ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the attitudes of workers in industrial societies – England and Sweden. In the 1950s the rate of inter-generational mobility between manual and non-manual occupations appears to have been similar in Sweden, in Britain, and in a number of other European countries. Although there was a close relationship between the model of the class structure and reasons given for the existence of social classes among the English workers, this was not the case for the Swedish. Indeed birth and family background were emphasized among these English workers to about the same degree as education among the Swedish respondents regarding themselves as 'working class'. For the English workers, possibilities of individual upward mobility were considered to be less likely, but when this was considered to be possible, fewer respondents mentioned the importance of education. The chapter shows that the English and Swedish respondents held rather different conceptions of their respective class structures because of exposure to different political norms.
