ABSTRACT
Students new to sociology may be forgiven if, by this stage in the text, they have gained the strong impression that the principal concern of sociologists is to demonstrate to the world at large that nothing much changes over the years. Thus far, for example, we have seen John Goldthorpe argue that, irrespective of the absolute social mobility wrought by shifts in the occupational structure, relative mobility chances have remained more or less constant throughout the course of this century. Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden found that changes in the formal procedures governing access to educational opportunities nevertheless failed to alter the middle-class ethos of the grammar schools, so that working-class pupils entering these institutions were still at a considerable disadvantage, but for cultural rather than financial reasons. Finally, in Chapter 4, I have attempted to show that Peter Townsend’s findings about the incidence of poverty in our relatively affluent society are by no means as implausible as his critics have sometimes claimed. Again, as we have seen, the argument here is about relative and absolute measures of the phenomenon at issue. If the former perspective is adopted, then it is entirely reasonable to maintain that large-scale structural poverty has not been diminished by the social policies of the past forty years.
