Pride, Paternalism, Prejudice—Images of the Working Class

Moving the Social, 2012

Since the end of the Second World War, economic affluence, a neoliberal turn in world politics and economic globalisation have questioned the relevance of social class as a useful social science category. Analysing the changing configuration of labour markets, structural insecurity, labour movements and welfare states, this essay tries to revive the empirical validity of the notion of working class in a Scandinavian context. As a starting point I discuss how changing occupational patterns and state intervention transformed the basic class structure of the three Scandinavian countries Denmark, Sweden and Norway. This led to new trends in consumption, saving and the way ordinary people coped with social insecurity. These developments made heavy demands on the labour movement, which was challenged from within by renewed grassroots activity, i. e. social movement unionism, and from without by new social movements. Recently the Scandinavian countries were exposed to globalisation. The re...

The Sociological Review, 2010

It is well documented that educational achievement in Western societies is related to family background. Yet we know less about how people who have completed university degrees experience the importance of their education. How is education related to the different culturally embedded structures of nation states? How do highly educated people perceive the pertinence of their education? Such questions are rarely posed in the literature on social class, but recent research on the middle class in Britain offers a background for comparisons. Based on results from interviews with a sample of people having higher educational diplomas, the article discusses the particularities of the Norwegian case. We find much ambivalence over class identification and there is a remarkable tendency to downplay the importance of education. Our findings indicate that the Norwegian middle class has internalized egalitarian values embedded in Norwegian culture and thus, compared to the British case, more ofte...

2005

I was interested in doing research into attitudes, norms and values within the Norwegian Labour Party concerning “competetive tendering” (“konkurranseutsetting”), and privatisation of welfare institutions. This because I wanted to uncover perceptions of change and stability as concerning key elements of the welfare state, and the types of, mainly grassroots, responses to possible changes produced in terms of their effect upon traditionally held norms and values. I chose the Labour Party because this is the main political party which has been seen as responsible for the development and protection of welfare institutions. I chose to do library research, and to interview members of the party. Both my interviews and my library research proved very revealing. The “rank and file,” or “grassroots” members of the party whom I interviewed felt that the Labour Party represents, or should represent, a very strong sense of community and solidarity amongst the less well off, and less privileged ...

Arguments about the death of class have been fuelled by the confusion surrounding contemporary class politics. For a good part of the twentieth century, some consensus existed on both the nature and the salience of the relationship between class and political leanings: the well-heeled classes would opt for right-wing politics that protected their privilege, while those less well-to-do would prefer the left’s redistribution and public welfare. That consensus was arguably disrupted by a differentiation of both class relations and the political landscape. The emergence and rise of the “new middle classes” meant that sizeable parts of the populations of Western societies found themselves at neither pole of the hierarchy, and it was unclear what politics would be in their best interest. From the 1960s, the political landscape became more complex too, with the rise of the New Left, and in turn the emergence of right-wing populism. This produced an essentially two-dimensional political lan...

2020

This chapter presents an overview of Danish working-class literary history from the past to, perhaps, the present. Thus, the initial sections of this paper outline the established narrative of the tradition1 from the late 19th century to the early 1980s; the closing part poses a seemingly simple, but highly cotentuous question: Does a contemporary Danish working-class literature exist? In many national contexts such a question would seem superfluously polemic because the answer would be a rather selfevident yes. This is the case in Denmark’s close neighbor Sweden, where working-class literature constitutes a dominating strand in modern Swedish literature and, furthermore, has enjoyed a veritable renaissance in the 21st century (Nilsson, 2017). The current Danish situation is markedly different. In 1985, John Chr. Jørgensen – an important contributor to the research field – mourned “the silencing” of Danish working-class literature (Jørgsensen, 1985), and declarations of the “death o...

Scandinavian Economic History Review, 2023

This article deals with the recent developments of labour history in and about the Nordic countries. We identify patterns, problems and possibilities in these recent developments in the fieldroughly within the last two decades. Our main source of analysis is the research presented and exchanged in the Nordic labour history journals, the Nordic Labour History Network, the labour history associations, the archives and libraries. We relate current trends to developments in European and Global labour history. We claim that the revival and expansion of Nordic labour history must also be understood through its exchange with labour history outside the Nordic sphere and with other disciplines and research fields. The expansion of the field occurred through increased attention and sensitivity to the specificities of various forms of labour, the lived lives of those who work, the places in which work takes place, the various ways in which workers form collective practices and structures, and how they understand themselves in relation to as well as within and outside the parties and institutions that organise and claim to represent workers and labour interests.

2013

Nordic Labour History Conference, 2020

Call for Papers: Nordic Labour History Conference 2020. The next Nordic Labour History Conference – taking place at the Workers’ Museum (Arbejdermuseet) in Copenhagen, November 26-29, 2020 – will continue the efforts from Reykjavík 2016 of expanding the field with new approaches to what can be interrogated as labour history: What counts as labour, where does labour take place and under what conditions, who constitute the working class and indeed ‘the worker’, what can be recognized as labour organizing and workers’ associations. The title of the conference – Labouring Lives and Political Protest Across and Beyond the Nordic Countries – is meant to encourage this expansion of approaches by pointing to the specificities of labour as such, of labour organizing, of workers’ associations and parties, of collective bargaining practices and traditions, of the lived lives of workers, of convergences of and segregations between workplace and home, labour and free time, of various forms of political protest, activism and dissidence, as well as the spatial and temporal geographies of labour within, but not limited to a Nordic context. Labour and workers travel beyond sectoral and national borders and thus labour history inquiries must travel too. Find more information in the full CfP.

Young, 1998