Privatised instrumentalism

Social relationships centred on the home, combined with an attitude that work and cooperation with workmates are mainly means of improving personal wages, conditions and living standards.

The idea that workers’ social lives become centred on the home and that they treat work, including cooperation with colleagues, mainly as a means of improving their own material circumstances.

Lockwood’s idea of privatised instrumentalism predicted a working-class life increasingly centred on the home, with work treated mainly as a means to obtain material rewards. Cooperation with workmates would reflect individual interests in better pay and conditions rather than collective solidarity.

Explain privatised instrumentalism through both home-centred relationships and self-interested attitudes towards work and collective action.

A home-centred lifestyle combined with treating work and collective action mainly as ways to improve one's own material living standards, rather than expressing wider class solidarity.

Collective action through trade unions could similarly be motivated by improving their own pay and conditions rather than changing society. This combination was described as privatised instrumentalism.

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AQA GCSE Sociology · 8192

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Eduqas GCSE Sociology · C200