The Language of Social Sciences and Popular Culture
Peter Mandler delivered the annual Ford Lectures in British History at Oxford University in January and February 2026. Here we present three commentaries on the 2026 Ford lectures from historians based at Oxford and a reply to these comments from Peter Mandler himself.
Over the course of his lectures, Peter Mandler developed a powerful argument about the relationship between knowledge, expertise, and power. He demonstrated that while social scientific terms often had an ‘expert’ meaning to begin with, in many cases, this was not how the population used or interpreted terms. As concepts spread through culture, they acquired colloquial meanings that were related but not necessarily identical to their expert meaning. Mandler called this the ‘looping effect’, adapting a term from Ian Hacking, an idea that I have found very generative for thinking about my own research. My reflections therefore extend on this idea of the ‘looping effect’ to consider how the language of social sciences permeated through other linguistic and cultural forms that were outside the scope of Mandler’s lectures but are central to my own research on social care work and class in late 20th and early 21st century Britain—namely, slang and colloquial language, and popular culture. I argue that as social scientific concepts spread through culture, it was not just their meanings that changed, but also the very language used to describe social scientific concepts.
My work on social care relies heavily on the use of original oral history interviews, conducted with people who worked in social care between 1979 and 2010. There were many similarities between how my interviewees discussed class, and the trends Mandler observed in the discussion of class in the popular press in his fourth lecture titled ‘State and Economy’. When I asked people directly whether they identified with a particular class identity, few ascribed positively to a sociological category. If pushed, most people could describe certain traits that were typical of the working, middle and upper classes and fit themselves into these categories. But frequently, there was a deep ambivalence about these forms of sociological categorisation. In the existing scholarship on class, the dominant interpretation of this trend, evident for example in Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite’s widely accepted argument in Class, Politics and the Decline of Deference, is that the declining use of ascriptive labels suggests a chipping away at the boundaries between classes and the strictures of class categories. When looking only for evidence of class in the sociological language of working, middle and upper class and ascriptive class labels, it is easy to see how historians have come to this conclusion. Yet this conclusion that class differences were increasingly less ossified is difficult to square with the ongoing prevalence and casual use of other types of class language that I suggest invoked sociological class categories, but without using the precise sociological language.
While we can all agree that language is important, one of the lessons of Mandler’s lectures is that it is also dynamic. Historians must therefore be cautious about fetishising certain words, as the only or primary expression of certain concepts. Mandler’s use of large language scraping tools like Google n-gram or press archives has obvious benefits in allowing him to map the popularity of certain words over long periods of time and across large databases; for anyone watching the lecture, his many line graphs were immediately striking and thought-provoking. But it strikes me one of the difficulties of these methods is that so much of what we see is bounded by the a priori choice of search terms that run the risk of missing different lexicons and permutations of language. Some of the questions the lectures raised for me, then, were, what does it mean when a social scientific term falls out of popular usage? How might the language of social sciences have an afterlife, or perhaps a half-life, in other cultural mediums? What new interpretations are possible when we think about the language of social sciences not as falling out of use, but rather as entering a new unspoken phase in which they are embedded but unnamed in other cultural forms? Mandler’s lecture have helped me sharpen my understanding of the late 20th century as a tipping point in discourses of class—when the language of social sciences devolved into colloquial and popular cultural representations.
In both my oral history interviews and in popular culture, I found there were types of class labels other than working, middle or upper class that people freely and willingly used to describe both themselves and others. Most common were ‘posh’ and ‘chav’, but we could add to this ‘the snobby lot’, ‘low paid workers’, ‘the working poor’ and the figure of the ‘lad/ladette’. In our discussion, Mandler also added the term ‘swot’, commonly used by school students to describe others more studious or possibly just posher. Although not the vocabulary of social scientists, these terms were colloquial expressions of social categories that were popularised by social scientists. It is possible to observe a similar relationship between sociology and popular culture. Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Mike Savage have debated whether people more commonly drew on popular culture or sociology to define their identities. But Mandler’s idea of the looping effect enables us to posit a more complex interrelationship between the two. Particularly by the late 20th and early 21st centuries, once the social sciences were much more embedded within society and culture, the creators of popular culture were themselves attuned to and drawing on the wellspring of the social sciences. Take, for example, the popular early 2000s TV show Little Britain. Presented in a mockumentary format, the show stylised itself as a sociological commentary on modern British society. Characters such as Vicky Pollard were highly exaggerated and stereotypical portrayals of social scientific ideas of the ‘underclass’. Indeed, humour often played on stereotypes drawn from popular psychology and sociology, the assumption being these social categories are so widely understood and intelligible that they can be reenacted and mocked without being named.
Vicky Pollard, a character in Little Britain
Clearly, this shift from social scientific language to more colloquial and popular cultural forms still marks an important moment of transition in popular understandings of class, but perhaps not in the way people have previously thought. I argue the decline of ascriptive class labels did not mean the underlying concept was less relevant but rather tells us more about the ways people related to this system of classification. I suggest two alternative ways for interpreting the decline of class labels. First, while it sounds prosaic, it is worth emphasising that over time stigma attached to the language of social sciences, and particularly class categories. While true of all forms of communication, the language of social sciences was especially at risk because of the power relations of expertise. Across all the lectures, Mandler underlined the agency of the lay public to appropriate and repurpose expert language, but the persistent stigmatising effect of class labels suggests this process was not always straightforward or successful. Jon Lawrence has astutely observed that the relationship between working class people and sociologists, in particular, was often marked by avoidance, suspicion, hostility, and feelings of condescension. For this reason, Bev Skeggs found that many working-class women in the late 1990s sought to disidentify with the label of working class to escape the stigma it implied. But crucially, the very act of doing so marked them as working class; this loop was inescapable.
Secondly, I suggest there was an element of performativity to the way people, particularly middle-class people, talked about class. As Mandler argued in his fourth lecture, in the mid to late 20th century, the middle classes ‘tactically withdrew’ from class language. When asked directly for their views on class, they tended to disavow it. But withdrawing from class language and withdrawing from class prejudice were not the same thing. Slang, humour, and informality had a permissive quality, allowing people to say implicitly or in veiled terms what was considered less socially acceptable to say out loud.
Freya Willis is a DPhil Student in Modern British History, researching social care work in England and Wales (1979-2010).
Image copyright BBC
