520855
research-article2014
SOC0010.1177/0038038514520855SociologyBradley
Class Debate
Class Descriptors or Class Relations? Thoughts Towards a Critique of Savage et al.
Sociology 2014, Vol. 48(3) 429–436 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0038038514520855 soc.sagepub.com
Harriet Bradley
University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
Abstract The work of Savage et al. in relation to the Great British Class Survey is acknowledged as an important contribution to a reinvigorated sociological research agenda on class, with a major public impact, but it is argued that the analysis, although bold and responsive to current social transformations, is flawed. Three weaknesses are identified: the approach to class is gradational, not relational; the markers of cultural capital used in the model are highly selective, therefore skewing the empirical findings, and lead to a negative view of working-class culture; and the model of latent classes resulting from the analysis is not coherent, with groupings that might be better distinguished as class fractions. Finally, an alternative deductively based class schema is proposed, which tries to accommodate contemporary change.
Keywords capitals, class, culture, economy
There are certain names that I hear and I think ‘urgh’. It’s the Tylers, the Charmaines. A name for me is an efficient way of finding what class that child is from and do I want my children to play with them. (Katie Hopkins, on This Morning programme, 4 July 2013)
While this politically incorrect statement by the former Apprentice candidate may have shocked and embarrassed the show’s liberal hosts, it is probably a sentiment secretly shared by much of the population of Middle England. Owen Jones’ trenchant Chavs exposed the opprobrium attached to ‘non-respectable’ working-class people. Yet the This Morning incident encapsulates for me the complexity of British attitudes to class: it is sometimes denied, in talk of ‘classlessness’, its importance downplayed, while at the
Corresponding author: Harriet Bradley, Centre for Employment Studies Research, Faculty of Business and Law, University of the West of England, Frenchay Campus, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK. Email:
[email protected]
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same time it is performed, played out, registered in numberless small nuances of interaction in every aspect of our daily lives. While there was a time when even sociologists, the great excavators of class, started to doubt its existence and to proclaim ‘ the death of class’ (Pakulski and Waters, 1996), or of certain manifestations of it (Gorz, 1982), or its secular decline (Beck, 1992), the spread of austerity policies and the heightening of economic equalities as a result of globalising neoliberal capitalism (Williams et al., 2013) has reversed that trend. The study of class had not, granted, disappeared entirely. The Nuffield school led by John Goldthorpe continued the careful statistical mapping of class difference and immobility, while the highly influential work of Diane Reay, Beverley Skeggs and others, drawing on the theories of Bourdieu, spread through schools of education and claimed to constitute ‘a new (cultural) sociology of class’. However, the article in Sociology by Mike Savage and his collaborators, ‘A new model of social class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey experiment’, seems to me to mark a decisive move from the margins to the centre. The BBC survey to which the study is linked captured the imagination of members of the public and media, while sociologists have responded enthusiastically to the article. Savage et al. claim to develop the Bourdieusian approach which is fast becoming a new orthodoxy (Atkinson, 2010; Skeggs, 1997, 2004). They analyse class in terms of the possession of different forms and degrees of three types of capital: economic, cultural and social. On the basis of this they propose a new model of the class structure, consisting of seven ‘latent classes’, a number of which are seen as new or emergent. The short questionnaire for the BBC Great British Class Survey allows the punter to identify to which of these s/he belongs, heightening public interest in the project. There can be no doubt that the class structure has transformed, and is still transforming, since the heyday of British class analysis. Savage et al. must be commended for a bold attempt to chart that change on the basis of considerable empirical investigation. This article is the fruit of a fascinating long-term exploration of class and consumption by Savage and his colleagues from CRESC at the University of Manchester. Nonetheless, I argue that this culture-led version of Bourdieu is misguided, a product perhaps of decades of prosperity and consumerism. I question the basis of the analysis and am sceptical about the set of class categories discussed in the article. I want to make three key points: 1. This approach to class is gradational, not relational. 2. The markers of cultural capital are highly selective and therefore inappropriate for empirical operationalising. 3. The schema resulting from the analysis is not coherent and the groupings would be better distinguished as class fractions, as in earlier work by Savage et al. (1992).
The Basis of Class: It’s the Economy Stupid! Just as there is confusion and contestation around public perceptions of class, there is a long history of sociological arguments about its nature and causes. The Bourdieusian framework appeals because it captures the complexity around class, avoids some of the
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traps in other perspectives (for example, the reduction of class to occupation which threatens to leaves out of the model those who are unemployed, retired or engaged in mothering) to produce a multifactoral approach to class. Even Goldthorpe has acknowledged that the latter is desirable and is working on an analysis which incorporates status (Chan and Goldthorpe, 2004). However, this version of the capitals approach seems deficient in one major sense, which sets it apart from the work of the great progenitors of class theory, Marx and Weber, and their followers. Savage et al. group people into clusters (clouds in social space) on the basis of their possession (or not) of various signifiers of the three forms of capital. It is thus a categorial or gradational, not a relational approach to class: classes are not defined by the nature of their economic links to each other, but placed on a scale in terms of possession of less or more of various assets. If we return to Marx and Weber, both attempted to delineate classes in terms of relationships. For Marx, the basis of class was the appropriation by one class grouping of the social wealth which the whole of society combined to produce. For Weber, the relationship was formed by the market, where one class grouping purchased the various forms of labour on offer from the others; this labour was differentiated and defined by possession of levels of skill and credentials, and the different property-less groups used tactics of exclusion to retain their market position (Witz, 1992) I am not asking for a return to past theories developed at very different social conjunctures. However, I assert that a truly sociological theory of class conceives it as a social relation, not an attribute or cluster of attributes. A major insight of the postmodern moment in sociology was that forms of social differentiation are marked by ‘othering’. My social identities (gender, class, ethnicity, etc.) are defined against those who are other/not-me. In a gradational account of class this process is lacking, or indeed concealed, although it is devastatingly revealed in the words of Katie Hopkins, as in the habits of upper-middle-class private-school students sneering at working-class or state school students as ‘peasants’ or ‘chavs’. The mechanisms by which class is made visible were, indeed, revealed in the Paired Peers study of the classed experience of student life in Bristol (Bradley et al., 2013). Students who did not see themselves as being working class when they arrived at university began to develop a sense of class when they witnessed the life of wealth and privilege of their upper-middle-class peers: I was one of the few people from a state school and that straightaway separated me from them … They say there isn’t a class barrier, but there is and I notice it a lot. I never felt it at school because we were all in the same boat. (Samantha, working-class student) They just spend money like it grows on trees … go out and go shopping and buy more clothes and I’m like ‘but you have a wardrobe full of clothes, you don’t need any more’. (Megan, working-class student)
Such students in developing their class awareness saw it in relation to wealth and money. While cultural and social differences, evinced in such ‘small acts’ as choice of names for children and preferred types of food, are indeed ways in which the dominant class mark themselves out as different from ‘them’, these class accretions rest on the bedrock of the
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unequal distribution of wealth and income, accomplished sometimes through entrance into highly paid occupations, sometimes through inherited or acquired possession of capital goods (shares, investments, properties, companies). These relationships of production lie at the heart of the complex nexus of social relations we know by the shorthand of class. In Fractured Identities (Bradley, 1996), I described class as a social dynamic, indicating that these relations are not static but evolving, and characterised it in these terms: Class is a social category which refers to lived relations surrounding social arrangements of production, exchange, distribution and consumption. While these may narrowly be conceived as economic relationships, to do with money wealth and property, in this book it is suggested that class should be seen as referring to a much broader web of social relationships, including, for example, lifestyle, educational experience and patterns of residence. (1996: 19)
I suggest this remains a useful basis for a genuinely sociological and relational approach to class.
The Multiplicity and Embeddedness of Cultural Forms My second critique of the Savage et al. framework is the (perhaps inevitably) extremely limited nature of the cultural forms that they have chosen as a basis for defining cultural capital in the Great British Class Survey (GBCS). Granted, the array of cultural forms and items in our society is almost infinite. Presumably Savage et al. chose the ones they saw as most significant. But there is a strangely old-fashioned feel to their choice, harking back to the old debates about ‘high’ versus ‘popular’ culture. This seems odd, since Savage et al. have already identified the ‘middle class’ as omnivores, consuming theatre/ opera/ratatouille and rap/football/fish and chips. There is an ambivalence about the working class: are they merely cast as one-sided consumers (popular culture) or are they marked out by lack of cultural consumption as seems to be the case in Figure 1 (2013: 227)? What I miss in this account is any acknowledgement of the distinctive nature of working-class cultural life: betting shops, pubs, greyhound racing, darts, pigeon-fancying, seaside trips, package holidays, DIY skills, professional playing of football, reading of sports papers and ‘true life romances’. What I see as a vigorous enjoyment of cultural forms in working-class communities is missing from this particular strand of Bourdieusian analysis (Bennett et al., 2009; Skeggs, 2004) so that working-classness appears as a lack, a cultural deficit. It can be argued that the reason for ignoring such cultural forms is that they do not carry social legitimacy, so cannot be considered as symbolic capital. But this neglects the way that these working-class activities, embedded in supportive communities, can be converted into economic capital (income and wealth). Wayne and Colleen Rooney and Adele are perhaps too obvious examples. But consider the case of Jack and Sandra, contacted as part of the Ordinary Lives project which investigated class reproduction among families in Bristol (Atkinson and Bradley, 2013). Jack came from a family in a poor area, negatively viewed as ‘rough’. He is heavily tattooed with a strong Bristolian accent. He and his wife both left school at 16. He became a roofer, she worked in an office. A stroke
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of luck came their way when the 1987 storm damaged roofs in the area and Jack found himself working overtime and piling up money. This was invested in buying a run-down property, which Jack himself restored. This became the basis of a bed and breakfast business, managed by Sandra, using clerical and financial skills from her office background, and household abilities in catering for her clients, while Jack did the building work. They have used their working-class skills and cultural assets to move themselves upwards into the class fraction of affluent small proprietors.
New Classes? Change and Continuity These problems about culture and its relation to economic capital underlie my third concern about the GBCS. Savage et al. rightly wish to engage with the changes in society which have impacted on class formations: the decline of manufacturing, the movement of women into the labour market, the rise of new service occupations, the result of greater social and geographical mobility. They use their framework to identify a new class schema, consisting of seven classes, some long-standing, some newer. A questionnaire designed for the GBCS allows individuals to identify their class, using indicators of their personal share of economic, cultural and social capitals. My criticism of this schema follows from my previous comments. It does enshrine a more complex view of class than that lying behind the NSec or Nuffield class schemae, since it builds cultural assets and social networks into its definitions, rather than reducing class to occupational status. This in theory is admirable, but in practice I find it problematic. Class becomes a scale, on which individuals are placed in terms of their possession of more or fewer elements of capital. The relation between the classes then is gradational, and the cut-off points between the classes relatively arbitrary. To be fair, this is acknowledged by Savage et al., who state that they are not ‘developing a deductive class schema’ (2013: 229), but are using their various indicators to differentiate ‘parsimoniously’ statistical clusters of people and thence locate the main class boundaries. This is their method of ‘latent class analysis’. This process of analysis, I suggest, leads to a certain incoherence within the scheme which also results from the attempt to combine economic, social and cultural elements. Thus the seven classes are categorised in fairly conventional economic and occupational terms: ‘technical middle class’, ‘emergent service workers’ and so forth. Yet because the classes consist of clusters of individuals grouped in terms of social contacts and cultural activities, people from the same occupations appear in different ‘classes’: care workers pop up in three of them. Looking at the occupations seen to predominate in each identified class, one has to ask whether there is anything which really binds them together into a coherent body. It may be such curiosities which led the authors to put a question mark after ‘a new model of social class’. I tentatively offer a brief outline of an alternative schema, consisting of three, possibly four, classes, within the Marxo-Weberian tradition: the elite, the middle class, the working class, these broad groupings being sub-divided into a number of fractions. The precariat (the latest successor to a class previously distinguished as the lumpenproletariat, the reserve army of labour, the underclass or the labour surplus class) might be seen as distinctive enough to constitute a fourth class, or alternatively as being the most
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disadvantaged fraction of the working class. These classes are defined by their position within the arrangements of the economy. The elite class are defined primarily by their possession of wealth (in terms of land, property, shares and investments, ownership of companies), although they may also earn high salaries (as politicians, for example). Among the elite one can distinguish a subset, often referred to as the ‘super-rich’. Stephen Ackroyd (2012) has researched extensively into this group of people, whom he estimates as 0.01 per cent of the population (as opposed to the 1% made famous by the Occupy slogan). The importance of this group outweighs its size, however; these are the movers and shakers of global neoliberal capital. As Ackroyd emphasises, they are themselves a global class, having wealth, properties and investments based in a number of countries and being themselves often deracinated and internationally mobile in the way described by Bauman (2000). London is an important sphere of operation for the super-rich. By contrast, the middle classes, though they may possess wealth (housing and shares), are defined by income. They are high-level wage-earners, who command their earnings on the base of qualifications, skills and appropriately valued experience. The most advantaged fraction of the middle class are the traditional professionals (doctors, lawyers, engineers) and the managerial elite: in fact, Goldthorpe’s service class. Less advantaged are the lower-middle classes, qualified but less well-paid, such as nurses, council workers and technicians. It may also be possible to identify a middle-middle class of highly educated, less rewarded professions: teachers, social workers and computer specialists. Some of the students in the Paired Peers study from this kind of background identified this as the ‘squeezed middle’. They saw their parents as neither poor nor rich: they were not eligible for bursaries, but their parents struggled to help them with fees and loans. Next come the working class, defined by both Marx and Weber as those who have nothing to sell but their labour. It consists both of the lower-paid wage-earners, distinguished by lack of higher educational qualifications, although they may have NVQs or other forms of certification, and also those who have labour to sell but nobody to buy it: those dependent on benefits. The working class is smaller than it used to be, partly because of the shift to services, partly because of the upgrading of the occupational structure in the post-war decades and the concomitant expansion of higher education. It is perhaps the most transformed of the classes. There are various discernable fractions within it: a relatively affluent and aspirant upper-working class, including skilled manual workers and the growing ranks of ‘white van men’ (redundant factory workers and mechanics who have utilised their skills in self-employment); a feminised middle grouping of low-paid workers in retail, care and leisure services; and an unemployed or underemployed benefit-dependent group. We may conceptualise the ‘precariat’ as a separate class, since it is a heterogeneous group which contains highly educated folk as well as the very low-skilled (I contest the view of Savage et al. that the precariat is distinguished by lack of all capitals): armies of temps, cleaners, classroom assistants and hourly paid lecturers, call-centre workers, fruit-pickers, bar and restaurant staff. The precariat is defined by its marginal and insecure relation to employment, in and out of various types of temporary and part-time work and inferior contracts; its ranks contain young people, including students and ‘graduates
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without employment’, migrant workers, minority ethnic workers, women and men recently made redundant. It is not itself new, as indicated above, but its constitution is new, with the addition of skilled and well-educated workers who suffer from the policies of austerity and neoliberal globalism.
Conclusion I have argued that this contribution to long-standing debates on class is interesting, thoughtful and timely, but flawed. In attempting to include social and cultural capital (granted to be important markers of class) into their model, Savage et al. underplay the importance of the various forms of economic capital which still lie at the centre of class configurations, as sketched out in the previous section. Thus their empirical schema appears confused and their conceptualisation of class loses relational nature. In studying how the lived relations of class are played out in specific sites or ‘fields’, such as education or consumption, the insights of Bourdieu and his followers highlighting the importance of social contacts and cultural knowledge have been invaluable. Social and cultural capital have a crucial part in the processes by which class relations and the class dynamic are reproduced (Atkinson and Bradley, 2013; Bradley et al., 2013). However, the relations of the economy are still the basic shapers of that dynamic. Funding Brief reference is made to Paired Peers, funded by Leverhulme Trust, Ref F/100 182/CC. Details on the project website: www.bristol.ac.uk/spais/research/paired-peers/. There is similar reference to the Ordinary Lives project funded by the ESRC, grant reference RES-062-23-2477. I wish to thank both funders.
References Ackroyd S (2012) Economy, Class, Ideology and the Transformation of the Organisational Field in Britain and the USA: A Neo-Marxian View. Paper presented to the British Sociological Association Annual Conference, Leeds University. Atkinson W (2010) Class, Individualization and Late Modernity: In Search of the Reflexive Worker. London: Palgrave. Atkinson W and Bradley H (2013) Ordinary Lives in Contemporary Britain. SPAIS Working Paper. Bristol: University of Bristol. Beck U (1992) Risk Society. London: Sage. Bennett T, Savage M, Silva E, Warde A, Gayo-Cal M and Wright D (2009) Culture, Class, Distinction. London: Taylor and Francis. Bradley H (1996) Fractured Identities: Changing Patterns of Inequality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bradley H, Abrahams J, Bathmaker A-M et al. (2013) A Degree Generation; The Paired Peers Project Year 3 Report. Bristol: Leverhulme Trust/University of Bristol. Bauman Z (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chan T-W and Goldthorpe JH (2004) Is there a status order in contemporary British society? Evidence from the occupational structure of friendship. European Sociological Review 20: 383–401. Gorz A (1982) Farewell to the Working Class. London: Pluto. Pakulski J and Waters M (1996) The Death of Class. London: Sage.
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Savage M, Barlow J, Dickens A and Fielding T (1992) Property, Bureaucracy and the Culture: Middle-class Formation in Contemporary Britain. London: Routledge. Savage M, Devine F, Cunningham N et al. (2013) A new model of social class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey experiment. Sociology 47(2): 219–50. Skeggs B (1997) Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage. Skeggs B (2004) Class, Self and Culture. London: Routledge. Williams S, Erickson M, Bradley H and Devadason R (2013) Globalization and Work. Cambridge: Polity Press. Witz A (1992) Professions and Patriarchy. London: Routledge. Harriet Bradley is currently Professor of Women’s Employment at the University of the West of England. Her research focuses on the intersections of class with gender and ethnicity. Her recent publications include Globalization and Work (Polity Press, 2013) with S Williams, M Erickson and R Devadason, and Gender (Polity Press, 2012, 2nd edn). Date submitted July 2013 Date accepted October 2013
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