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In order to understand the way in which people self-identify in society and as a contribution to debates about class identity in Latin America, in this article the authors assess how individuals categorize themselves and others socially, and discuss whether a significant portion of the population classifies itself as middle class. They address the question of whether or not individuals' representation of their social position is linked to social class, examining whether that position incorporates a socio-economic dimension, a hierarchical dimension, or even an element of moral value. The authors focus on how individuals name their own social position by means of a vignette-based survey applied in 2016 to a randomized sample of 2000 people in Chile. The results show that the theoretical notion of class is still of relevance to subjective positioning criteria, and that such criteria are specific to individuals who self-identify with lower or higher social positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Sharp social inequalities in Latin America persist not only as a result of structural elements, but also because people justify and legitimate them in everyday life. Thus, to overcome inequalities it is necessary that individuals subjectively perceive them as unjust. This is an issue that is especially relevant in Chile, one of the first countries to experience neoliberalism in the 1970s. More than social inequalities as such, which are widely studied by Latin American sociology, this article analyzes social justice as a subjective judgment about inequalities. On the basis of the findings of an empirical game-based research project, the article examines the justice criteria used by ordinary people regarding differences between members of society. The authors argue that according to these subjective criteria, social justice refers to aspects that differ from neoliberal discourse about distributive justice based on equality of opportunity and that procedural justice is also key in ordinary discourses about social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]