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Why is there a distinct lack of debate around prostitution and the sex trade in the academy? What motivates these academics to follow a particular line? To understand that, you have to look at how class analysis, largely prevalent within sociology and anthropology as a way of understanding institutionalised power relations, has been usurped by essentialist identity politics, the rise of market doctrine within universities, and how these have joined forces with old-fashioned sexism and male libertarianism.

Theory in Chinese sociology since the 1980s had exhibited two major intellectual trends. First there was a shifting interest from Marxian sociology to more specialized studies on classical sociologists. More fundamentally, social stratification became a dominant field of study as modernization theory was displaced by a growing concern with market reform and its consequences on social structure. The paradigm shift from modernization to marketization was precipitated by the introduction of relevant concepts and methods by American Chinese scholars. While there were substantial disagreements on the schemes and mechanisms of social stratification, and the composition and characteristics of the middle class, the centrality of CASS stratification research went largely unchallenged, notwithstanding the call for bringing Marxian class analysis back in the studies of social inequalities.

It is a well-known story: even before the sovereign debt crisis hit the European periphery and austerity was established as the dominant model of handling it, the conservative (fiscal) policies systematically applied across peripheral and core states had already begun treating large portions of state budgets as afflictions—they were there to be cut. With the financial crisis and its global spread, even the systems of tertiary education, despite being hailed earlier as fundamental pillars of development and driving motors of emerging ‘knowledge economies’, quickly became just another uncomfortable figure in state budget tables. Encompassing a shift in public education towards ‘market-based self-sustainability’ (Žitko 2012, p. 19) and the internationalisation of tertiary education systems, the pre-crisis ‘knowledge society bubble’ burst, and a halt was put to (at least nominally) expansive policies prevalent earlier in this sector.

While many different types of inequalities will be referenced in this book, inequality primarily will be addressed through the conceptual framework of ‘class’. Class analysis’ extensive theoretical development over the last century and a half, touching on core aspects of the explanatory and normative dimensions of inequality (see inter alia Sayer 2005), provides a powerful set of theoretical resources with which to analyse some of the key relations between socially produced risks and inequalities.

The model of traditional class theories in the West is not completely appropriate for conducting a class analysis of contemporary Chinese society. I argue that Western class categories are not directly applicable to the Chinese situation and that the Chinese new middle class is distinguished more by sociocultural than by economic factors. The Chinese new middle class is more diversified and heterogeneous than it appeared at first. The cultural and social identification of the Chinese new middle class operates mainly through cultural practices and consumption patterns. Hukou creates spatially distributed inequality. Danwei continues to be significant in considering class and class distinction in urban China. Both hukou and danwei create differences in work situations by forming guanxi networks inside the boundaries of the new class. This explains why hukou and danwei manifest themselves in sociocultural rather than economic differences. Significant effects on the new class also come from institutional changes in the framework of property ownership and the dominant role of the cadre in society. Therefore, ‘class’ in the Chinese context is a relatively sociocultural term rather than solely an economic one.

A practice that has alternately been at the centre and fringes of rural studies, class analysis continues to evoke heated debate regarding its ability to unpack socio-economic relations in the past and present. Taking the position that the concept of ‘class’ continues to have something useful to say, this chapter explores the evolution and place of class analysis in rural studies over the past 50 years. Calling attention to two identified ‘crises’, the chapter goes on to consider the ways in which rural class analysis is being implemented at present, and with particular reference to the influence of concepts of performance and embodiment. In so doing a strong emphasis is placed on the corporeal aspects of inter- and intra-class collaboration and contestation, whereby the personification and ‘playing out’ of moral codes and conventions constitute a determined basis for on-going tensions in contemporary rural communities. Finally, a number of suggestions are made regarding current and future gaps in the literature.

’Class’ in Britain has often been framed — from within and without — as a peculiarly ‘British’ question, with a distinctive national preoccupation with class. This is fortunate, since it allows us to sidestep the question of whether it is appropriate to speak of ‘national’ sociologies in a globalizing world (Beck, 2007). George Orwell writing in 1941 saw the British ‘as the most class-ridden country under the sun’ (1982, p. 53), whilst 56 years later Stein Ringen (1997, p. 7) writing from an avowed outsider’s perspective saw ‘this thing the British have with class’ as both a ‘fascinating peculiarity’ and ‘a sign of closed minds’ which he traced in both sociological and popular accounts. Certainly, class analysis was once regarded as central to British sociology in a way not attributed to other national sociologies. But if there is a particularly ‘British’ sociological approach to class, it has been one strongly shaped by transnational conversations, until the 1980s essentially an argument with American liberal theorists then, after a period of ‘crisis’, a more congenial European dialogue when British class analysis acquired something of a French accent. However, quite what ‘class’ means when we consider ‘this thing the British have with class’ is an interesting question, since both academic and popular meanings of ’class’ seem so diverse and changeable.

The last 15 years have seen a growth of sociological studies of the lived experience of class — studies of suffering, low self-esteem, hopelessness, sense of inferiority, but also pride, sense of entitlement and self-congratulation, snobbery and contempt for others. Many of them have been inspired by Bourdieu’s work on symbolic domination and capitals, and lifestyles and tastes. These have rescued class analysis from sterile classification exercises and explored how deeply class affects people and the quality of their lives. In addition, the concept of recognition — initially associated with non-class inequalities and differences, such as those of ethnicity and sexuality — was soon used to argue that class was not merely a matter of unequal distribution of economic resources but of unequal recognition. Far from being a minor consideration, recognition often matters to people more than their economic standing, as it affects their sense of self-worth and position in the eyes of others. Yet despite the importance of these aspects of how class is lived, they are more a response to class inequalities than their cause; if people of different classes treated one another with respect, instead of suspicion and contempt, class inequalities would remain. There would still be major differences in life chances, strongly though far from exclusively shaped by economic processes.

The theories of reflexivity may be embedded in abstract and generalized statements about the parameters of contemporary Western societies, and in most cases may be far removed from the practical business of social research, but that does not stop them being, like all models purporting to explain human behaviour, amenable to empirical analysis. Having said that, to proceed properly it is essential to translate the sometimes sketchy thoughts into testable themes by, first of all, isolating the core processes and causal mechanisms postulated and then, subsequently, formulating them into logically coherent conjectures. This chapter will deal primarily with the first step, drawing out as many theses open to empirical investigation as possible. In so doing it will separate out the theories of reflexivity into two categories, each comprising two thinkers, in recognition of the fact that while all four may be united by common ideas and declarations on class analysis, they can, like a beam of white light striking a prism, be refracted into varying hues according to their emphasis, explicitness and causal reasoning. Hence Beck and Bauman are herded under the label of individualization, while the two British theorists are depicted as describing ‘late modern reflexivity’.

The once unflinching stranglehold of Marxism and the Nuffield programme over class analysis is beginning to slacken, allowing room for a flowering of perspectives envisioning the concept in starkly contrasting ways (Wright, 2005). Yet, as already seen, there is one standpoint in this assortment currently enjoying particularly frequent adoption and discussion: that forwarded by Pierre Bourdieu. The appeal to Continental concepts, in large part motivated by the fact that they knit cultural processes into the very definition of class and thus resonate with the so-called ‘cultural turn’ gripping postmillennium sociology (see especially Devine and Savage, 2005), has no doubt been profitable. Theoretically it has laid bare the fallacies of the utilitarian model of agency employed by Goldthorpe and Wright by identifying the practical, pre-reflexive and dispositional nature of action flowing out of differentiated past social experiences and the inextricability of cultural frameworks and resources in the formation of ‘choices’ (see especially Devine, 1998; Savage, 2000), succeeded in reconnecting the analysis of class with broader trends in social and cultural theory (see, for instance, Skeggs, 2004; Adkins and Skeggs, 2004) and even facilitated reflection on the moral dimension of class, that is, its invidious role in dictating perceptions of self-worth (Sayer, 2002, 2005). Empirically it has granted a deeper exploration of the relational sense of identity, difference and similarity articulated by individuals (Savage, 2000; Savage et al., 2001), the experiential content of differing positions in the social order and, in particular, the denigration and dispossession pervading life in the lower sections (Skeggs, 1997; Charlesworth, 2000), the reproduction of inequality through differential possession of certain forms of capital and its manifestation in everyday life (Reay, 1998a; Devine, 2004; cf. Lareau, 2003) and the underlying dispositions and outlooks marking out differences and orienting action in certain locales (Savage et al., 2005b).

Ralph Miliband made an enormous contribution to the revival and development of Marxist political thought in the second half of the last century, through a range of books and articles, from Parliamentary Socialism (1961) to the posthumously published Socialism for a Sceptical Age (1994b). These works stand as important statements and explorations of core concepts and theoretical claims drawn from classical Marxism, and as attempts to develop and apply Marxist analysis to understand and intervene in the shifting economic and political conditions of his time. But what of our time? Does Miliband’s work still help us to understand and intervene in the world of the 21st century?

Throughout this book I have pointed to the continued salience of class in terms of identification, opportunity and constraint, and the ways that class and sexuality connect in the lives of working-class lesbians. In exploring their views and experiences, many relevant theories have been drawn upon, encapsulating the complexity of the intersections between class and sexual identity. Whilst some theorists see ‘ambivalence’ as a key site of renewed class analysis and as an adequate descriptor of current class identifications, whereby people are increasingly felt to make partial, hesitant, ‘complex’ and contradictory class identifications (Bradley and Hebson, 1999; Savage et al., 2001; Walkerdine et al., 2001) I have argued against the applicability of this to my data, given that ‘working-class’ remains a salient identification. Given that powerful, if varied and complex, certainties were made — and that working-class lesbians could point to, name and ‘identify’ class in their lives, I feel there is no need to ‘re-fashion’ or rework the label. Similarly, my data suggests that the idea of ‘dis-identification’, whereby working-class people are seen to actively avoid being named through class (Skeggs, 1997) does not always hold true in all contexts.

This chapter examines whether the influential analyses of the changing patterns of social class and perceptions of class identity amongst employees, symbolized by the ‘death of the working class’ thesis, are verified in our two leading new economy sectors, namely, software and call centres. These analyses concern the assumed disintegration of Marxist-inspired class analysis, the fragmentation of class structure and their replacement by other organizing criteria of social groups, such as voluntarily chosen identities. The claimed emergence of the information or network society has added a further dimension to the extant sociological debates concerning the existence and basis of class.

Class, historically at least, has been one of the key analytical concepts in Social Science generally, and Sociology particularly. It has also been one of the most contested. In section 5.1 of this chapter, we begin with an examination of some of those contestations, because that literature informs both our conceptualisation of class and, consequently, our analysis of the data. In essence, we treat class as a structured lived experience which helps shape how our respondents understand and relate to politics. In section 5.2 we use our data to examine whether and how our respondents ‘live’ class and whether and how class affects their understanding of, and attitude towards, politics.

The conventional view of class, advocated by Goldthorpe (1983, 1984), considers the household as the appropriate unit of stratification. This means that insofar as members of the same family live together, they are assumed to occupy a single position in the class hierarchy. The massive entrance of women into paid employment during the last decades has stimulated challenge to this approach. In particular during the 1980s, a heated debate took place over the question of how to incorporate women to class analysis. Controversy became acute over the fact that it was common practice in stratification research to derive women’s class position simply from their husband’s or father’s employment, data on female work activities being irrelevant. Consequently, feminist critique has highlighted two aspects of the conventional view considered as problematic: firstly that women’s class position is independent of their own employment status, and secondly that the social position of the family is completely unaffected by women’s work career (Sorensen, 1994: 28). The main reproach focused on the occurrence of families in which husband and wife occupy basically different class positions and where the ‘family class’ cannot simply be derived from the man’s occupation (Heath and Britten, 1984).

I have been edging towards the issue of social class — one that, in the context of the Harry Potter books, has attracted some attention — for a while now. In the previous chapter I have noted that the educational experience of Magic world is apt to be viewed in our world as being specific to a certain social class. This has in fact been the main thrust of observations about class attitudes in the Harry Potter novels, and to this I return later in this chapter. In the previous chapter I have also commented on the manner in which the house-elves’ class characteristics (being servants, the kind of treatment they receive, the spaces they inhabit, their way of speaking, etc.) is made uneasily coextensive with their species-condition of servility. This latter observation arguably has a bearing both on prevailing conceptualizations of class in our world and (to some extent) on the social and political implications of the reception accorded to the Harry Potter novels.

In the past three decades a remarkable shift has occurred, even an inversion, within the sociological agenda. In the 1970s no self-respecting British sociologist could ignore the concept of class: class analysis was a major concern, if not the key concern of British empirical sociology. At this time the sociology of ‘race relations’, as it was characteristically called, was a relatively marginal sociological specialism; and even within that specialism much theoretical work was devoted to the relation between ‘race and class’. As AIi Rattansi’s dissection of the neo-Marxist position in chapter 3 of this volume shows, among Marxists there was a tendency to reduce race to a ‘subset’ of class, even to see it as an obfuscation of ‘real’ class relations; or at the least, to see class as ‘determinant in the last instance’. While the leading neo-Weberian, John Rex, who revisits some of his earlier work in chapter 2, outlined the specificity of a ‘race relations situation’ (Rex 1970), his framing of ‘race relations’ was principally in relation to class contexts and social and political power. The task of breaking free of this modernist preoccupation with class as the central dimension of social differentiation was all the harder because of the strength and sophistication of the classical models of the accounts of class and social divisions offered by Marx and Weber.

This chapter examines several interrelated issues pertaining to the new Malay middle-class lifestyles and culture, such as living conditions, asset ownership, consumption patterns, and leisure activities. At the same time, it also discusses an important issue in class analysis — that is, the self-evaluation by members of the new Malay middle class of their own class positions — to see if their subjective evaluations match our objective definition of the new middle-class. This chapter aims to show that the new Malay middle class lifestyles and cultural preferences are not homogenous; and that while the more affluent sections of the new Malay middle class have developed distinct high-status lifestyles and cultural preferences, many still have lifestyles and cultural preferences that do not differentiate them as a social category distinct from the lower classes.

This chapter is part of a broader effort within the sociology of education to write social class back into the analytical problematic of the discipline. Social class has been the subject of considerable debate and development in mainstream sociology in recent years. However, to some extent research in the sociology of education has failed to keep abreast of or take into account empirical, methodological and theoretical developments in class analysis in mainstream sociology. We intend to demonstrate that pronouncements about the ‘end of class’ are premature. Marshall (1997) suggests that ‘we may have mistaken changes in the shape of the class structure for changes in social fluidity or the degree of openness’ (p.5 emphasis in the original).

The 1960s and early 1970s represent a period of fertile theorising on race and ethnicity. Conflict sociology bore fruit earlier in this field than in others, mainly for circumstantial reasons. The consensual assumptions of earlier theories, such as Park’s concept of the race relations cycle, were too incompatible with the events sociologists saw around them; looked at in the same light, the micro focus of the social psychological literature, while not inherently objectionable, appeared fundamentally incomplete. But whatever the precise causes there can be little question about either the theoretical trend or its import. Theories such as Lieberson’s (1961) ‘societal theory of race and ethnic relations’, van den Berghe’s (1978) ‘taxonomy of paternalistic and competitive race relations system’ and Rex’s (1970) ‘Weberian class analysis of race relations’, to take just the most prominent of examples, were bold departures that sought to address macrosociological dimensions with a particular emphasis on power and conflict.

Occupational titles form the basic raw material of this study. Extrapolation from the job descriptions recorded in the marriage registers and autobiographies to analyses of ‘class’ mobility, can be justified on the grounds that ‘occupations are at once the most obvious and the most effective predictor of differential location within the structure of social inequality’.1 Most of the major twentieth-century mobility surveys start from a similar premise. However, the assumption that occupation and class are interchangeable is by no means uncontentious. A target of the recent revision of traditional approaches to class analysis within both history and sociology,2 it has also drawn objections from within the more specific field of mobility studies. According to one critic of Goldthorpe’s work, for example, a neglect of the occupational processes underlying patterns of class movement has led him to underestimate the ‘true’ degree of social flux operating in contemporary British society.3

The analysis of women’s subordination, has up to now been broadly based on two contending streams of thought. Marxist feminists have emphasised class relations within capitalism specifically as being the root of gender inequality, especially that of subordination of women’s labour. They regard gender/sex asymmetry as being derivative of capitalist class relations. On the other hand, those who use the concept of patriarchy, especially radical feminists, as a transhistorical category, reject class analysis as being insufficient to explain gender relations. For them, patriarchy is an independent set of social relations from class relations.

The issues touched upon in the last chapter represent part of a more profound debate that evolved throughout the 1970s and 1980s concerning the coherence of Marxism as a critical social theory. Central to this debate was the role attributed to social classes as the primary agents of socio-political change. Increasingly, class was viewed as an imprecise category that failed to properly grasp the nature of political struggles in advanced capitalist democracies. These struggles were concerned less with inequalities in economic wealth and more with social identity and asymmetries in power based on, for example, sexual and racial discrimination. The challenge to Marxism by what is often referred to as ‘identity politics’ articulated by ‘new social movements’ went directly to its conception of society as being fundamentally conditioned by economic structures. New political antagonisms forced Marxists to deal with a degree of social complexity that was not anticipated in most of its classical doctrines.

In Bourdieu’s forms of analysis, class is fundamental to that side of his argument concerned with objective conditions. But his analysis of class does not depend on objective economic or indeed political criteria alone for its foundation, but on a broad-ranging account of class practices which includes food tastes, clothing, body dispositions, housing styles and forms of social choice in everyday life, as well as the more familiar categories of economy and polity. This extended exposition of class along a range of parameters does not dissolve class into a Weberian account of ‘lifestyle’ or reduce its power. Rather, it extends the force of class analysis, both in the range of its explanatory power, and in the subtlety of its classifications.

We have come a long way from the position fifteen or so years ago when feminism sought merely to have women recognised in a sociology of work and challenged the sexism manifested in the marginalisation of women in class analysis. An influential paradigm has emerged: that gender is integral to the organisation of work and to social production. This has tended to take the form of a twofold shift in focus. First, it is maintained that gender relations are important in their own right, for women’s (or men’s) place in the labour process is shaped by these relations as such and not simply by their role in the sphere of reproduction. In practice this has usually taken the form of arguing that patriarchy is as integral as class relations to women’s subordinate position. But secondly there has been a shift towards the view that patriarchy is as integral as class to the explanation of capitalist production itself. These two themes, however, are not necessarily coterminous. While patriarchy is usually crucial for an understanding of the position of women and men, it does not necessarily follow that it is crucial to the development of the labour process, either specifically or as a whole.1

Elite analysis has presented a major challenge to the study of political power and political leadership in the non-Western world. It has identified inadequacies in both group and class theories, arguing that in every group there is social stratification and power may be concentrated in any one of these strata. In some cases it may happen that power is concentrated in one group more than in others. Another shortcoming of class analysis theory is that power within any class may be concentrated in the hands of a person (a political leader) or group (an elite). The approach has, in short, attracted considerable attention among political scientists, and one bibliography lists over 4000 references to elite studies.1

The definition of class according to the nature of the relations of production has traditionally centred on the distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, a focus which has involved the identification of concepts which are in direct contradiction — the private ownership of the means of production by a privileged minority and the necessary sale of labour power by the majority. This situation is mirrored in the essentially antagonistic relationship normally existing between the two classes, which finds expression, at least in theory, in the ideologies of each class. Whilst the division between bourgeois and proletarian may be used as the foundation of class analysis, it does not take account of the complexities of class formation which may exist at any stage in the development (or, indeed, the overthrow) of capitalism. The dissolution of ‘pure’ ownership of the means of production into separate but closely related functions of possession and control (Wright, 1976, pp. 21–6) and the consequent existence of more complex technical relations of production (for example the functions of foremen, supervisors and managers) is evidence that there are some jobs- perhaps the majority in advanced industrial society — which combine within the individual, elements of both the classical bourgeois and proletarian roles in the production process. Additionally, there may be persons who are self-employed and who appear to lie outside the principal sphere of large-scale capitalism.

In 1983, 8.8 million women were employed in Britain; 5 million in full-time jobs and 3.8 million in part-time jobs. The full-time figure is a slight decrease on the 1971 figure of 5.5 million although the size of the women’s part-time labour force increased by one million, from 2.8 million in 1971. Women’s unemployment also grew during the 1970s from 280700 in 1976 to 854000 in 1983.1 The size of the women’s labour force as a whole has grown over the post-war period, therefore, and it continued to grow through the 1970s and 1980s recession.