This is a new group formed as part of the Economies, Risk and Technology research cluster. We bring together 13 faculty and PhD students with related research interests committed to working together and developing a cohesive research culture, applying for research grants, recruiting and supporting PhD students. We see the success of this group as important for the strategic growth of the Department of Sociology as a whole.
Intellectual programme
Intellectually, we are concerned to address the nature and causes of inequalities, and seek new and innovative multi-dimensional paradigms. We resist uni-dimensional, reductionist and linear accounts such as those which see inequalities as the reflex of economic processes alone, and are committed to understanding the wider social, cultural and political processes which generate inequalities. We deploy rigorous methodological skills including both quantitative and qualitative methods, including social network analysis, multiple correspondence analysis, historical and ethnographic perspectives. We champion a variety of relational perspectives ranging from Bourdieu’s field analysis, social aesthetics, science studies, systems theory and actor network theory. We are committed to a multi-dimensional approach looking at issues of class, gender, race and ethnicity, age and generation, and the relations between these .
We see a major challenge for the study of inequality today as lying in a better understanding of the role of expertise in generating rewards and also in generating forms of exclusion. We seek to fashion a more elaborate sociological perspective on expertise which does not see it simply as a form of human capital or discrete physical or intellectual skills but which sees it in relational terms, as embodying forms of closure, demarcation and exclusion in which some people and groups are defined as ‘inexpert’. We are therefore committed to studying groups at all levels of the social hierarchy and we think this kind of relational perspective will allow us to bring out the processes implicated in the creation of social inequality. We are also interested in how different kinds of social mobility and meritocratic motifs are implicated in the formation of different expert groups.
We can pool a remarkable range of research experience on numerous expert groups – including bankers and financiers, scientists, artists, comedians, actors, engineers, journalists, political campaigners, and professionals. We would see ICE as being affiliated to the LSE International Inequalities Institute, where it will dovetail with research groupings from other departments. ICE will therefore crystallise the Sociology Department’s distinctive interests in research on inequality. We have strong international connections which will be strengthened by the formation of ICE.
Members
Mike Savage is Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. He has been a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences since 2002 and a Fellow of the British Academy since 2007. He has long standing interests in the culture and activities of professional and expert groups. His book Property, Bureaucracy and Culture: middle class formation in contemporary Britain (1992) argued that the professions were distinctive from managers through having more secure careers structures and being more highly educated and has been widely influential in shaping our understanding of expertise and the middle and upper classes in Britain. His more recent work has focused on the remaking of expert groups in the context of dramatic economic changes and the rise of income and wealth inequality. He has argued for the need to study elite groups more seriously (notably in Savage and Williams’ edited collection, Remembering Elites, 2008) rather than treating them as an aristocratic upper class throwback. His collaborative work on ‘Culture, Class, Distinction’ examines the cultural tastes and activities of the British population and draws attention to the way that expert groups now have wide ranging tastes which straddle popular commercial and highbrow culture. Much of his work has been funded by the ESRC and other research councils.
Charis Thompson: My new project is: Is Science Part of the New Inequality, or Does Science (Still) Mitigate Inequality in a Measurable Way? In this project, I review social theories that hold that science is a meritocratic / democratic force that breaks down inequality resulting from the circumstances of one's birth. I further link this inquiry to literature across the social sciences that has begun to characterize today's super-elites as a new phase of history. I then ask, using mixed methods and data, whether the new science elites, especially those in the life sciences, are becoming more like other super elites, and thus, potentially, putting at risk the connection between science and democratic participation. I also draw out the changing role of the sciences and technology in defining the historical era, especially as regards meritocracy and democratic participation.
I am an RQIF Professor at LSE Department of Sociology, and currently on leave, serving as Chancellor's Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, UC Berkeley. I am the author of Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (MIT Press, 2005), which won the Rachel Carson award from the Society for the Social Study of Science, and of Good Science: the Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013). I am the recipient of the Social Science Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Berkeley. I publish on biodiversity conservation, biopolitics, bioethics, the sociology of science, medicine, and technology, STS.
Carrie Friese: My research is in medical sociology and science and technology studies. I have previously been involved in research regarding health inequalities. Currently, I am initiating a Wellcome Trust New Investigator Award for the project Care as Science: The Role of Animal Husbandry in Translational Medicine. This five year project (2015-2019) uses quantitative and qualitative research methods in a field analysis of in vivo science and translational medicine within the UK. It asks why an increasing number of scientists understand quality animal care as a scientific priority in the current socio-historical moment. I have also written and taught workshops on situational analysis and grounded theory, and have a general interest in relational research methods.
Sam Friedman: I joined the LSE in 2014 as Assistant Professor in Sociology. My research focuses on issues of social class and inequality, and my most recent work examines the unseen cultural, social and economic barriers faced by the upwardly mobile within elite occupations. While the notion of a ‘glass ceiling’ is traditionally associated with women and ethnic minorities, research I am currently conducting using the Labour Force Survey with Daniel Laurison (also at LSE) indicates that a ‘class ceiling’ maybe as, if not more, powerful in contemporary Britain. In the coming months I will be following up these quantitative findings with four in-depth case studies of different elite occupational groups - actors, barristers, journalists and bankers.
I am also particularly interested in the cultural dimensions of contemporary class division and in my recent book Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour, I examine the relationship between social class and British comedy taste. In particular, I find that a ‘cultivated’ sense of humour has become a key resource for the British middle class and an essential tool in communicating their cultural distinction. Finally, I am part of a team of researchers, led by Professor Mike Savage, currently analysing the BBC Great British Class Survey, the largest survey ofclass ever conducted in the UK (with 320,000 respondents). I also sit on the editorial board of The Sociological Review and outside academia I am the Consulting Editor of Fest, the largest magazine covering the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Fabien Accominotti: I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at LSE. Like many sociologists I am eager to understand why, in meritocratic societies, individuals whose abilities or talent do not differ widely nevertheless enjoy considerably different levels of social and economic success. To address that problem of non-meritocratic inequality, my research focuses on social processes of valuation – processes whereby the social environment of things or individuals shapes their value independent of their intrinsic qualities.
Empirically I have studied art worlds and cultural markets, where inequalities of success are often dramatic and social processes of valuation most salient. In a project on the art market in the heyday of French modern painting, I developed a relational definition of consecration to explain how market intermediaries conferred economic value to art and artists. I also showed how consecration departs from other processes of valuation, such as the certification of unobservable quality or the imposition of new quality criteria.
Current projects include the completion of a book on the art market, provisionally titled Market Chains: Careers and Creativity in the Market for Modern Art, and an experimental study of the drivers of winner-take-all inequality in cultural markets. I am also willing to test the power of concepts forged for the study of art worlds by applying them to broader social settings. Together with Shamus Khan (Columbia) and Adam Storer (UC Berkeley), I am thus working on elites and culture in the Gilded Age. Through a quantitative analysis of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic, we explore how cultural participation bred processes of consecration and certification that cemented the dominance of elites in an era of massive social inequality.
Daniel Laurison: I am a postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Sociology Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. I am interested in politics, inequality, and the way social position (the amount of economic, cultural, and social resources/capitals someone has, relative to others in society) shapes how people understand and relate to the world around them (especially with regard to politics & inequality). I have looked at how electoral politics are produced, how regular people perceive politics, and the relationship between objective social position and subjective class identity. My PhD was on the field of experts in political production (campaign staff and political consultants in the US). I am currently working on a project examining differences in income and other measures of success, between the upwardly mobile and those from relatively privileged social origins working in elite/high status occupations.
Lisa McKenzie: I am currently working as a research fellow as part of the Great British Class Survey Team headed by Professor Mike Savage at the London School of Economics. My role on the team is specifically focused upon the group at the bottom of the class structure we have called the Precariat. Although my previous research has focused upon the poor working class, my current research interests especially relate to the precarious nature of particular groups in our society and the vulnerability they experience through insecure housing, work, social benefits, health care, and education. The current focus of my research is an East London neighbourhood, and the working class people who have lived there for many generations drawing upon the historic work and community studies of Wilmott and Young in the 1950’s.
As a researcher and an educator I am keen to develop research proposals, community collaborations and student projects focusing upon class inequality using a collaborative ethnographic approach. I am particularly interested in how research, teaching and community engagement can collaborate in paradigms of social justice through the use of higher education, and innovative research methodology.
My recent research funded by a Leverhulme Early Careers Award focused upon ‘masculinity and belonging within poor neighbourhoods’. An extension of the research from my PhD, an ethnographic study of the St Ann’s council housing estate in Nottingham focusing upon white mothers to mixed race children. Consequently my scholarly interests range widely, the theoretical influence within the PhD and the later research on masculinity was the work of Pierre Bourdieu, with particular influence relating to symbolic violence, capital exchange, and power relationships within neo-liberal structures.
My research interests are the continuation and development of research proposals focusing upon class inequality and council estates within the UK. This especially relates to those communities who are presently living through a period of adversity, as the consequences of the UK’s austerity measures have major impacts upon public services, housing and welfare entitlements.
In addition to my academic work at the LSE I am a political and social activist engaging with local community protests, and campaigns. I am also convener of the BSA Activism in Sociology Forum and I manage the LSE researching Sociology Blog.
Rozlyn Redd is a course tutor in the Department of Sociology at LSE. Her work broadly focuses on peer influence, field theory, processes that produce inequality and ‘race.’ She recently completed her PhD, The Aesthetics of Academic Choice, which analyzed university major choice through the lens of field theory, particularly focusing on the role of social segregation and peer influence in this process. In a previous life she was a political consultant who analyzed policy and public opinion in California.
Katharina Hecht is a second year PhD student in the Department of Sociology. Her PhD is supervised by Prof Mike Savage and Dr Sam Friedman and focuses on economic inequality and how it is understood by individuals situated at the top end of the income distribution. Katharina is interested in research methods and social science research on inequalities, in particular the intersections of economic inequality and inequalities of class, gender and ethnicity. See her entry under Research students.
Reuben Message: I am research student in the Department of Sociology, supervised by Dr Carrie Friese and Professor Charis Thompson. My PhD research: the origins of modern forms of the intensive husbandry of aquatic organisms lie in the nineteenth century. My research explores the cultural, social, technological and economic circumstances of their emergence and development. Focusing on “fish culture” as an innovative reproductive technology, I explore how specific material techniques and knowledge practices intersected with different social worlds and new and emerging forms of stratification. Key themes include the construction of forms of production centred on the conservation, the biological reproduction and control of fish life, the establishment of markets in live fish and their eggs, and the connection between these with broader social and historical processes. These include the social and epistemic organisation of empirical ichthyology, the role of scientific expertise in rationalising the legislative protection of some fishes, and the transformation and reproduction of the social relations of freshwater fishing in view of changes in regulatory regimes and consumption practices. Via the history of the processes involved, I tell a story about the modernisation of Britain in which hierarchies of expertise, and material and cultural practices, are co-constitutive with socio-economic change, including the entrenchment of particular forms of inequality.
My research interests include: Science and technology studies; reproductive technologies; nature/environment and society; economic and historical sociology; social history.