Dr Wendy Bottero
Email: wendy.bottero@manchester.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0) 161 275 0267
Wendy studied Social and Politcal 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 Lectureship at the University of Southampton. She has been at Manchester since January 2006.
Wendy is a member for the Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life, the Mitchell Centre for the Analysis of Social Networks, and her current research project is affiliated to the ESRC Research Centre for the Study of Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC).
Research interests
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; social networks and social interaction; and social theory, particularly the work of Pierre Bourdieu.
Wendy is currently working on the 'Who do you think they were?’ research project, which looks at the different ways in which family history research is conducted. This is qualitative study of popular family history, which explores how - in the process of researching their family trees - family historians investigate historical processes, and situate themselves, and their ancestors, within narratives of social historical change, and 'the past'. This research project is in association with the ESRC Research Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC).
This is an extension of Wendy’s previous work, on the Family History Project (with Ken Prandy), 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 also continuing her work developing and extending ‘social distance’ approaches to stratification and inequality, which question 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 and patterns of friendship, partnership and cultural similarity which gives rise to relations of social closeness and distance. Wendy’s work explores:
- 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.
Books
- Stratification: Social Division and Inequality, Routledge. Buy it from Amazon at:[ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stratification-Division-Inequality-Wendy-Bottero/dp/0415281792/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267030809&sr=8-1]
Refereed journals
- Bottero, W (2012) 'Who do you think they were? How family historians make sense of social position and inequality in the past' Sociology 63 (1) pp 54-74, March, DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2011.01393.x.
- Bottero, W and Crossley, N (2011) 'Worlds, Fields and Networks: Becker, Bourdieu and the Structures of Social Structures' Cultural Sociology 5 (1) pp 99-119 DOI 10.1177/1749975510389726. (Nominated for the BSA/SAGE 2012 Prize for Innovation and/or Excellence.)
- Bottero, W., (2010) ‘Intersubjectivity and Bourdieusian approaches to “identity”’ Cultural Sociology, forthcoming.
- Bottero, W., (2009) ‘Relationality and social interaction’, British Journal of Sociology, 60(2): 399-420.
- Bottero, W., (2007) ‘Social interaction and inequality’, Sociology Compass. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/soco/1/2; 814-831, DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00030.x
- 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. (2004) ‘Class identities and the identity of class’, Sociology, 38(5) 985-1003.
- Bottero, W. & Irwin, S. (2003) 'Locating difference: class, 'race' and gender and the shaping of social inequalities', The Sociological Review, 51 (4): 463-483. [Also reprinted in (2006) in D. Inglis and J. Bone (eds.) Social Stratification: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, London: Routledge.]
- Bottero, W. & Prandy, K. (2003) ‘Social interaction distance and stratification’, British Journal of Sociology, 54 (2): 177-197. [[Also reprinted in (2006) in D. Inglis and J. Bone (eds.) Social Stratification: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, London: Routledge.]
- Bottero, W. and Prandy, W. (2001) 'Women's Occupations and the Social Order in Nineteenth Century Britain' Sociological Research Online, 6 (2)
- Irwin, S. and Bottero, W. (2000) ‘Market Returns? Gender and theories of change in employment relations’ in British Journal of Sociology, 51, 2: 261-280.
- Prandy, K. and Bottero, W. (2000a) ‘Social reproduction and mobility in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ in Sociology, 34 (2): 265-281.
- Prandy, K. and Bottero, W. (2000b) ‘Reproduction within and between generations: the example of nineteenth-century Britain’ in Historical Methods, 33(1):4-15.
- Bottero, W. (1998) 'Clinging to the wreckage? Gender and the legacy of class', Sociology, 32, 3: 451-469.
- Prandy, K. and Bottero, W. (1998) 'The use of marriage data to measure the social order in nineteenth-century Britain', Sociological Research Online, March,3, 1,
Chapters in books
- Bottero, W., (2009a) ‘Globalization and Belonging’ in F. Devine and S. Heath (eds.) ‘Doing Social Science: Evidence and Methods in Empirical Research’, Macmillan
- Bottero, W., (2009b) ‘Class in the Twenty-First Century’ in K. Sveinsson (ed.) Who Cares About the White Working Class? Runnymede Trust Report. LINK: [http://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/publications/pdfs/WhoCaresAboutTheWhiteWorkingClass-2009.pdf]
- Bottero, W., Lambert, P., Prandy, K., and McTaggert, S., (2009) ‘Occupational Structures: The stratification space of social interaction’ in K. Robson and C. Sanders (eds.) Quantifying Theory: Pierrre Bourdieu, Secaucus: Springer.
- Bottero, W. (2005) ‘Interaction distance and the social meaning of occupations’ in Pettinger, L., Taylor, R., Parry, J. and Glucksmann, M. (eds.) A New Sociology of Work? Oxford: Blackwell, (also available as The Sociological Review, Special Issue 2, vol. 3, 2005).
I am keen to supervise research students in the areas of stratification, hierarchy and class; social mobility and social reproduction; social ties and interaction; and identities and social divisions.
Phd students:
- Melanie Semple, 'Fatherhood and masculinity', University of Southampton, awarded 2003.
- Jeff Vass, PhD Candidate (part-time), 'Sociality and the idea of the social', University of Southampton (2004 to date).
- Helene Snee, PhD Candidate (full-time) 'Gap year travel and cultural capital', University of Manchester (2006 to date).
- Paul Simpson, PhD Candidate (full-time) '"Nobody loves a fairy when she's forty?" Gay mid-life and processes of ageing', University of Manchester (2007 to date).
- Oi Yeung Lam, PhD Candidate (full-time) 'Cultural capital and education in Hong Kong', University of Manchester (2008 to date).
- Julia Bennett, PhD Candidate (full-time)'Belonging, place and community', (full-time), University of Manchester (2008 to date).
- Katherine Davies, PhD Candidate (part-time), 'Sibling resemblances', University of Manchester (2009 to date).
Current undergraduate teaching
- SOCY 10440, Researching Culture and Society
- SOCY 20871, Culture and Inequality
- SOCY 20112, Research Design
- SOCY 20862, Life Stories and Biographical Research