Social inequalities
50. Gender and work
Equal treatment legislation was introduced in the 1970s – are there still gender inequalities in work and employment? The short answer is yes, gender imbalances in the types of jobs that men and women do (horizontal and vertical gender segregation), and how their work is valued and rewarded, remains a […]
48. Sheila Rowbotham: Manchester’s Dreamer
Sheila Rowbotham, the renowned socialist feminist historian, writer, and campaigner, joined the Sociology department at Manchester in 1993 and left upon retirement in 2009. As a student of the famous historians E. P Thompson and Dorothy Thompson, Rowbotham’s work takes up the task of unearthing and documenting the ‘hidden histories’ […]
42. Making elites visible
In the last thirty years, there has been an enormous rise in the wealth and power of the very wealthy (sometimes called ‘the 1%’) but social science has been slow to tackle this phenomenon. Manchester Sociologists (working in the interdisciplinary ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change) challenged this neglect […]
40. Re-thinking ageing populations
Ageing populations now exert a major influence on all aspects of social and economic life. Concerns about the best way of  providing for such populations, their impact on standards of living, and relations between age groups and generations, feature prominently in public debate and discussion. The twenty-first century will without […]
Win a copy of ‘Sans Papiers’ new book on undocumented migrants
Sans Papiers: The Social and Economic Lives of Young Undocumented Migrants This new book, by Alice Bloch, Nando Sigona and Roger Zetter combines theoretical and policy debates with an in-depth exploration of the experiences of undocumented migrants in the UK from Zimbabwe, China, Brazil, Ukraine and Turkish Kurdistan. Undocumented migration is […]
35. Cathie Marsh and the craft of quantitative sociology
Cathie Marsh was a leading light in the field of quantitative sociology, particularly in the use of surveys. Sociological surveys were falling from favour in the 80s, and often dismissed as crude tools lacking in subtlety. Cathie disagreed. Her 1982 book The Survey Method argued that the problem wasn’t the […]
32. Individualised class
In the 1980s ‘death of class’ debate, it had been suggested that rising affluence and consumer choice meant  that ‘class’ was now irrelevant. For Ulrich Beck, affluence and consumer choice had led to increasing individualised and diversified lifestyles, which he saw as breaking the influence of economic ‘class’ on cultural […]
29. Researching race
The ways in which race structures identities, experience and disadvantage has been a central concern to much of the work coming out of Manchester sociology. All the research carried out in Manchester seeks to explore how race is both a social construction (ie it has no biological or genetic basis) […]
26. Feminist waves and different generations
In light of recent feminist activisms that have attained a high degree of media visibility – such as the campaign to have women represented on bank notes and the Everyday Sexism project – a fourth wave of feminism has been proclaimed.  When feminism is understood as a series of waves […]
23. Undocumented migrants
Undocumented migrants, also known as irregular migrants, are people who have crossed an international border and are living a country without any legal right to reside there. Relatively little is known about undocumented migrants because they are a hidden group. It is impossible to know the exact number of undocumented […]