Daniel Laurison

• London School of Economics and Political Science

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 manager...

This important book takes readers behind the closed doors of elite employers to reveal how class affects who gets to the top. Drawing on two hundred interviews across four case studies - television, accountancy, architecture, and acting - it explores the complex barriers facing the upwardly mobile.

“Hear that?” asks Dave, a senior manager at 6TV, as he leads us through the offices of the television broadcaster, on the way to our interview room. The layout of each department, we observe as we walk, is exactly the same. There is no spatial demarcation of grade or seniority, and the desks are arranged open-plan around a line of brightly coloured...

Academics often tell suspiciously neat stories of the research process. Most often we package our methodology into a few formulaic paragraphs within an article or book and narrate fieldwork and decision-making as linear, rational and seamless. But research rarely plays out like this. In practice it is usually profoundly messy and disjointed. This p...

We interviewed Nathan at one of London’s most prestigious West End theatres. He was the lead in the venue’s big budget autumn play, and was enjoying very good reviews. It was only the latest accolade in an illustrious acting career. Now in his mid-40s, Nathan’s CV is littered with acclaimed roles on stage and screen. He has played title roles for t...

“She was just good at selling herself … without … without looking like she was selling, do you know what I mean?” The Future Leaders panel murmur their agreement with Head Judge, Simon. They are discussing the relative merits of two interviewees, Sophie and Martin. Each are vying for a place on television’s most prestigious mid-career scheme, a yea...

We hope that over the course of this book we have made our key findings eminently clear: that people from working-class backgrounds earn less in top jobs than their privileged colleagues; that this can only be partially attributed to conventional measures of ‘merit’; and that more powerful drivers are rooted in the misrecognition of classed self-pr...

The publication of the BBC annual report is normally a fairly sedate affair. A 200-page document covering all areas of the Corporation’s governance and accounts, it’s fair to say that it doesn’t exactly make waves. But in 2017 things were very different. Dedicated to publishing the names of all staff earning over £150,000, the report uncovered for...

At 6TV, there is one meeting that trumps all others. The ‘Creative Assembly’, as it’s termed by its architect, the Chief Creative Officer (CCO), has, in many ways, become the channel’s key decision-making forum. Held once a week, its aim is to review programmes that have been pitched to, or piloted by, the channel, and to discuss and debate the rel...

Social mobility has become one of the central political issues of our times; certainly across the Western world, it has emerged as the rhetorical weapon of choice for a generation of political leaders. Impassioned speeches abound. “The American Dream is dead,” Donald Trump declared throughout his 2016 presidential campaign, “But I will bring it bac...

‘Does this control for IQ?’ This was the question libertarian commentator Toby Young tweeted to us when the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) published the first part of our class pay gap research in 2017. It was a fairly predictable response. Young has written extensively about the relationship between cognitive ability and life outcomes, and has n...

We are talking to Giles in the gigantic boardroom at Turner Clarke’s (TC) London headquarters. Giles is one of the firm’s most senior Partners. He was privately educated and his parents are both doctors. We are coming to the end of our interview and have reached the section where we ask Giles for his reflections on our findings so far. We explain t...

In contemporary Britain it quite literally pays to be privileged. Even when individuals from working-class backgrounds are successful in entering the country’s elite occupations they go on to earn, on average, 16% less than colleagues from more privileged backgrounds. And more significantly, this class pay gap is not explained away by conventional...

In 1960, the pioneering American sociologist Ralph H. Turner wrote a prescient article in the American Sociological Review. In it, he introduced the concepts of ‘sponsored’ and ‘contest’ mobility. In contest mobility, success is the prize in an open tournament, and the contest is only judged to be fair if all players compete on an equal footing. He...

This important book takes readers behind the closed doors of elite employers to reveal how class affects who gets to the top. Drawing on two hundred interviews across four case studies - television, accountancy, architecture, and acting - it explores the complex barriers facing the upwardly mobile.

Although it is clear that the 2020 election broke turnout records, we do not know how levels of voting changed across income groups. Journalistic accounts emphasized increases in turnout across demographic groups but relied on self-reported voter data. The authors use validated voting data from both the Common Election Study and the Pew Research Ce...

Intersectional analyses are increasingly common in sociology; however, analyses of voting tend to focus on only race, class, or gender, using the others as control variables. We assess whether and how race, class, and gender intersect to produce distinct patterns of voter engagement in presidential elections 2008–2016. Per existing research, we fin...

Reviewer: Jessica McCrory Calarco, Indiana University In The Class Ceiling, authors Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison deftly dismantle popular (and often highly politicized) myths about inequality and meritocracy in the UK. First, and using nationally representative data from Britain’s Labour Force Survey (LFS), the authors highlight class-based gap...

https://www.routledge.com/New-Directions-in-Elite-Studies/Korsnes-Heilbron-Hjellbrekke-Buhlmann-Savage/p/book/9781138059191

We investigate the relationship between social origin, postgraduate degree attainment, and occupational outcomes across five British age-group cohorts. We use recently-available UK Labour Force Survey data to conduct a series of logistic regressions of postgraduate (masters or doctorate) degree attainment among those with first degrees, with contro...

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...

In this paper we demonstrate the way in which class origin shapes earnings in higher professional and managerial employment. Taking advantage of newly released class origin data in Britain’s Labour Force Survey, we examine both the relative openness of different high-status occupations and the earnings of the upwardly mobile within them. In terms o...

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 orig...

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 demons...

Why does social class matter more than ever in Britain today? How has the meaning of class changed? What does this mean for social mobility and inequality? In this book Mike Savage and the team of sociologists responsible for the Great British Class Survey look beyond the labels to explore how and why our society is changing and what this means fo...

Most explanations of inequality in political participation focus on costs or other barriers for those with fewer economic, educational, and “cognitive” resources. I argue, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's work on “political competence,” that social position in the form of income also structures political participation through differences in the sense t...

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 h...

In this paper, I examine differences in political engagement among an elite segment of the British population: GBCS respondents who are college-educated, non-routine workers making over £100,000 a year. I show that even though everyone in this group ought to have more than sufficient skills and resources for political engagement, there are still su...

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 (G...

I am incredibly grateful to my dedicated team of undergraduate research assistants for their tireless work copying data from the internet for me. Laurison – Very drafty draft, please do not circulate or cite.