorate the legacy of alternative com
The hidden tastemakers: Comedy scouts as cultural brokers at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
The Price of the Ticket: Rethinking the Experience of Social Mobility
Increasing social mobility is the 'principal goal' of the current Coalition Government's social policy. However, while mainstream political discourse frames mobility as an unequivocally progressive force, there is a striking absence of studies examining the long-term impact of mobility on individuals themselves. In British sociology the most influential research was carried out by Goldthorpe 40 years ago and argued that the mobile were overwhelmi…
Dignity Denial and Social Conflicts
Struggles over dignity and dignity denial are a central facet of class struggles and other struggles under capitalism. Marxist theory, however, has not developed an adequate understanding of dignity denial or of struggles against it as a crucial part of capitalism and its dialectic. This paper discusses dignity denial as inherent both in a society based on commodity production for profit and also in the political, ideational, and social implicati…
Cultural sociology and new forms of distinction
Breaking the 'Class' Ceiling? Social Mobility into Britain's Elite Occupations
In this paper we use the unusually large sample size of the Great British Class Survey to compare rates of social mobility into different elite occupations. We find a distinction between 'traditional' professions, such as law, medicine and finance, which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals, and technical or emerging high-status occupations, particularly those related to IT, that appear to recruit more widely. Second…
On Social Class, Anno 2014
This article responds to the critical reception of the arguments made about social class in Savage et al. (2013). It emphasises the need to disentangle different strands of debate so as not to conflate four separate issues: (a) the value of the seven class model proposed; (b) the potential of the large web survey - the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) for future research; (c) the value of Bourdieusian perspectives for re-energising class analysi…
‘I’m not a snob, but…’: Class boundaries and the downplaying of difference
Are the creative industries meritocratic? An analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey
There is currently widespread concern that Britain’s cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are increasingly dominated by the privileged. This stands in stark contrast to dominant policy narratives of the CCIs as meritocratic. Until now this debate has been clouded by a relative paucity of data on class origins. This paper draws on new social origin data from the 2014 Labour Force Survey to provide the first large-scale, representative study of …
The Class Pay Gap in Higher Professional and Managerial Occupations
This article demonstrates how class origin shapes earnings in higher professional and managerial employment. Taking advantage of newly released data in Britain's Labour Force Survey, we examine the relative openness of different high-status occupations and the earnings of the upwardly mobile within them. In terms of access, we find a distinction between traditional professions, such as law, medicine, and finance, which are dominated by the childr…
Habitus Clivé and the Emotional Imprint of Social Mobility
Increasing social mobility is the 'principal goal' of the British Government's social policy ( Cabinet Office, 2011 : 5). However, while policy perspectives present mobility as an unambiguously progressive force, there is a striking absence of studies looking at the impact of mobility on individuals themselves. Drawing on 39 lifecourse interviews with upwardly mobile respondents drawn from the UK Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Project (CCS…
Sociology (38 works) · Political science (32 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (28 works) · Law (26 works) · Social science (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Economics (15 works) · Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies (13 works) · Social Psychology (13 works)