Atkinson - Class

1. Barbara Adam, Time
2. Alan Aldridge, Consumption
3. Alan Aldridge, The Market
4. Jakob Arnoldi, Risk
5. Will Atkinson, Class
6. Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer, Disability
7. Darin Barney, The Network Society
8. Mildred Blaxter, Health 2nd edition
9. Harriet Bradley, Gender 2nd edition
10. Harry Brighouse, Justice
11. Mnica Brito Vieira and David Runciman, Representation
12. Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism 2nd edition
13. Joan Busfield, Mental Illness
14. Margaret Canovan, The People
15. Andrew Jason Cohen, Toleration
16. Alejandro Cols, Empire
17. Mary Daly, Welfare
18. Anthony Elliott, Concepts of the Self 3rd edition
19. Steve Fenton, Ethnicity 2nd edition
20. Katrin Flikschuh, Freedom
21. Michael Freeman, Human Rights 2nd edition
22. Russell Hardin, Trust
23. Geoffrey Ingham, Capitalism
24. Fred Inglis, Culture
25. Robert H. Jackson, Sovereignty
26. Jennifer Jackson Preece, Minority Rights
27. Gill Jones, Youth
28. Paul Kelly, Liberalism
29. Anne Mette Kjr, Governance
30. Ruth Lister, Poverty
31. Jon Mandle, Global Justice
32. Cillian McBride, Recognition
33. Anthony Payne and Nicola Phillips, Development
34. Judith Phillips, Care
35. Chris Phillipson, Ageing
36. Michael Saward, Democracy
37. John Scott, Power
38. Timothy J. Sinclair, Global Governance
39. Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism 2nd edition
40. Deborah Stevenson, The City
41. Leslie Paul Thiele, Sustainability
42. Steven Peter Vallas, Work
43. Stuart White, Equality
44. Michael Wyness, Childhood

Copyright Will Atkinson 2015

The right of Will Atkinson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2015 by Polity Press

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8512-0

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8513-7(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Atkinson, Will, 1983

Class / Will Atkinson.

pages cm. (Key concepts series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7456-8512-0 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7456-8513-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Social classes. 2. Social conflict. I. Title.

HT609.A8498 2015

305.5dc23

2015000759

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

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The sheer variety of things the concept of class appears to cover can sometimes seem bewildering, if not downright contradictory, to those who want to get a handle on it. Everyday conversations, news stories and opinion pieces, but academic research too, all buzz with loose and vague uses which, on closer inspection, might not be all that easy to reconcile. Sometimes, for example, it is used to capture the recently popular notion of a divide between the bankers, or the 1 per cent in income terms, and the 99 per cent of us. At other times it is deployed to make sense of cruel exploitation in dingy workshops around the globe, or tension and conflict between managers and workers in workplaces across the world, or governments being run by people coming from a small number of elite educational institutions thanks to extremely wealthy even aristocratic backgrounds. Then again it seems linked to abject poverty, exclusion and deprivation, or is touted as a cause of lack of social mobility or early death.

At the same time, class is often held to account in some way for rather more pervasive and seemingly ordinary things such as the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the music we listen to, the houses we live in, the way we walk and talk, our plans and aspirations, our dreams and our hopes, our skills and our knowledge, our interests, our morals and our politics. It seems to be simply there in everything we do, what we can do, what we want to do and our relationship with others, so that when we see others we instantly read their place in the world relative to ours through what they are wearing, what they are saying, how they are saying it or what they are doing. We feel we have something in common or not, that we are more or less like each other, and we look up to them or, more perniciously, we look down on them. When we talk of (or to) them, furthermore, we mobilize a vast vocabulary sharpened for the task of distinguishing, differentiating and denigrating, that is, doing down, criticizing, judging the worth of a person in relation to ourselves words such as snob, toff, commoner, scumbag, but also classy, smart, sophisticated, stupid, vulgar, tasteless, dangerous, unfortunate and so on. And of course not everyone possesses equal capacity, equal power, to make their definitions of people stick, to spread them widely and impose them as legitimate, or to deflect or cushion damaging blows to self-worth dispensed by others.

So how can one concept seem to cover so much? How can it account for all of these things at the same time? Are some of the things mentioned really about class, or are they just signs of confusion which needs to be cleared up? Certainly social scientists have to be wary of the multiple, conflicting, fuzzy and confused definitions of class circulating in the media, politics and everyday conversation. We have to break with those folk constructs, those prenotions as Emile Durkheim called them, and put them to one side since part of our interest is in understanding where they come from and what interests they might serve. Yet social science is just as plagued by competing definitions purporting to be able to explain different things or, to be more accurate, to explain lots of things in very different ways usually deriving from clashing ideas about what it means to be human.

The primary aim of this book, then, is to clarify matters for those new to the topic of class. Inevitably there will be some taking stock of where we are currently at, assessment of which directions seem to offer the most fruitful ways forward, taking stances in particular debates and developing possible avenues for further work. Nevertheless, the first and foremost task is to offer an accessible guide to the concept of class, and to achieve this it sets out to explore five sets of relevant questions and the answers given by different schools of thought. The first of these questions, and the most fundamental, is this: what actually