David Lockwood - Curriculum vitae#

David Lockwood is a renowned theoretical sociologist. He has made influential contributions to the debates about social order particularly with regards to social structure and agency and to working class images of society. He has also taken part in ground-breaking research on social cohesion and social stratification.

He was born in Holmfirth, Yorkshire in 1929 to a working class family. In 1954 he married the academic Leonore Davidoff, another pioneer who has also been interviewed. His working life began in a textile mill and he was conscripted to the Army Intelligence Corps between 1947 and 1949. A grant for ex-servicemen enabled him to study at the London School of Economics, graduating in 1952. His Ph.D. thesis on the theme of class and stratification as they related to clerical workers was published as a book entitled The Blackcoated Worker in 1958 and republished in 1989.

In 1958 David Lockwood was appointed as a Fellow and a University Lecturer in the Economics Faculty at Cambridge University. With John Goldthorpe, he jointly directed The Affluent Worker (a study examining the lives and aspirations of the new working class of post-war Britain, through a large number of semi-structured interviews with workers in Luton). This would become one of the best-known studies ever undertaken by British sociologists, and exemplified his commitment to both theoretical and empirical rigour. In Solidarity and Schism, published in 1992, he continued to explore the ideas of social integration, citizenship and class.

Lockwood joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex in 1968 as Professor, retiring in 2001. In 1998, he was awarded a CBE in the honours list for his contributions to sociology. He was honoured in 2011 with a lifetime achievement award by the British Sociological Association (BSA), for his outstanding contribution to British sociology. (Source: www.esds.ac.uk)