Abstract
The point of departure in this book is that class analysis needs to engage more thoroughly with Beck, Bauman, Giddens and Archer’s claims that a new phase of modernity renders class irrelevant. It is not enough to demonstrate, say, persisting social inequality and its reproduction, since this is in fact not incompatible with either of these authors’ theories. Atkinson pinpoints a key issue: The four authors hail the coming of all kinds of social change, but a common denominator is their stress on increased reflexivity. Precisely what this means is not always clear. Atkinson interprets it as meaning a condition of ‘active, individual choice and deliberation’ (p. 8) in which social change has set actors free from the constraints of social structure and guidelines of tradition. This is the assertion he sets out to refute.
The first part of the book deals with theory. Here Atkinson offers a fairly brief discussion of the four theorists of modernity, discusses earlier approaches to class and provides his own take on Bourdieu. He commits to a very thorough-going ‘Bourdieusianism’. Atkinson holds that in order to assess what Bourdieu has to offer, one must be willing to try out the entire perspective, as opposed to tugging concepts – like cultural capital – loose from the system they belong to and discussing them in isolation. This is sound in my view, and a welcome corrective to how Bourdieu is frequently treated. However, Atkinson is an almost annoyingly true believer: Bourdieu’s writings are treated as close to an infallible and exhaustive source of insight into class relationships. Admittedly, Atkinson does want to supplement Bourdieu with a few concepts from phenomenology. While these add-ons are agreeable they seem rather inconsequential for the ensuing analysis. It seems like Bourdieu is being installed as a new Marx – a strange fate for the undogmatic iconoclast.
The bulk of the book is dedicated to empirical analyses. Here Atkinson uses qualitative interviews to show how, even under present conditions, 55 Bristol residents from different sectors of the social space still rely heavily on socially conditioned, ‘classed’ ways of perceiving, thinking and acting that lure beneath the level of the (discursively) conscious. Higher-class people are found to have taken up educational careers simply because that was what seemed ‘natural’, just as it did not occur to their lower-class counterparts that they could do the same. Something similar applies for other ‘choices’ and outlooks – on work, cultural consumption and politics.
On all issues, the research participants’ ways of perceiving and thinking are clearly ‘classed’. But there is no trace of class identities and explicit recognition of class conflicts. Not even politics is understood in class terms. Atkinson joins the broader ‘cultural class analysis’ movement (Savage, Skeggs, Devine, Reay, and others) in taking this to be typical of how class manifests itself. This represents, I think, a significant advance over the narrow emphasis on categorical class identity. Remarkably, however, it does not seem to occur to Atkinson that this is in fact rather close to what (for example) Giddens claimed about the contemporary role of class. This is acknowledged by other ‘culturalists’, like Mike Savage, but it is a peculiar omission from a book that deals with (and indeed seeks to refute) individualization theory and ‘new’ modernity.
A particularly interesting feature of the book is how it deals with class reproduction. In sociology it is common enough to conceptualize relative social immobility as caused by external constraints, such as the costs associated with education. But Atkinson develops an important insight from Bourdieu on how (career) aspirations that are ‘objectively’ unlikely to succeed – because of constraints of that nature – are blocked off from even being considered. People from different classes are endowed with very different ‘views’ of what is possible, desirable and ‘fit for them’, embodied in their classed habitus. This leads the privileged to aspire to even more privileges, and the underprivileged to accept their lot. Processes of social closure (a concept Atkinson never uses) thus operate in part through the actions and inactions of the excluded themselves. This is not only an underdeveloped notion in class analysis, but also an intriguing complication of questions of social justice, challenging the naïve liberal notion that unjust inequalities are those that hinder people from ‘following their dreams’. What if peoples’ dreams themselves are crucially shaped by the class structure?
Whatever social changes may have taken place, people are not reflexively creating their own lives unconstrained by social conditionings. They move in the complexities of the contemporary world by relying on the socially induced ‘sense of one’s place’. This is actually Atkinson’s argument against the entire edifice of different second-phase-of-modernity theories. No attention is given to the specific processes highlighted by Beck, Bauman, Giddens and Archer, such as the emergence of ‘new risks’. He does not deny ‘the broad mutations in economy and society addressed by Beck and the rest’, however, and even recognizes, in passing, that they ‘constitute the new environment in which class continues to operate’ (pp. 187, 191).
Little is said on how this should be taken: What is particular about how class operates in the context of late modernity? Not much seems to be the answer. The concluding chapter is called ‘Rigid Relations through Shifting Substances’. If one accepts Bourdieu’s dictum that the real is the relational, as I am sure Atkinson does, this leads to the conclusion he is hinting at all along. These ‘broad mutations’ and the ‘new environment’ are superficial and inconsequential. He is indeed tacitly denying their importance – not by refuting their existence but by relegating them to a completely subordinate role. For all his insistence on the need for class analysis to engage more fully with theories of new modernity, Atkinson too settles for a rather partial assessment. More than being the final showdown, this book should be read as suggesting a research programme of investigating what might be distinctive about class relations in late modernity.
Be that as it may, this is a work of many merits. It deals with important and major issues in sociology and seeks to do so in a head-on confrontation between competing interpretations. Furthermore, Atkinson manages to fuse theoretical sophistication with empirical scrutiny in a mostly elegant, if at times overly polemic, prose. It is a good read and an important contribution to cultural class analysis and the debate on modernity, albeit not one as conclusive as Atkinson imagines.