Dr Wendy Bottero

Wendy studied Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge, before completing her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. She taught at the University of Abertay, Dundee, worked as a Researcher on the Family History Project at Cambridge University, and then moved to a Lecturership at the University of Southampton. She has been at Manchester since January 2006.

Wendy is Joint Reviews Editor for the journal Sociology, and sits on the editorial board of Sociology Compass.  

Wendy’s research interests are in the areas of stratification, hierarchy and ‘class’; social mobility and social reproduction; social identities; analysing social change; social divisions, lifestyles and differential association; and social theory, particularly the work of Pierre Bourdieu.

Her previous work, on the  Family History Project (with Ken Prandy), was a study of historical social mobility in Britain which used the family trees of amateur family historians (a sample of 80,000 male and female ancestors, going back 5 generations) to explore the reproduction of social position for those born  in the period 1790-1910. This work extended the Cambridge Stratification School’s ‘social interaction distance approach’ to inequality.

Wendy is continuing her work developing and extending ‘social distance’ approaches to stratification and inequality, as part of a questioning of conventional theory and research in the area. Social distance (or relational) approaches use patterns of differential association to explore stratification as a ‘space of social relationships’, by mapping the network of social interaction – patterns of friendship, partnership and cultural similarity – which gives rise to relations of social closeness and distance. Wendy’s work is exploring:

• using social ties to measure the space of social relations
• how thinking about social ties affects the theorising of social location
• the impact of social ties on perceptions of social location

• SOCY 20871, Culture and Inequality
• SOCY 20112, Research Design
• SOCY 20862, Life Stories and Biographical Research
• SOCY 60011, Cultural Formations

I am also keen to supervise research students in the areas of stratification, hierarchy and ‘class’; social mobility and social reproduction; and social identities and social divisions.

Publications Database

• Lambert, P., Prandy, K., and Bottero, W. (2007) 'By slow degrees: two centuries of social reproduction and mobility in Britain', Sociological Research Online, 12 (1)
• Bottero, W. (2006) ‘Interaction distance and the social meaning of occupations’ in Pettinger, L., Taylor, R., Parry, J. and Glucksmann, M. (eds.) A New Sociology of Work? Blackwell (also available as The Sociological Review Special Issue 2, volume 53, 2005).
• Bottero, W. (2005) Stratification: Social Division and Inequality, Routledge.
• Bottero, W. (2004) ‘Class identities and the identity of class’, Sociology, 38(5) 985-1003.

Phd students

• Melanie Semple, PhD, ‘Fatherhood and Masculinity’,  University of Southampton (completed 2003)
• Jeff Vass, PhD candidate  ‘Sociality and the Idea of the Social’, University of Southampton (2004 to present)

•  Helene Snee, PhD candidate  ‘Gap Year Travel and Cultural Capital’, University of Manchester (2006 to date)