Book Review: Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing Mothering

Abstract

about 20 minutes to fill out and produced a 'class classification'). As a social scientist, I was struck by the ways the authors painstakingly take the survey apart and provide the epistemological and ontological thinking behind its clever and simple design. I cannot recall a similar sociological study that has grown from an internationally publicized survey-the largest survey of social class ever conducted in the United Kingdom. Readers will be fascinated by the attention to detail given in the take-up of the survey and the distribution and disparities found at the local levels. In and of itself, the take-up of the survey reflected the marked geographical divisions in why some people are interested in class and others are not. As Savage notes, 'it is the more affluent who seem to be more interested in the topic of class, even though they might also be sceptical of the survey results' (p. 11). And on the same page '. .. Of the 161,000 respondents, not a single cleaner or worker in elementary (basic) services or plastics processing answered'. The book offers a superb methodology and analysis of how the GCBS questions were calibrated. For students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, the book will provide a rich and relevant insight into how to produce rigorous data from survey research and how to marry together online digital engagement with more conventional modes of data collection. I refer here to the inclusion into the study of one of the UK's leading researchers of the precariat, Lisa McKenzie, who lent her ethnographic skills to interrogate why the precariat had not engaged with the survey. The methodological richness of this book is certainly a key strength. The first key finding is that in the United Kingdom today there is a clearly defined wealth elite at the top and the precariat at the bottom, alongside huge numbers of people located in five middle-class structures that are fluid and mobile in their orientation. The second, perhaps more significant, finding is that Britain is facing new mountains of inequality fuelled by a 'housing aristocracy', regional, national and intra-city divides and the elite educational and professional institutions that are affiliated to political parties (and no longer to occupational classes). The 'cultural class analysis' fundamental to the framing of these findings reveals extremely interesting things about how classifying processes themselves are necessarily morally loaded and inherently hierarchical and proliferate a politics of stigmatization. This is somewhat ironic, given the GBCS is itself a survey that seeks to classify! But this misses the point of this book, which is to place under a political microscope the ways in which we discourse on class and how we positon 'our own class'. Sadly, it is this politics of classification that has led to the precariat becoming invisible in modern Britain today.