John Harald Westergaard was born on 13 October 1927 in
Putney,
London, to Otto and Inger Westergaard; his parents were Danish and his father was a
civil engineer. In 1938, with his parents about to divorce, Westergaard moved to
Denmark with his mother and was sent to
boarding school in
Copenhagen; his experiences under
Nazi occupation and his mother's attachment to the
Danish resistance movement during the
Second World War encouraged an opposition to authority and a belief in
socialism. He was briefly a
censor in the
British Army of the Rhine and then completed a
sociology degree at the
London School of Economics (LSE), graduating in 1951. He was a researcher to
Ruth Glass at
University College London, before moving to the
University of Nottingham for the 1955–56 year. He then returned to the LSE as a lecturer, and secured promotion to a
readership in sociology in 1970. In 1975, he was appointed as
Keith Kelsall's successor to the chair in Sociological Studies at the
University of Sheffield. He retired in 1986 amid funding cuts and declining student numbers which had led to the sociology
honours degree course falling into abeyance at Sheffield. His early retirement – and that of
Eric Sainsbury (chair in Social Administration) – was carried out to ensure that junior staff did not lose their jobs. In the meantime, he had also been Deputy Dean and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Sheffield between 1982 and 1986. In retirement, he remained associated with the university as an emeritus professor; he also held visiting posts and served as president of the
British Sociological Association from 1991 to 1993. He was also an Academician of the
Academy of Social Sciences. Westergaard's research focused on
social class and
inequality in
capitalist societies; his
Marxist interpretation was unorthodox in its focus on income distribution rather than productive relations. With Henrietta Resler, he co-wrote
Class in a Capitalist Society in 1975, arguing that class inequalities had persisted in
post-war Britain; his book
Who Gets What?: The Hardening of Class Inequality in the Late Twentieth Century (1995) articulated his belief that inequalities had persisted in the meantime.
Alan Walker wrote that "He championed the study of class inequality as a defining feature of capitalism, long before its importance became more widely acknowledged, and played key roles in the development of the sociology profession." Westergaard was married twice and had four children (one of whom died in infancy) and a step-son. He died on 3 May 2014. == Publications ==