Showing papers in "European Sociological Review in 1985"

Housing tenure and family formation in contemporary Britain

Abstract: The housing market in Britain is dominated by two very distinct tenure types, conferring differing degrees of security, opportunities for mobility, direct and indirect subsidization and potential for capital gain. Despite apparent convergence between privately (owner-occupied) and publicly (local authority or 'council') owned homes in terms of physical amenities and space provision, marked differences exist in other respects, and current trends represent an increasing polarization of the housing market between those families who own their homes and those who rent them from the council. Currently, 56 per cent of British households are owner-occupiers, while 31 per cent are local authority tenants (1981 Census figures). Local authority housing was introduced on a significant scale just after the end of the First World War, and since that time the state has been involved (with greater or lesser degrees of political commitment) in the provision of large-scale public housing. Home ownership has also been encouraged by all governments, largely through indirect financial incentives, such as tax relief on mortgage interest repayments. The development of the building societies as mortgage brokers provided a means of purchasing, over a long period of time with security and at a reasonable cost. The most striking trend in British housing over the twentieth century has been the increase in the proportion of the housing stock either owner-occupied or rented from local authorities, at the expense of the proportion of privately-rented housing which, at the turn of the century, housed the vast majority of British households. Much attention has been devoted in the sociological and economic literature to the structure of the British housing market, but housing tenure has only recently been recognized as a useful discriminatory variable in the description and analysis of differentials in British demography. I one of the first systematic pieces o work to focus specifically on demographic differen ls between housing tenures, Fox and Goldblatt (1982) showed that the association between tenure category and mortality from the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys Longitudinal Study was strong (with owner-occupiers having the lowest overall level of mortality and local authority tenants the highest), and that, although there was an association between tenure and social class, the relationship existed independently of social class effects; for example, mortality for owner-occupiers aged between 15 and 64 was lower than that for any grouping of social classes of comparable size. Given that physical housing conditions are broadly similar for the two major British tenure categories, it would seem that tenure is acting as an indicator for some other set of relationships not directly associated with physical housing conditions. Owner-occupation is the form of tenure preferred by the great majority of young married couples for reasons not only associated with housing conditions per se. For example, couples moving from the local authority sector to the owner-occupied sector were often found to have moved into inferior accommodation in terms of amenities (Jones, 1976). Moreover, the costs of owner-occupation are usually much higher in the arly years of house purchase than the costs associated with local authority tenancies of comparable quality (OPCS, 1981). This suggests that owning one's own home has a status value which is more important to many couples than the physical conditions of housing. Murie has commented that: 'tenure status itself may be taken

Redistribution and equality in the welfare state:An effort to interpret the major findings of research on the redistributive effects of the welfare state

Abstract: One of the many vividly debated issues of the welfare state is that of its redistributive effects. Perhaps a majority of social scientists and economists believe that the welfare state makes a considerable effort to improve the lot of the poor and the worse-off more generally, at the expense of more well-to-do, joining Wilensky's conclusion that '. .. taxes and benefits taken together have a highly egalitarian effect on income distribution.' (Wilensky, 1975: 94). Some students in the field go even further and argue that the welfare state has actually broken the link between economic welfare and contributions made in the production system, thus causing strong work disincentives (Lindbeck, 1983: 227). For some scholars the welfare state is an important step towards democratic socialism, because it removes commodities from markets to be distributed politically and thereby changes the mechanisms and distributions of capitalism (Furniss and Tilton, 1977; Stephens, 1979, Esping-Andersen, 1980). Then there are those who claim that the welfare state is a failure. Its ability to diminish equality has been challenged: '. . . a growing body of academic work shows increasing disillusion with the achievements of state welfare and pessimism about its potential for achieving redistribution to those in need.' (Taylor-Gooby, 1982; quoted by O'Higgins, 1985b). Some even argue that the welfare state actually is as much for the rich as for the poor (Le Grand, 1982), and its ability to modify class relations has been seriously challenged (Westergaard and Resler, 1975, Westergaard, 1978). This review attempts to clarify the issue of the redistributive effects of the welfare state on equality by looking carefully at research findings and by examining the theoretical assumptions that have led to controversial interpretations. For this purpose, there are two types of study which are relevant. First, there is a diffuse group of studies focusing on welfare outcomes, both their development in time and their distribution. Welfare research and social indicators on health, education, housing, economic resources etc. have greatly improved our knowledge of the level and distribution of welfare in a society; but for our purpose the basic problem of the use of the welfare outcome studies is the difficulty of specifying the impact of the welfare state, since these outcomes are obviously an effect of a vast array of other factors as well. The second group of studies focuses on the welfare efforts of the state, or on the inputs it makes in order to influence welfare outcomes. These studies are similar enough to justify the notion of a 'redistribution research paradigm'. This review focuses on the presentation of this paradigm, examining its characteristics, findings and weaknesses, but in the end we come back to studies on welfare outcomes.

Long-term changes in the occupational structure

Abstract: This article is devoted to an empirical analysis of long-term changes in the distribution of the labour force (or employment) by occupation. The literature on the subject is not very extensive. A careful collection of long-term data on the employment structure of several countries, some of which concern occupations, is contained in Bairoch (1968). A statistical study based on cross-sectional and time-series data for 51