cresc news 14 - university of...

The Great British Class Survey

In early-April this year, CRESC research drewworldwide attention and precipitated avigorous debate on the role and nature of

social class in Britain today. The cause of thisattention was the publication of thepreliminary findings of the Great British ClassSurvey (GBCS) in the British SociologicalAssociation’s (BSA) flagship journal, Sociology.The paper’s online launch was designed tocoincide with a special plenary session at theBSA’s annual conference at which the keyfindings were disseminated. Beyond theGrand Hall of London’s Connaught Rooms, thepaper drew widespread media attentionstarting that day with BBC Breakfast andfeaturing on most major news programmeson radio and television in the UK throughoutthe day. Whilst beyond these shores theresearch team were fielding queries fromacross the globe, and the story had becomethe most read article on the New York Timeswebsite within two days. It also led to 7million unique visitors to the BBC’s online‘class calculator’, enabling people to see howthey fitted into the new class structureelaborated in the Sociology paper. In turn, theclass calculator has become the most popularfeature on the BBC News website this year.The attention was not just from the media;the research paper was made freely availableby SAGE for a period after the launch and wasdownloaded almost 20,000 times in Aprilalone, setting a new record for the publisher.

To date, the dominant model of social classhas defined it only in relation to occupationaland employment status, consisting of threebroad categories: lower, middle and upper.This influential schema has formed the basisfor the way in which social class has beenunderstood not only by government in theform of the National Statistics Socio-economicClassification (NS-SeC), but also by mostacademics and the public at large. The GBCSwas devised by CRESC’s Mike Savage andFiona Devine in collaboration with the BBC’sLab UK as a means of defining social class notsimply in terms of economic capital but alsoin terms of social and cultural capitals,thereby drawing on the work of the Frenchsociologist Pierre Bourdieu. This led to thedevelopment of a survey of unprecedentedscope and scale.

In terms of scope, the GBCS asked fiftyquestions which probed a wide variety ofthemes covering the value of a respondent’sproperty, savings and household income(economic capital), their cultural interests andactivities (cultural capital), as well as thenumbers, status and range of people that theyknow (social capital). Whilst in terms of scale,the initial survey was launched on 26 January2011 and had been completed by over 161,400respondents by July of that year, making it thelargest of its kind. However, initial analysis ofthe data indicated that these people were notrepresentative of the population at large, andso a nationally-representative face-to-face

survey of 1,026 individuals was commissionedby the BBC and conducted by the marketresearch company GfK. These data wereanalysed using latent class analysis andweighted so that the two survey sources couldbe combined, with GBCS respondentsequivalent to a single case in the GfK. Thismeant that the final model, which identifiedseven new social classes, was based on therepresentative GfK survey and not upon theskewed GBCS responses.

The first class identified is an elite (6% GfK,22% GBCS) with high levels across all threecapitals. Second, is an established middle class(25% GfK, 43% GBCS) with high economiccapital, both high ‘highbrow’ and popular or‘emerging’ cultural capital, and social networksof high status. The third class identified is amuch smaller technical middle class (6% GfK,10% GBCS), typified by high economicresources, medium levels of cultural capitaland small social networks of high status.Fourth was a group of new affluent workers www.cresc.ac.uk

CRESCNewsISSUE 17 SEPTEMBER 2013

ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change

(15% GfK, 17% GBCS) moderate in economicand social terms, but with medium highbrowand high emerging cultural tastes. Fifth arethe emergent service workers (19% GfK, 17%GBCS) with relatively poor economic resources,moderate social contacts, high emerging andlow highbrow cultural capital. These complexnew definitions embody the ‘fuzzy’ andfragmented nature of the middle groups in thecontemporary U.K. Sixth is a traditionalworking class (14% GfK, 2% GBCS) whoseeconomic capital is confined largely toproperty, low cultural capital and small socialnetworks of low status. The final group toemerge from the model is a precariat (15% GfK,<1% GBCS) with universally low scores acrossall three capitals. The identification of theseclear polarities in British society resonateswithin wider debates on inequality in thiscountry, and nowhere is this more evident thanin analysing where these groups reside. Weare fortunate to have postcode data enablingus to literally map with unprecedented spatialdetail what the new class system looks like,and as the map shows, the elite are apredominantly south-eastern configurationthat exemplifies the imbalances of wealth inthis country.

This is just the start and what has the potentialto be a fascinating programme of research.One of the first tasks going forward is to startanalysing the additional 200,000 respondentswho have completed the GBCS since April thisyear. Furthermore, extensive overlaps existbetween the GBCS and other BBC surveys suchas the Musicality and Personality tests, whichwe know have been undertaken by samerespondents. This opens up the possibility ofmuch wider collaborations across newdisciplines and the development of excitingnew research horizons.

More information:

Savage, M., Devine, F., Cunningham, N., Taylor,M., Li, Y., Hjellbrekke, J., Le Roux, B., Friedman, S.and Miles, A. (2013) ‘A New Model of SocialClass? Findings from the BBC’s Great BritishClass Survey Experiment’, Sociology, 47 (2) 219-250.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/21970879

Contact: [email protected]

Niall Cunningham

CRESC News Issue 17 September 2013

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CRESC’s Great Train Robbery analyses thebusiness models that underpin railprivatisation in the UK and criticises the

political outcomes. The privatisers’ vision of atransparent and democratically accountableset of privatised markets has turned intobackstairs lobbying, manipulation of publicdebate by well resourced private interestsand a blurring of the divide between thepublic and the private.

Some of the problems of the privatised railsystem are well known. Franchisees – as inthe catastrophic case of the East Coast Line –can walk away from the franchise withoutserious penalties when the ludicrously unrealprojections that won the contract in the firstplace turned out to be fantasies. Less known,is the extent to which the train operatorshave been able to manipulate the licensingsystem so that they effectively pay dividendsto shareholders from direct public subsidy;since 1997 on the West Coast Mainline,Virgin Trains paid out a total of £500 millionin dividends and received a direct subsidy of£2.5 billion.

Worse still, the report highlights the large,hidden and indirect subsidies to trainoperating companies which have completelywrecked the balance sheet of the quasi-publicNetwork Rail company that providesinfrastructure. Train operating companyprofits are politically constructed through ahidden subsidy of low track access chargeslevied by Network Rail. These have fallenfrom £3.2 billion at the start of privatisationto £1.6 billion today, despite the increaseddemands on the infrastructure made byincreased train and passenger numbers: inthe age of privatisation the state is keepingthe trains running.

The end result is a shocking and largelyundiscussed increase in public liabilities.Network Rail (NR) is not only failing to recoupthe real cost of operating the infrastructurebut also spending an extra £5 billion a yearon capital investment in improving thenetwork. This is largely financed by issuingprivate bonds which are publicly guaranteed.Network Rail is unsustainably burdened withhuge debts. The cost of servicing that debt isnow greater than spending on trackmaintenance and the financial consequencesfor the taxpayer are considerable becauserepayment of £30 billion of principal ispublicly guaranteed. Rail is going to need abailout.

At the economic root of this lies a longstanding problem about the business modelof recovering costs by charging passengers:

rail cannot operate without some £10 billionof (direct and indirect) public subsidy becausepassenger income, even with some of thehighest fares in Europe, cannot cover costs.Indeed the importance of passenger revenuehas declined under privatisation: in the lastten years of British Rail passenger incomeaveraged just over 64 per cent of totalrevenue whilst under privatisation’s first tenyears it averaged just over 55 per cent.

The predatory profits of the Train OperatingCompanies are a problem, but they are notthe most serious part of the problem.Demonising dividends and value extractionby operators like Richard Branson is akin tothe demonization of individual bankers afterthe financial crash: it fails to fix on thefundamental fault of the system which is thedetermination, under the privatised system,to operate a for profit rail network with notenough money in the fare box; and behindthat, the business model of charging userswhich does not capture external benefits likeincreases in land and property valuesadjacent to new lines. For instance, London’snew Crossrail will cost £16 billion and isprojected to boost property values within onekilometre of the project by £5.5 billion.

Any attempt to reshape rail policy so as tocapture these externalities – for instance viaproperty taxation – will be politically

Railway models Mick Moran

explosive. More insidiously, the whole wellorganised constellation of interests createdby rail privatisation now operates a smoothlyoiled lobby so that the Train OperatingCompanies now define an agenda of reformwhich suits them but is not in the publicinterest. The Association of Train OperatingCompanies spins a narrative of public serviceand represents malfunctioning of the system(like the West Coast franchising renewalfiasco) as a story of minor glitches in afundamentally well-functioning machine. Thefirst priority is to get the franchising systemback on track. The problem of Network Rail’sdebt and the inadequacy of the businessmodel do not figure in public discussion.

Privatisation was sold with the promise of anew political model: where backstairsmanipulation of policy (for instance byMinisters) would be replaced by thetransparency of open contractual competitionand public regulation. Instead we have aworld populated by well paid lobbyists andwell networked business elites plus smokeand mirrors accounting which makes itimpossible for normal citizens to penetratewhat is going on. In this sense, railprivatisation has indeed proved a model; amodel of how things are now done in thepost-privatisation state in Britain.

[email protected]


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Do Methods Frame Politics?John Law

Methods shape the world. That’s theargument of CRESC’s ‘Social Life ofMethods’ theme. But what does this

mean in practice? The answer is: it dependson the method, and it depends on thecontext. But methods can be very powerful, inpolicy, in framing agendas, and inimplementing them. Here’s an example. It’s acase to think with.

The last big outbreak of foot and mouthdisease in the UK was in 2001. Confirmed inFebruary, it was finally eradicated inSeptember. How was it controlled? Theanswer was: by culling. Over six million farmanimals were killed. Some had contracted thedisease. Some were in close contact withinfected animals. And some were culledpreventatively – like a firebreak – roundplaces that were infected.

The epidemic was a national emergency anda horror for many. But though there weredissidents, most policymakers and farmersagreed that culling was necessary. But apartfrom infected animals, which others shouldbe killed? To answer this question thepolicymakers turned to epidemiology tosimulate the effects of different cullingstrategies.

So what actually happened in 2001? Thehistory is complicated, but let’s talk abouttwo epidemiological models. One, call it theofficial ‘Ministry model’, was based in theMinistry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food(now DEFRA). It had GIS data so it ‘knew’ thelocations of the farms. It ‘knew’ theepidemiological differences between cows,sheep and pigs. It was very detailed, andtherefore slow to run. But here’s the bottomline. It was used to guide culling policy untilMarch 23rd. ‘Cull infected farms. Keep an eye

on adjacent premises. And do somepreventative culling amongst sheep inCumbria.’ That was the core of the policy.

But then everything changed. Why? This wasfor many reasons: because the headlineinfection figures were still growing; becausepublic opinion was restless; because thenewspapers were complaining; becausePrime Minister Tony Blair was anxious;because it looked as if the culling wasn’tworking; but also because a secondepidemiological model from Imperial College,London, was making quite differentpredictions. These were dire: much, muchworse than those from the Ministry. They saidthat the policy was not working at all. But the‘Imperial model’ was different technically too.It didn’t ‘know’ nearly as much as the‘Ministry model’. It worked with a ‘generic’animal (it made no distinction betweenspecies). It didn’t have GIS data so it didn’tknow where farms actually were. Instead itdrew in very clever ways from statisticalmicrophysics. But it was quicker because itwas simpler.

Things were pretty tense in the Whitehallcorridors of power in March 2001. There waslots of political pressure. The Prime Ministerwas impatient. But the ‘Ministry model’people were saying: ‘the epidemic is on theturn. Just wait for another week or two andyou’ll see the headline numbers starting tofall.’ The ‘Imperial model’ people, who hadOxford links to Tony Blair, were saying ‘no:we need to ramp up the culling. If you don’tdo this the epidemic will rage out of control.’

What happened? The answer is: the ‘Imperialmodel’ carried the day. All animals onpremises next to an infected farm were to beslaughtered. Not just watched for symptoms.This was the so-called ‘contiguous cull’ and itstarted on March 23rd.

Who was correct? There’s quite a strong casefor saying that the Ministry was right, thoughthe argument will never be settled. Butwhat’s important in the present context isthat each of these models was being shapedby science, and by social and political events.But at the same time they were also shapingpolicy realities too. And the differencemattered. It was a question of life and death.A lot of animals died because reality wasframed by the ‘Imperial model’ in a particular

Foot and Mouth outbreaks in 2001

No entry, no access to the countryside

way. They wouldn’t have died if the ‘Ministrymodel’ policy had not been stopped.

We can’t get away from this kind of dilemma.There’s no such thing as a method without asocial context or social effects. This meansthat it won’t do to criticise methods justbecause they are social creatures and politicalactors. They always are. But if we canunderstand how this works in differentcontexts then it will become possible todebate the merits of different methods, andthe social and political ways in which theyframe the world. As in the foot and mouthepidemic in 2001. That’s the focus of CRESC’s‘Social Life of Methods’ theme.


WHAT IS FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE?People don’t catch foot and mouth disease. But most farmed animals do. It’s a viralinfection that leads to a high fever followed by blistering and considerable suffering. It’salso highly infectious, especially for pigs and cows. Mostly, left to their own devices theanimals recover. Not all. But they lose weight, and dairy cattle produce less milk. Thismeans that the disease is a scourge for agriculture. It also explains why the developedworld tries to keep the disease out. But since it is common in the tropics, from time totime, there are foot and mouth break outs in the ‘North’.


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Infrastructures of Social ChangeHannah Knox

In March 2013 a new research theme wasinaugurated in CRESC entitledInfrastructures of Social Change. Far from

being an entirely new theme, this cluster ofresearch builds on several years ofcollaborative work developing methods andtheories for understanding the interplaybetween technology, knowledge andmateriality in processes of social change.

A reorientation around the topic ofinfrastructures was prompted in part by anawareness that several researchers in thecluster had taken infrastructures asparticularly powerful sites for exploring thisintersection between technology, knowledgeand materiality. Penny Harvey and HannahKnox, for example, who are convening thenew research cluster, have recentlycompleted a research monograph whichinterrogates social and politicaltransformations in Peru through an analysisof road construction. Others involved in thetheme have also found infrastructuralprojects an important site from which toobserve the complex intersections of peopleand things through which socio-culturalchange takes place. Damian O’Doherty hasbeen studying organisational change throughan ethnographic study of an airport; GillianEvans has been analysing socialtransformation in East London from theperspective of the Olympics and its legacyprogram, and Madeleine Reeves has analysedpost-soviet politics from the perspective ofmaterial practices through which nationalborders are made and lived.

Recently we have been asking ourselves, whatis it about infrastructures that makes themsuch appropriate sites from which to observethe complex dynamics of contemporary socialchange?

PlaceFirstly, we suggest that infrastructures shouldbe of particular interest because of the way inwhich they refuse to be easily demarcated aseither local or global entities. Infrastructureprojects are resolutely sited, materialprocesses of social transformation, but theyare also projects which are sustained by a setof specific relationships that reach far beyondthe ostensible location of the materialinfrastructure itself. Roads, airports, bordersand regeneration projects all involve aspecific set of more or less extendedrelationships, from financial and tradingrelations that cross continents, to friendshipsand conflicts that take place in the corridorsof organisations or across the dinner tables offamily gatherings. The necessity of takinginto account relationships at different scales,means that infrastructures provoke a newkind of spatial analysis of social change whichdoes not rely on our usual conceptions of thecontainers or boundaries of social relations:

organisations, cities, regions, nation states.Instead they require us to develop a newvocabulary to explain the spatialisingdynamics of infrastructural arrangements.

Political SubjectivitySecondly, prompted in part by theinfrastructural dynamics of recent eventssuch as the Occupy Movement, we havebecome fascinated by the way in whichinfrastructures seem to offer an alternativeway of understanding contemporary politicalrelationships. CRESC researcher, AdolfoEstalella, for example, has been following theM15 movement in Madrid, observing howthis impromptu social gathering provoked therapid creation of an ad hoc urbaninfrastructure of water, electricity, libraries,kitchens and nurseries with their own specificsocial and political dynamics. Such activistinfrastructures provide new forms ofconnectivity and new modes of socialdifferentiation, shedding light both on thecontours of emerging political relationships,and on the possibilities and limits of moreembedded infrastructural systems.

As with activism, we have also found art anddesign a very fruitful site from which toobserve the link between infrastructure andpolitical subjectivity. From Nick Thoburn’swork on radical political media, to HannahKnox’s work on digital modelling, tocollaborations with photographers likeMartin Newth and artists like Helen Barff, artand design have offered a means ofextending our engagement with the socio-material politics of infrastructural systems.We have found these projects have enabledus to extend a conversation that we startedwith Science and Technology Studies, helpingus to ask not only what kind of relationshipsinfrastructures put in place but also whatmakes a particular infrastructure manifestpolitical relationships in a particular way andwhat alternative relational configurationsmight be thinkable and actionable.

KnowledgeLastly, we suggest that infrastructures offer aparticularly promising site from which to

interrogate contemporary forms ofknowledge and expertise. Infrastructuresseem particularly generative of new kinds ofknowledge. As highly complex projects whichaim to resolve political crises and yet whichproduce new vulnerabilities anddependencies, they constantly provoke newmodes of technical and evaluative expertisewhich aim to demarcate and map thedynamics they set in play.

In a slightly different vein, another way inwhich infrastructures engage the question ofknowledge derives from their seeminglyinvisible or unremarkable character. We havebecome particularly fascinated in howinfrastructures, conceived as a necessarilydistributed set of relationships, entail in theirvery definition an understanding that muchof what makes an infrastructure holdtogether remains invisible, underneath or in-between. Infra-structure is the structure thatholds other things together. Most of the workof holding together, however, remains out ofsight: tubes and pipes become buriedunderground, commercial relationshipsbecome hidden behind contractualagreements, and social struggles becomedistilled in mission statements and strategicplans. We suggest that these invisibilities andelisions raise questions not just about how totrace what lies behind infrastructure, but alsowhat role infrastructure plays in provokingsome of the more affective, experiential orimaginative dimensions of social change.

As we move into the new academic year, weare planning a number of events to developour thinking in this area. A workshop oninfrastructures and social change held in Julyis being followed up in two panels at theCRESC annual conference in September 2013,and in a collaboration with the V&A Museumfor an exhibition that they are developing onDesign and Political Activism. More detailsabout our projects, a link to our twitter feedand an online repository of readings are allavailable on our webpage:www.cresc.ac.uk/our-research/infrastructures-of-social-change.Follow us on twitter: @cresc_theme4, orcontact us via CRESC to find out more aboutour plans for exploring social change throughinfrastructure over the coming year.

This piece summarises a fuller exploration ofinfrastructures and social change which isforthcoming as a CRESC working paper.



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Urban Ecologies:A New Theme in UrbanExperimentsFrancis Dodsworth and Sophie Watson

If one takes a walk through the eastern partof central Paris, from the Place de laBastille towards the Gare de Lyon, one

comes across a collection of craft workshopsnestling under the arches of a railwayviaduct: the Viaduc des Arts. Ostensibly this isjust another sign of the urban regenerationthat has transformed this once working-classarea in the last few decades. However, if onelooks upwards there is something unusualabout this particular viaduct. The first pictureshows the view from the ground, from wherea lot of greenery is clearly visible. If oneascends the steps at the side, one isconfronted by a surprising scene, illustratedin the second picture: rather than a disusedrailway line there is a well-tended walkwayfilled with trees, shrubs and flowers, withbenches positioned for the office workers and

pensioners of Paris to rest or enjoy theirlunch. This is the Promenade Plantée, whichstretches all the way to the eastern forest atVincennes and which was opened in 1993 ona defunct railway line. Although it was thefirst such structure, there are now similarparks elsewhere in Europe and the UnitedStates and they are generally symptoms ofwider moves to ’green’ the city and todevelop ecologically sustainable patterns ofurban life. Our major cities are now filledwith guerrilla gardeners, urban apiarists andrejuvenated allotment enthusiasts.

In order to better understand this importantcontemporary dynamic Urban Experiments isdeveloping an interest in urban ecologies, atheme that was recently launched with aworkshop on the subject held in MiltonKeynes, 18-19 June 2013. Erik Swyngedouw(Geography / School of EnvironmentalDevelopment, Manchester), launched thediscussions with presentations on the politicsof ecology in the contemporary city and thedangers of fetishising ‘ecology’ and‘sustainability’ as ways of convincing thedisadvantaged to accept their exclusion fromprosperity. Maria Kaika (Human Geography/School of Environmental Development,Manchester), and Jonathan Metzger (KTH/Architecture and the Built Environment,Stockholm), offered different ways of re-conceptualising the planning process and theends of planning in general, urgingrespectively renewed attempts at utopianthinking and new ways of integratingextended interests in the planning process.On the second day Tora Holmberg (Sociology,Upsalla) spoke about the ‘Zoocity’ andhuman-animal relations in an urban context;Simon Carter (Sociology, Open University)demonstrated the importance of earlytwentieth–century health movements in theconstruction of the concept of a ‘healthy’urban environment and Maria Jose ZapataCampos (Managing Big Cities, GothenburgResearch Institute) gave a presentation oncommunity recycling in Managua, particularlythe relationship between organised planningand municipal policy and the reality of localself-organisation in the informal settlementsthat make up most of the cities of the globalsouth.

This workshop drew attention to the ways inwhich environmentalism and new urbanecologies are transforming the modern citypolitically, economically, socially andmaterially. However, it would be wrong to seethis as a novel development per se: citieshave always been defined in part by theirenvironment and ecology and a new projectby Sophie Watson, being conducted withinUrban Experiments, is fleshing out theimportant contemporary and historical rolethat water plays in the modern city, from thehistorical significance of drinking fountainsand public baths to the washing of thestreets of the city which is such a feature ofurban life in much of southern Europe.Indeed, if we return to Paris, the third pictureillustrates two aspects of urban ecologiesdrawn together. This picture illustrates thewashing of the Paris streets as the waterrushes past the stands of the Velib bicyclehire system. Velib is the largest cycle-sharingscheme in Europe and one of the many suchprojects that are springing up as far afield asNew York and Wuhan, and which arerepresented in Britain by the Barclays CycleHire scheme. These systems aim to provide ameans of urban transport that does notdirectly pollute the atmosphere; thedistinctive feature in Paris being that there isalso a similar scheme for the hire of electriccars, the Autolib, which can now be seenlined up waiting for hire, or indeed in usethroughout the streets of the city.

This new theme from Urban Experimentsseeks to draw together existing interests inthe theme in terms of cycling and the politicsof sustainable urban development, and newinterests in water and the cultural andmaterial transformation of the city throughnew ecologies.



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CReSC publishes ground-breakingresearch on the historic impact andcultural value of the BBC World Service

over eight decades, and the very special roleplayed by its diasporic broadcasters as newsmakers and diplomatic intermediaries. Butwhat does the future hold for the WorldService and its historic role as an agent ofcultural diplomacy as it prepares to comeunder the licence fee in April 2014?

The BBC World Service, often referred to asthe ‘voice of Britain abroad’, is very wellknown to over 183 million people around theglobe who regularly tune in or log on to oneof its 27 language services. But the Britishpublic, with the exception of intrepidtravellers, digital media surfers, andinsomniacs who listen to BBC Radio 4 in thedark hours of the night when World Serviceprogrammes are broadcast, know very littleabout it. This is a shame because from April2014, British citizens will pay for its services,and changes in its governance, funding cutsand its absorption into the BBC’s Global NewsDivision pose significant threats as well asopportunities. How these shifts play out willmatter greatly for how Britain is perceivedaround the world and for its ability toinfluence by attraction – its exercise of whatJoseph Nye refers to as ‘soft power’. It seemsironic that, at a time when rising powers ofBRIC countries are investing in internationalbroadcasting and public diplomacy initiativesto project their strategic narratives onto aworld stage, European powers aredisinvesting in these services.

It could be argued that internationalbroadcasters like BBC World Service, DeutschWelle and France 24 are remnants of abygone era – colonial relics and Cold Warpropaganda tools that have no place in amedia-saturated, multi-polar world, but thatwould be to ignore a rich history of culturalencounters and translation activities thatenabled the BBC to forge a unique brand ofcorporate cosmopolitanism. For the last 80years, the World Service derived much of itsintellectual, creative and diplomaticsignificance from the diasporic broadcasterswho have been at the heart of the BBC'sforeign language service. Yet, they haveremained largely absent from the publicunderstanding of the World Service.

Diasporas and Diplomacy:Cosmopolitan ContactZones at the BBC WorldService edited by MarieGillespie and Alban Webbmakes visible the roleplayed by successivewaves of exiled, refugee,dissident and migrantintellectuals and writerswho have helped toestablish and renew theBBC’s reputation as one ofthe world’s most credibleand trusted internationalbroadcasters.

CReSC's 'Reframing the Nation' researchtheme and its affiliate AHRC-funded 'TuningIn' project have produced the firstinterdisciplinary, empirically-researched andtheoretically-informed analysis of therelationship between the diasporicengagements and diplomatic imperativesthat have shaped the overseas operations ofthe BBC since its inception as the EmpireService in 1932. The book is based on a long-term strategic partnership between the BBCand CReSC at The Open University which hasallowed for a wide-ranging, independent, andinterdisciplinary study of the World Serviceusing a range of innovative methods thatstraddle the divide between Arts andHumanities and Social Science research (seefor example, the Witness Seminar series thatcontributed to archiving the corporatememory of its staff and projects exploringaudience research methods at the BBC). TheWorld Service not only offers a window onthe world, and the journalistic and diplomaticchallenges of communicating with it, but is initself a unique cultural laboratory in whichthe shifting nature of diasporic identities andcosmopolitan practices can be studied withparticular precision and clarity.

The research on which the book is based usesa postcolonial ‘contact zone’ perspective inorder to locate transnational and diasporicsubjects in their embodied interactions,activities, networks and spaces. In bringingtogether international scholars and CRESCresearchers to work collaboratively it weavesa rich narrative seam across genres, forexample, the evolution of World Music, global

sports and drama for development as well as arange of more conceptually focussed themesincluding diasporic nationalism, religioustransnationalism and the politics of translation.It moves from an examination of British expataudiences in the 1930s through to World WarTwo political satire and the problems ofreporting Jewish persecution, to the historicalrole of the BBC in South Asia, the Middle Eastand Iran. It ends with an examination of theway new interactive online media aretransforming audiences, creating digitaldiasporas, and the challenging establishedjournalistic principles.

The study develops an analysis of cosmopolitanpractices as expressed in the attitudes, workingmethods and cumulative experience of staffmaking the programmes, as shaped bycorporate, journalistic and strategic interests. Itis through such conjunctions that the complexdiplomatic value of the World Service is derived:operating according to dialogic principles inwhich British voices, attitudes and governmentpolicy (national interests and values) becomepart of a wider narrative exchange with theBBC’s many audiences. As such the culturalbridge to audiences engineered by successivegenerations of diasporic staff at the WorldService is of paramount importance andremains the underlying currency of itscontinued success as an internationalbroadcaster and as a diplomatic force. It wouldbe a sad loss for Britain if the World Servicewere to lose its distinctive diasporic voice andits associated diplomatic cultural value.


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Contributors to Voice a poetry magazine programme broadcast in1941 on the BBC Eastern Service including Una Marston, Mulk RajAnand, George Orwell and WH Auden.

The Future of the BBC WorldService and the Decline ofBritish ‘Soft Power’?Marie Gillespie and Alban Web


Delyth Edwards

I am working as the ethnographer on theUnderstanding Everyday Participation:Articulating Cultural Values project. I ambased at the University of Leicester, butworking from the University of Manchesterat present on our first case study areas ofCheetham Hill and Broughton. Presently, ihave been conducting ethnographic walks inthe two areas, noting and documenting bothnon/legitimate spaces and places ofparticipatory interest. I will also be involvedin the household interviews when they getunderway.

Heather Whitaker

Heather Whitaker joined CRESC as a researchsecretary in March 2013 after completing herMA in Economic and Social History at the

University of Manchester. She previouslyattained her BA (Hons) in Economics andPolicy.

Oriol Barranco

Oriol Barranco is a postdoctoral researcher atUniversitat Autonoma of Barcelona,Catalonia (Spain). His research has been ontransformations of labour process, labourconsent and resistance in the workplace,labour trajectories, social movements, andsocial networks. He is a Visiting Researcher atCRESC from June 15, 2013 throughSeptember 14, 2013. He is sponsored byAndrew Miles.

Mark Taylor

Mark is working on the UnderstandingEveryday Participation: Articulating Cultural

Value project with Andrew Miles andcolleagues at the universities of Leicester,Exeter, and Warwick. In particular, Mark isinvolved in analysing existing secondarydatasets, such as Taking Part,investigating the ways in which"nonparticipation" is constructed andwhat it represents, and mapping bothofficial and vernacular resources in aseries of different places in Britain: at themoment, the Manchester city-region.

Yannis Kallianos

I completed my PhD in SocialAnthropology at St Andrews University in2012. My thesis focused on the December2008 revolt in Greece and explored radicalpolitical practices in Athens in relation toeveryday life, transformation of publicspace and social imaginaries ofsubversion. My main research interestsconcern radical politics and the formationof political communities; social conflictand political violence; and the way peoplemake sense of social change in relation tothe city and the use of public space.

Currently, I am interested in addressingprocesses of crisis and political legitimacyin Greece based on an exploration of theeveryday politics of social conflict in localcommunities that oppose theconstruction of waste landfills in theirterritory.

Yannis is the research Associate inInfrastructures of Social Change whilstHannah Knox takes maternity leave.

Welcome...New faces and news from CRESC

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What is social and cultural change? How are the public agendas for framing change set? What do they conceal?How do they reproduce inequalities? And how might they be contested? These are the core questions for the2014 CRESC Conference.

‘Epochal’ theorising will not do. Structures are real, but the extent to which they reflect simple patterns islimited. Instead we need to ask well-theorised and ambitious questions about particular institutions, networksand practices and their changing intersections with power and inequalities. In the final CRESC conference we areseeking theoretically informed and empirically-grounded contributions that explore change, power andinequality, ask how these are framed, and explore how dominant framings might be contested. We invite well-theorised empirical submissions in any area including the following:

Power and Social Framing:the CRESC 2014 Conference

• Finance and the economy

What kinds of mechanisms sustain thepower of business elites? How do thesework? How can we reveal the undisclosedthat sustains financial and businesspower? And how can we reframe issues inways that allow public discussion ofalternatives?

• National culture and ‘soft power’

Technical change, privatisation andtransnationalism are changing thecharacter of national ‘soft power’, butwhat mechanisms are at work in thistransformation? How do they hardeninequalities, nationalisms and racisms?And where are the possible sites ofresistance?

• Cities

Cultures and social divisions grow out of the power-saturatedmaterial realities of the city, but how do these processeswork? What tools do we need to understand theinterrelations between urban cultures and materials? Andhow might we open up spaces to alternatives?

• Infrastructures

Infrastructures reflect state decentralisation andfragmentation, but what are the material politics in play?How does power circulate between political, business andcultural elites, experts, and diverse publics? How might weexplore and reframe the shifting character of political power?

• Participation

The idea of ‘participation’ includes some and excludes others,so how and where are boundaries drawn, and who or what isbeing counted in or out? How do policy models frame theirquestions in ways that obscure exclusion and inequality?What assumptions do they depend on and how mightalternatives be articulated?

• Class

Social stratification has an important cultural dimension, sowhat tools do we need to understand this? How do culturaldistinctions re-articulate and obscure power and classinequalities? And how do processes of cultural stratificationoperate in the life course and between generations?

For further details please visit:http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/cresc-2014-annual-conference-power-and-social-framing

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