The Reconstitution of Status
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 1978
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sociologist A H Halsey is Professor of Social and Administrative studies at the University of Oxford. He explores the concept of Status in Society for his third Reith lecture from his series entitled 'Change in British Society'. In this lecture entitled 'The Reconstitution of Status', Professor Halsey looks at the theory of class and status in order to argue the importance of position and power in influencing social mobility. He investigates how class and status can either support or oppose each other and how persistent inequalities are less and less protected from challenge.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.1 | This lecture in the series Change in British Society, given by A.H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. |
| 0:09.9 | was originally broadcast in 1978. |
| 0:13.1 | The 19th century, it sometimes said, ended in 1914, and the guns of that August opened a new era of British society. |
| 0:22.0 | According to George Dangerfield, the strange death of Liberal England occurred just before the first war |
| 0:27.3 | during Asquist liberal government. |
| 0:30.4 | For Lord David Sissell, the son set on the old order with the death of his prime ministerial grandfather Lord Salisbury in 1903. |
| 0:38.8 | A search for exact chronological origins could occupy us endlessly in innocent debate. |
| 0:44.4 | What matters, and what's agreed now from widely different ideological standpoints, |
| 0:49.7 | is that the history of our century is the history of the decay of the values and the status system of Victorian Britain. |
| 0:57.0 | This large sociological generalisation is essential for understanding the daily social exchanges of a country |
| 1:05.0 | in which the tiniest details of manner and style was once a symbol sufficient to place a person immediately in a national |
| 1:12.0 | and unitary hierarchy of prestige. The generalisation is important also for understanding |
| 1:18.4 | the social source of the declining Britain thesis, which recurs so frequently in the times, |
| 1:24.1 | and appears for that matter in the new statesman when Mr. Paul Johnson writes for it. |
| 1:28.8 | Its deeper significance, however, is in the light it throws on the persistence of class inequality |
| 1:34.7 | about which I spoke last week. I want this week to relate status to class. |
| 1:42.4 | Liberal 19th century capitalism distributed the goods and services of an industrialised earth through the social mechanism of the market. |
| 1:51.8 | Distributions were therefore the outcome of interests. |
| 1:55.6 | They arose from a division of labour which treated labour as commodity, and removed responsibility from the rich |
| 2:02.3 | and the powerful for the lives of the poor and the dependent. The enlightened spokesman of |
| 2:07.7 | English liberal capitalism, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, Mill, they all elaborated |
... |
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