David Lockwood (sociologist)

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David Lockwood CBE FBA (9 April 1929 – 6 June 2014) was a British sociologist known for his work on social class and work. He was born in Holmfirth, England, the youngest child in a working-class family. His father Herbert worked as a dyer and later as a cobbler after an injury; he died in 1939. His mother Edith was a cleaner. Lockwood left school to work in 1944 at Victoria Textiles and studied in the evenings at Huddersfield Technical College. He served in the Army Intelligence Corps from 1947 to 1949, and while in Austria he developed an interest in Karl Marx. He earned a place at the London School of Economics by examination and studied there with influences from T. H. Marshall and Max Weber.

He graduated in 1952 with a first-class degree and did a one-year study on industrial disputes. Through T. H. Marshall he obtained an assistant lectureship. In 1960 he became a lecturer in the Economics Department at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College. In 1968 he moved to the University of Essex as a professor. He was recognized with a CBE and was a Fellow of the British Academy. One of his notable students was Anthony Giddens.

Lockwood’s key ideas include The Blackcoated Worker (1958, with later edition in 1989), which analyzed how to locate the class position of clerical workers using Max Weber’s distinction between market rewards and work situations, as well as symbolic rewards from status. He contributed to the idea of proletarianisation—the notion that white-collar workers were increasingly identifying with manual workers. Other important works are The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (three volumes, 1968–69), coauthored with Frank Bechhofer, John Goldthorpe, and Jennifer Platt, and Solidarity and Schism (1992).

He was married to Leonore Davidoff, a pioneer in gender studies, in 1954, and they had three sons: Matthew, Ben and Harold. David Lockwood died on 6 June 2014 at the age of 85.