Class in the New Millennium

The Structure, Homologies and Experience of the British Social Space

Will Atkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367876975
• eBook ISBN: 9781317241553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Class in the New Millennium paints a fresh and comprehensive picture of social class in Britain today. Anchored in a broad repertoire of methods and pursuing a distinctive theoretical agenda, it not only painstakingly maps the structure, transformation and effects of the UK's key fault lines but goes behind closed doors to see how they play out in everyday family life.

Throughout the book Atkinson throws new light on a diverse array of themes, including: the continued effects of deindustrialisation, educational expansion, feminisation of the workforce and surging employment insecurity; the persistence of lifestyle cleavages despite cultural and technological change; the growth of political disengagement, the transformation of the Labour Party and the rise of nationalism; the entwinement of class with space, place and physical movement; and the way in which class interacts with intimate relations to shape not just the way we decorate our walls or talk over the dining table but the very reproduction of the class structure itself.

This innovative title will appeal to scholars as well as advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in the fields of sociology, politics and political science, cultural studies, cultural geography, social policy and social work.

1

Introduction

What is the state of class in Britain today? What – to give this somewhat abstract query more concrete form – is the shape of the nation’s class structure, and how has it changed since the economic upheavals of the 1980s? How does it feed into our most apparently private of desires and tastes in music, sports, books, what we do to our bodies, watch on television and so on – not only setting us apart from others but setting up an order of worth in which some tastes are distinguished as ‘legitimate’ and others as ‘vulgar’? In what ways has this mutated with entry into a new century supposedly characterised by choice, reflexivity and individualism? How does class orient our values and ethics, playing out in political attitudes, but also the degree to which we feel we even have a point of view worth articulating? And how has the neoliberal revolution that swept the world in the 1970s and 1980s played into that? How does class shape – but also how is it shaped by – the quotidian experience of space and place at the national, local and household level? How does it entwine with that specific bundle of relations we call ‘family’ in so doing? How, finally, are children’s nascent and evolving class positions worked at through the most routine and prosaic, yet emotionally charged, objects and events of domestic life?

This avalanche of questions – vexations to countless scholars before me – I endeavour to answer in these pages, offering, as an end product, a novel vision of class, its effects and its place in everyday life in Britain for the new millennium. In so doing I mobilise the path-breaking and powerful view of what class is and how it works proffered by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his magnum opus, Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984). Being rooted in a detailed analysis of his own country during les Trente Glorieuses, however, there have long been questions as to how far this perspective could be generalised to other Western nations and whether it still stood in ‘the global age’, ‘the digital age’, ‘the age of the internet’, ‘late modernity’, ‘high modernity’ or whatever other appellation one wants to foist on the last thirty or forty years. Thus set in motion was a rapidly accelerating train of scholarship aiming to test the applicability of Bourdieu’s ideas in countries across the world. The UK was duly targeted as part of this, but in a way which, regrettably, overlooked some of Bourdieu’s core insights and, as a result, left far too many questions unanswered. Moreover, Bourdieu himself, for all his evident advances, neglected to situate class fully in relation to other social structures and influences shaping the mundane experience of the world, essential for making sense of how the determinations of class are actually perceived, felt and lived, so there is need for some further conceptual elaboration. All this will be expanded upon in what follows as a means of contextualising the analyses presented throughout this book, but let me first recount precisely how Bourdieu came to prominence in class analysis and challenged the conventional schools of thought.

From life chances to the misrecognition order

For a period in the later twentieth century most scholars of class – notwithstanding a few resolute intellectual dissidents – fell into one of two camps. Marxists, on the one hand, claimed that class is defined by one’s position in the production process – specifically, whether one is an owner of the means of production or a propertyless worker – and that everything, from work pressures, consumer desires and political leanings to the organisation of space, family relations and education, come down to the property owners’ desire to maintain or deepen exploitation or the workers’ determination to fight back. This boils down to a simple philosophical starting point: we are inherently labouring beings, transforming nature in order to survive. This comes before all else, defining the human condition and grounding all social relations. Some, like Erik Olin Wright (1997), have fought long and hard to fit the mess and complexity of contemporary societies into this framework, mapping multiple class fractions on the basis of how much skill or authority they possess and turning them into categories for survey respondents to fall into; but even for him class, and the opposition between owners and non-owners, remains primary.

The Weberians, on the other hand, asserted that social classes should be distinguished on the basis of the major fault lines in life chances in capitalist society, with John Goldthorpe (1980), their foremost representative, cutting up the occupational structure of Britain – and of other western nations later – into a vertical stack of boxes topped by the ‘service class’ of professionals and managers. Though light on philosophical anthropology, the Nietzschean thesis that people are driven to dominate one another echoes in Weber’s own formulations and perhaps seeps unbeknownst into the most seemingly technical of sociological researches otherwise enthralled by the economic view of people as utility maximisers. However, in contrast to the expansive explanatory power that Marxists ascribed to class – which has always tended to veer into outright reductionism – they opt for a more modest view of its place in society. Educational inequalities may well be explained by rational choices made in the face of different resources, and political views may be attuned to maintaining or improving one’s advantages, but consumption is, strictly speaking, a question of status, with little to do with class, and the everyday experience of space or family is of virtually no interest.

The two traditions often came into open conflict. Who, asked many, offered the soundest, most robust and most useful approach to class? When compared side-by-side, what does one reveal that the other hides? A famous investigation of these questions by Marshall et al. (1988) in the UK effectively came down in favour of Goldthorpe. Wright’s Marxist map of class relations was deemed too difficult to implement, too narrow in its scope and too driven by theoretical and political prejudices to be of much use to workaday sociologists seeking to chart patterns of inequality efficiently. The timing of this intervention was hardly convenient for Wright: at the same time Marxism was declining both as a political and intellectual force around the world and, though he continued to publish the results of his endeavours in the late 1990s, few have since taken up and used his measure of social class. Goldthorpe and his colleagues thus emerged the victors, and since then his class map – known as the ‘EGP scheme’ in recognition of the three researchers who worked on it together, Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portacarero – has been consecrated as the official governmental measure of class, both at the national level, in the form of the UK Office for National Statistics’ Socio-economic Classification scheme (NS-SEC), and at the international level, in the form of the European Socio-economic Classification (E-SeC) (Rose and Harrison, 2010). This is not to say there were no dissenting voices: some analysts preferred – and still prefer – to define stratification in terms of network clustering (e.g. Stewart et al., 1980; Bottero, 2005) or small occupational clusters (Grusky, 2005), while others have endeavoured to devise alternative maps of class akin to the EGP scheme but taking into account the mushrooming service sector in post-industrial nations (Esping-Andersen, 1993; Oesch, 2006). These perspectives have failed, however, to gather quite the same momentum as Goldthorpe’s vision of class, leaving the latter in a position of ‘industry standard’.

As a new millennium loomed and dawned, however, a revolution swept class analysis. Many were frustrated by the inability of the EGP scheme, and its founding logic, to reveal anything about the way in which class is perceived in daily life, entwined with a sense of worth and denigration and inscribed deep into mind and body, while feminists in particular took issue with the simplistic view of household relations – as simply being ruled by the primary earner’s (read: man’s) class interests and opportunities – and, by implication, gender underpinning it (see Atkinson, 2015). A search for fresh inspiration was sparked, and out of the scramble for different foundations emerged one body of work which, for all its problems, could provide the conceptual ammunition necessary for reinventing the oldest of sociological topics: that of Bourdieu.

For Bourdieu, class is not defined by exploitation or life chances, though both are still enveloped within his perspective. Instead, harking back to the pithy meditations of Blaise Pascal, but with distinct echoes of Hegel, class is defined by possession of certain properties securing recognition in a particular social order, that is, worth and value in the eyes of others. More accurately, since these properties are essentially arbitrary yet signal immense legitimacy in the eyes of their beholders, they secure misrecognition – the mistaken belief that someone is inherently superior by virtue of the fact they display a socially esteemed set of characteristics – and, with that, symbolic power – the power to have one’s definition of reality accepted and even taken for granted (rendering it ‘doxic’).¹ In post-industrial capitalist societies with developed educational systems, the three key sources of misrecognition toward which libidos – in the sense of desire for worth – are channelled are economic capital (money and wealth), cultural capital (a certain way of knowing the world emphasising mastery of abstract symbol/sign systems and linked to educational level), and social capital (connections and networks), all of which can be described as symbolic capital insofar as they are misrecognised as legitimate. Moreover, the class structure does not consist of a set of neat boxes piled on top of one another, as for Marxists or Weberians, but takes the form of a multidimensional social space. Three axes are key: total volume of capital in all its forms, composition of capital (i.e. whether one’s capital is primarily economic or cultural in character) and changes in these properties over time. Bourdieu thus distinguishes three clusters or clouds of individuals in these spaces which can be labelled ‘classes’ for analytical purposes: the dominant at the top, the dominated at the bottom and an intermediate class in between. Yet he also distinguishes class fractions within these three classes on the basis of whether they are richer in cultural capital or economic capital, pitting, for example, intellectuals against business leaders in the dominant class, with professionals in between, and cultural intermediaries (nurses, youth workers etc.) against small-business owners in the intermediate class.

Those possessing similar capital volumes and compositions are deemed to have similar conditions of existence, which in turn foster different dispositions, or habitus, among those subject to them and, thus, different aesthetic and ethical outlooks – or lifestyles and political attitudes. Insofar as these are associated in perception with being ‘smart’ or ‘rich’ or their maligned opposites in line with the misrecognition order and distribution of symbolic capital, some tastes and views are cast as elegant, desirable or authoritative on a wider scale while others are seen as ‘trashy’, ‘ignorant’ and so on. Indeed, if one maps out topographically the maximum differences and similarities of lifestyles – the ‘symbolic space’ – and attitudes – the space of political position-takings – and then examines where the different classes and class fractions sit within them, a remarkable (though not necessarily perfect) homology or correspondence between their dimensions and the dimensions of the social space emerges, thus converting statistical distances and directions into not only a guide to everyday perceptions of social distance but maps of power relations. Bourdieu himself demonstrated all this not through linear statistical techniques of the kind familiar to anglophone sociologists of class but through the innovative method of simple correspondence analysis (CA) and, later, multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), both forms of factor analysis designed to uncover correspondences between variables or categories of variables and project them geometrically (see Le Roux and Rouanet, 2004, 2010).

The immediate difference from the EGP scheme is obvious: occupations which the latter rolls together in the service class or the intermediate class, or even within their constituent subcategories (lower versus higher professionals and managers, for example), would be distinguished according to Bourdieu’s logic on account of the type of capital at their disposal. Several substantive advances follow from this. First, Bourdieu’s scheme allows a more nuanced approach to the puzzle of educational reproduction by distinguishing the primary resource at a parent’s or family’s disposal. Rather than being a debate over whether economic advantage, social connections or familial transmission of cultural capital is the key, in other words, it is likely to differ by class fraction within the dominant class. Second, when it comes to studying lifestyles, the NS-SEC, in rolling together class fractions, also rolls together what are likely to be different classed aesthetics with different associated tastes and practices. Perhaps this is one reason why Chan and Goldthorpe (2007) fail to find any significant connection between class and lifestyle differences while recognising the distinguishing power of education (see Atkinson, 2011). Finally, Bourdieu’s approach can throw fresh light on an issue which has plagued even Nuffield-sympathisers: the fact that, far from conforming to the hypothesis that the service class should be generally conservative in political outlook in order to protect their interests, the top class is fractured into an economically wealthy right-leaning faction and a highly educated left-leaning faction (see debates and contributions in Evans, 1999), which might again be hypothesised to flow from the different sources of their dominance. There have been all kinds of efforts to modify the EGP scheme to account for this (e.g. Güveli et al., 2007), but they begin to depart from, and perhaps even undermine, the original neo-Weberian logical connection between class, life chances and political interests.

Mapping the British social space and its homologies

Many people, struck by the advances that Bourdieu’s view offers, have endeavoured to apply his logic and methods to their own nations, mapping social spaces and their homologies in Norway, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• List of figures and box
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Field analysis: the British social space and its homologies
• 2 The social space and its transformations
• 3 The space of lifestyles
• 4 The space of political position-takings
• Part II Lifeworld analysis: class, place, family
• 5 National space, urban space
• 6 Local space
• 7 Domestic space I: Decor and regionalisation
• 8 Domestic space II: The spatiotemporal articulation of fields
• 9 Struggles for love and social reproduction
• 10 Conclusion: Britain and beyond
• Appendices
• Index