Abstract
In this edited collection, Will Atkinson, Steve Roberts, and Mike Savage draw together work from a veritable who’s who of British social class analysis. Within this there is a promising generational contrast, as the research of the most established names (Savage, Diane Reay, Harriet Bradley, Andrew Sayer) merges seamlessly with the research of newer scholars (Roberts, Atkinson, Nicola Ingram, Lisa McKenzie) to produce a volume of excellent empirical research, sound theoretical reasoning, and passionate political argument. The editors each offer one chapter to the volume (Roberts with Sarah Evans), alongside an introduction and conclusion, and early on define the theoretical foundations of the book. They argue that a Bourdieusian approach to class analysis, often dismissed as cultural, should not be discounted as a method to understand the lived conditions of a global financial crisis, ‘because differences in economic capital and power have always been fundamental to Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of conditions of life’ (p. 2). This is rather a straw man approach to framing an argument: those discounting a Bourdieusian approach are not dealt with in any detail.
In this spirit, Sayer’s chapter sits apart from the rest of the content somewhat, and is a gloriously economic addition to a work of sociology, on the return of the rentier class. His chapter focuses on the other end of the austerity debate, critically asking why those at the top do so well as opposed to why those at the (easier to study?) bottom suffer so much. Sayer’s work argues that Bourdieu’s own research on elites, in its analysis of how cultural and social capital reinforces advantage, fails to adequately draw attention to the arterial economic power of the rich. This challenging tone, of ‘It’s the economy, stupid’, can be read as a rebuke to much of the rest of the volume’s contents; therefore it is slightly disappointing that the editors did not make more of this challenge
Other than this, the collection has a consistent sociological and political narrative. Much focuses on the symbolic violence suffered by working-class individuals and families due to economic disparity, with writers establishing how these processes will worsen because of coalition austerity policies. It is also worthwhile noting that, from Reay’s exploration of the everyday humiliations of working-class children at school, to Gillies’ focus on the responsibilisation agenda of the Big Society on parenting, and Bradley and Ingram’s highlighting of the class-determined instrumentalism of students in higher education, five of the nine empirical chapters have a strong focus on children and young people. These chapters and others make this volume required reading for scholars in the field of youth studies.
In their conclusion, the three editors move beyond a summation of the evidence presented and instead dwell upon the challenges faced by academics in research dissemination and communication. They list competition in knowledge production from politicised think tanks, the relationship academic knowledge has with journalism, and attacks on social science as a discipline, as ‘daunting tides’ which prevent academic knowledge going mainstream. In this vein, at the 2013 British Sociological Association conference, Atkinson gave a paper which addressed the editors’ approach to compiling this volume, focusing on how it was initially mooted to be a non-academic text (at a reasonable price), and pushed to the general public. As the editors write, ‘We know, however, that unless the message of this volume is exported beyond the sociological field … our efforts to document the perniciousness of the present political juncture will have been in vain’ (p. 181). This laudable aim was, unsurprisingly, rejected by the publishers, who preferred a standard volume, to be sold to university libraries and to specialist academics. This dispiriting outcome runs in parallel to the focus of the BSA conference, the theme of which was ‘Engaging Sociology’, and where, despite the immense level of media attention devoted to Savage and colleagues’ work on the Great British Class Survey (GBCS), one came away with the feeling that no-one really knows how we will operationalise sociological research into political and social change, particularly on a macro scale.
The chapters in this collection, most notably the introduction and conclusion, are intensely political and activist, showing in great clarity how the supposed commitments of those in power to fairness and the sharing of economic and social pain are nothing of the sort. Whether the increased attention on social class and class differences generated by the GBCS extends into a public political role for sociology is still up for grabs, but appears unlikely. While this volume is an excellent resource for sociologists at all levels, and contains a noble attempt to answer that oft-ignored sociological question, ‘So what are we going to do about it?’, it does sadly appear to be another work which will either preach to the converted, or be one more instance of sociologists shouting into the dark.