Asset classes? Some reflections on the ‘new class realities’ of rentier capitalism

Introduction: Back to the future with Peter Saunders

In a recent paper, Mike Savage (2022) has, perhaps unexpectedly, attempted the rehabilitation of Peter Saunders’ infamous A Nation of Homeowners (Saunders, 1990), calling it ‘an under-appreciated classic … prescient about the rise of wealth inequality in a decade when this was still only nascent’ (Savage, 2022: 418, note 7). Some contemporary readers might be unfamiliar with Saunders' work. ¹ He was one of just a few British sociologists who followed a political trajectory towards what, in the 1980s, came to be called the ‘new right’ and what, today, we might term the neoliberal thought collective (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2015). His early work in urban sociology (Saunders, 1978, 1984) was written within a broadly critical, neo-Weberian tradition but, as he details in a recent self-published autobiographical trilogy (Saunders, 2020, 2021, 2023), over time he became deeply disillusioned with UK leftist politics and what he came to see as a lazy style of sociology that was broadly aligned with it.

Following disagreements with colleagues in the UK Labour Party about the rights and wrongs of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's ‘Right to Buy’ policy – the sale of council houses, at discounted rates, to tenants (Murie, 2016) – in the early 1980s, he undertook a sojourn from his base at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK to the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, to rethink his position. There, he met another visitor to ANU, David Green – someone a few years ahead of Saunders in his shift from a Labour Party stalwart to a free-market advocate (Saunders, 2021: 167–174). Green was a brusque Geordie, about the same age as Saunders, with a doctorate in politics from his hometown, Newcastle University, who had, whilst there, been deeply influenced by Norman Dennis, perhaps best known as a co-author of the 1950s sociological classic Coal Is Our Life (Dennis et al., 1956). Dennis was an old-school ethical socialist (a position he discusses in Dennis and Halsey (1988)) and a lifelong member of the Labour Party, but he was struggling with the political realities of socialist politics in the 1970s. Green and Dennis began a rightward shift in their political thinking – Green, probably, at a faster pace than his mentor. Green became particularly interested in the history and practicalities of communal self-help movements and whilst at the ANU was developing a political position that would later – especially through his involvement in the UK right-wing think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) – come to be viewed as one of the clearest and most influential articulations of a new right political position (Green, 1987).

Initially, Saunders and Green argued, but towards the end of his time at ANU, Saunders was persuaded by Green to read some core texts by Frederick Hayek (often construed as an ‘economist’, but better considered as a writer with a complex and oft-hidden relationship with sociology (Gane, 2014)). The reading of one text in particular – The Constitution of Liberty (Hayek, 1960) – on a beach in France on his return to Europe, turned out to be a quite revelatory conversion experience for Saunders. This conversion was painful (Saunders, 2021:167–174) and it took him quite a while to leave the Labour Party and to work out how a Hayekian political logic might be applied within his sociological work, and what the consequences of this might be for him personally and professionally.

Within this political repositioning, Saunders attempted to develop an empirical sociological agenda concerned with a wide range of issues such as social mobility, privatization and, especially, housing (Burrows and Marsh, 1992). In a series of papers that track his shifting political position, he attempted to foreground the importance of housing – the concept of ‘housing classes’ (Ruonavaara, 2024) in particular – for understanding patterns of social inequality (Saunders, 1978, 1984, 1988; Saunders and Williams, 1988), culminating in the aforementioned book, A Nation of Homeowners, which was, at the time, subject to heavy criticism from the sociological mainstream (Devine and Heath, 1999).

Savage (2022: 418, note 7) admits that he has some investment in this rehabilitation as he, along with several other now significant figures in contemporary sociology, were what we would now term ‘early career researchers’ on the project. As well as Savage, contemporary academic luminaries Mark Bhatti, James Barlow, Susan Halford and Lisa Adkins were all involved in the data collection that underpinned Saunders’ analysis, although none contributed to any publications from the work. All of these researchers have subsequently developed careers focusing on myriad substantive topics but, as Savage (2022: 418, note 7) notes, ‘both Lisa Adkins and myself have in recent years emphasized the significance of asset accumulation, including in owner-occupied housing, which might … suggest that Peter Saunders was ahead of his time’.

Savage's contribution to the development of a sociology that emphasizes the importance of asset accumulation has, indeed, been substantial, not least in the way he has sought to confront the analytic challenges presented by Piketty (2014) (and some other political economists) for the development of a more viable sociological analysis of social inequalities (Savage, 2014, 2021). However, it has been the recent work of Lisa Adkins, especially since her move to Sydney (where, as already noted, Saunders, also ended up for a time – albeit in a right-wing think tank (the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS)) – after he left academia), that has most reanimated many of the central concerns of A Nation of Homeowners.

Much has changed since the 1990s, of course, including, inter alia, the limits of neoliberalism becoming all too readily apparent (Davies, 2014), financializaton processes, often mediated through ubiquitous digital technologies, becoming normalized (Davis and Walsh, 2017), new forms of rentier capitalism (about which much more later) taking hold (Christophers, 2020), the Overton window shifting ever further rightwards and, crucially, asset price inflation emerging as an endogenous – rather than an episodic – feature of contemporary capitalism (Adkins et al., 2020). Sociology has also become far more ‘pluralistic’ over the past three decades or so, with traditional economistic-productivist, class-based models falling from favour and more intersectional theorizations of social inequalities becoming mainstream (Collins and Guo, 2021). It has been within this context that Adkins, and various of her colleagues, have begun to develop an innovative reimagining of critical economic sociology which, they readily admit, has ‘historical antecedents’ in the work of Saunders (Adkins et al., 2021: 566). ² They find in Saunders’ work an early attempt to understand ‘the relationship between home ownership, wealth accumulation and class’, but, for them, at the time this analysis failed to ‘impact on or change the course of the social science orthodoxy in regard to class’ (Adkins et al., 2021: 566). They implicitly agree with Savage that – leaving his reactionary politics to one side – Saunders was indeed ‘ahead of his time’. However, their case for why the analysis failed to gain purchase

was because housing tenure (and especially home ownership) was framed as an issue of consumption. As a consequence, the debate did not engage with (or appreciate) the key process … namely the construction of residential property as a financial asset … these debates also had little impact on the social science class orthodoxy because at that historical juncture the full force of wage moderation, asset price inflation and intergenerational wealth transfers had yet to be felt … Now … this full force is being felt, with asset ownership eclipsing the significance of employment and employment relations in the shaping of class positions. (Adkins et al., 2021: 566, emphasis added)

Such a statement – that asset ownership is now more significant than employment in determining class location – is clearly no longer a sociological anathema in the way it was at the time Saunders was developing his analysis. Adkins and her colleagues, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings, all share a politics that is very far away from that espoused by Saunders; they all have complex relationships with versions of Marxism, feminism, queer and critical theory, and all – in different ways – are preeminent scholars of the history of neoliberalism and its toxic impacts. The position they summarize in their co-authored book, The Asset Economy (Adkins et al., 2020) and elaborate on extensively elsewhere (Adkins, 2019; Adkins et al., 2022, 2023; Konings and Adkins, 2022; Konings et al., 2021) is itself one they jointly arrived at via relatively autonomous routes – three single-authored books, all in different ways ‘emphasising the growing role that speculative, asset-centred economic logics play in contemporary society’ (Adkins et al., 2020: vii): The Time of Money (Adkins, 2018); Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Cooper, 2017); and Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberalism (Konings, 2018).

The idea that the three of them should come together at the University of Sydney to work on these issues was not happenstance. The earlier work of colleagues at Sydney such as sociologist Fiona Allon (2008) on the reconceptualization of the house as an asset and investment vehicle in the lead-up to the financial crisis, leading to the emergence of the ‘citizen speculator’ (Allon, 2010) and ‘speculation as a structure of feeling’ (Allon, 2015), clearly has a resonance with the arguments they would later make. The huge corpus of work by political economist Dick Bryan – in particular Bryan and Rafferty (2018) – on the financialization of everyday life similarly aligns well with their thinking. The fact that such work existed within the University of Sydney's Social Studies of Finance network must have provided an attractive and conducive intellectual environment for their collaboration.

The Asset Economy (which, oddly, itself contains no references to the work of Saunders, although he is cited elsewhere by them (in Adkins et al. (2021) especially), is an incredibly pithy book which, in just 112 pages, manages to condense a range of often nuanced and complex arguments into just five short chapters all written with a clarity and sense of purpose that is rare in contemporary sociological scholarship. It is a book that has already been extensively cited across a range of literatures and its core arguments have been widely disseminated and have begun to gain purchase across several conceptual and policy domains. Of particular note is the influence it has had in the recent work of cultural political economist Will Davies, one of the most cogent critical commentators on the present conjuncture. In two recent papers he and his co-authors have used The Asset Economy as a crucial analytic scaffold for their ideas. In Davies et al. (2024) the central concept of the ‘domestic regime’ uses the analysis to underscore how housing, family wealth and financialization interact, emphasizing housing's role as a core asset class, sustaining inequality through intergenerational wealth transfers and asset-based welfare. In a more philosophical piece, Davies (2024) explores the implications of the supposed shift from labour to asset ownership as central to economic and social life. Time emerges as a critical resource in this system, with economic agency revolving around sustaining and growing assets. This generates new existential concerns, showing how individuals navigate obligations and opportunities within a balance-sheet-driven economic order​.

In this paper, we focus on the contribution the volume (and associated outputs) makes to just one specific area of debate – the changing nature of social class – and offer some critical reflections on the analytic utility, or otherwise, of the conceptualization and operationalization offered. Does it offer something fresh and insightful facilitating a better understanding of current socio-economic dynamics, or is it an updated rehash of Saunders’ position, albeit using a different set of rhetorical devices aligned with more progressive political discourses?

New class realities? ³

Adkins et al. (2020: 55) argue that ‘class has conventionally been understood first and foremost with reference to work and employment’. For them, it matters little if the conceptualization offered is broadly Marxist, as in the influential work of Olin Wright (1985), or broadly Weberian, as in the work of Goldthorpe and his colleagues – the so-called Nuffield class schema – adopted as the UK government's official measure of class (Rose and Pevalin, 2003), because in the end both analytic approaches involve the clustering together of different occupational groups into distinctive sets of mutually exclusive and exhaustive class categories. The nature of the clusters may differ markedly, but all such approaches foreground positionings in the division of labour – work and employment – as determinant of class positioning. Adkins et al. (2020: 57–59) do concede that, influenced by Bourdieu, Mike Savage, Tony Bennett and their colleagues have attempted to develop class schemas for both the UK (Bennett et al., 2009) and Australia (Bennett et al., 2020) that try to break with this tradition by supplementing positionings within the division of labour with consideration to the mediating influences of other forms of economic, social and cultural capital. ⁴ However, for Adkins and her colleagues, this does not go far enough; ‘it is too little, too late’ (Adkins et al., 2020: 58). For them, post-Fordist financialized capitalism has altered in such fundamental ways that any schema that does not place what they term the asset economy at the very centre of the analysis of social class will be found wanting.

Implicit to their argument is the notion that traditional employment-based conceptualizations of social class inequality are grounded in outdated Fordist-Keynesian models of the functioning of the economy, buttressed by similarly outmoded conceptualizations of social reproduction (Adkins, 2019). With the shift away from this epoch, from the mid-1970s onwards, towards what has been variously conceptualized as post-Fordism, neoliberalism, the end of organized capitalism or some other similar theoretical branding of social change (Savage, 2009a), the functioning of social reproduction within the household – the form of which has, of course, also radically altered over the period – begins to alter and with it, the necessity to radically rethink social class.

Adkins (2019) constructs two ideal-types to contrast the supposed functioning of the household within the Fordist-Keynesian era compared to the contemporary (increasingly financialized) neoliberal era. Under the Fordist-Keynesian accumulation regime households were the primary site for the reproduction of labour power (buttressed as needed by an expansive welfare state) and the consumption of the goods and services that such labour power produced in the workplace. In this supposedly virtuous economic cycle, wages and salaries from employment were key to maintaining the social reproduction of the household – often involving a highly gendered division of labour – with a ‘family wage’ providing enough resources ‘to take care of the daily needs of male breadwinners … via unpaid domestic and caring labour’ (Adkins, 2019: 21). Under such circumstances it becomes obvious why variations in work, employment and occupational positionings become central to understanding patterns of social inequality, and why the class location of all household members was (often) derived from the employment location of male workers (Dale et al., 1985).

Following Piketty (2014), Adkins et al. (2020: 23–26) note that since the late 1970s rates of return on asset values have generally exceeded rates of economic growth (a proxy for growth in wages and salaries) – a return to a situation that has pertained throughout the history of capitalism except for a period from about 1918 to about 1979 – with the consequence that, in recent years, patterns of global inequality have increased sharply as those with large asset holdings (often conceptualized as the top 1%) have seen their wealth increase disproportionally (Savage, 2021). Perhaps understandably, this empirical observation has led many social scientists to develop research agendas focused on – following Nader (1972) – ‘studying up’ (Burrows and Knowles, 2019; Hay and Beaverstock, 2016). Adkins et al. (2020: 24) are not unsympathetic to the development of these agendas – developing a sociology of powerful global wealth elites is an important undertaking – but they are concerned that such a foregrounding has tended to deflect from the realization that household asset ownership, although concentrated at the apex of society, is also ‘part of a wider logic … that includes a large percentage of households’ (Adkins et al., 2020: 24). Since the late 1970s asset ownership, in particular, home ownership ⁵ and private pensions have become far more widely spread across the population – albeit disproportionally concentrated within the boomer generation – with the consequence that the ‘economy of assets’ now impinges upon the life chances of many more households in very significant ways. Australia is perhaps paradigmatic in this regard (Ryan-Collins and Murray, 2023), but the direction of travel, Adkins and her colleagues argue, is now clear in many other national contexts.

According to Adkins et al. (2020), life chances are increasingly determined not only by one's position in the social division of labour but also by how this position articulates with access to and management of household assets. Under financialized neoliberalism, social reproduction is no longer just a matter of relatively passive receipt of wages and salaries supported on occasion by the institutions of the welfare state as under Fordist-Keynesianism. Financialized neoliberalism requires the emergence of a new household form – one that is altogether more proactive and entrepreneurial – which Adkins and her colleagues characterize as Minskyan ⁶ (Adkins et al., 2020: 17–23).

The heterodox economic ideas of Hyman Minsky (1919–1996) were reanimated in the wake of the 2008 global financial crash, ⁷ and the sociological utilization of his ideas – especially the supposed speculative dimension of all economic activity – have been developed by Adkins and her colleagues (Konings and Adkins, 2022). However, in the context of the construction of the ideal-typical household that supposedly emerges under conditions of financialized neoliberalism, his name is used in a perhaps more metaphorical sense to provide a contrast with the greater stability of social reproduction processes inherent in the Keynesian household. The emphasis that Minsky gives to economic instability and speculation in his writings allows Adkins and her colleagues to argue as follows:

To refer to the contemporary household as a Minskyan unit is to say that in the asset economy the household exists no longer primarily as a unit of subsistence or consumption but increasingly as a balance sheet of assets and liabilities that must be managed … The instability of the financialized economy means that the household balance sheet requires constant rebalancing. (Adkins et al., 2020: 17–18)

This notion of the Minskyan household is thus an inventive device that functions to make it clear that, contra Keynesianism, under conditions of financialized neoliberalism within which the emerging asset economy prospers, the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding new class realities is now the household rather than the individual. For Adkins and her colleagues, it is now the myriad actions of the household, in relation to work and employment, the division of labour within the home and, crucially, the strategic, often speculative, management of household assets, that combine to establish overall class positioning. The delimitation of what constitutes a household is, though, an empirical question. For example, in a brilliant and fascinating qualitative analysis of how young adults enter home ownership in New South Wales, using an initial conceptualization of a Minskian (sic) household, Cook (2023, 2024) demonstrates how it is, in fact, often a far broader kinship network – parents, grandparents, siblings even – that comes together strategically to provide equity for deposits. For many day-to-day social reproduction activities, it may well be people living under the same roof that constitutes the household; however, other households in a broader kinship network may also, on occasion, become entangled in larger – often more long-term – strategic and speculative activities when it makes sense to do so.

The notion of the Minskyan household is also useful for highlighting that such social reproduction activities are no longer just a matter of working for a wage and consuming goods and services:

[the household] now operates as a supplier of liquid, risk-managed assets for finance capital. It is in this transformation of the household where … the shifting contours of social reproduction are to be found. This is so because the very payments which households make on loans, debts and bills not only provision liquidity for financial markets but also, in a context of risk shifting from the state and employers to households [the means by which] access to housing, health care and education are secured … In as much as it is via payments rather than via the daily reproduction of the waged-worker through which households now survive or, more precisely, gain access to survival, it is … critical to recognise how in the post-Keynesian era the nexus of social reproduction or, the maintenance of life, now turns around payment streams. (Adkins, 2019: 28–29)

How best then to represent analytically this new reality, where patterns of asset ownership (mostly in the form of houses) articulate with different positions in the labour market? Adkins and her colleagues have provided a schematic representation of what this might look like on a couple of occasions (Adkins et al., 2020: 63; 2021: 565) and an online version can be easily accessed. ⁸ Their diagram shows several different ‘asset-based class’ categories by cross-classifying a household's location in relation to, first, housing assets, and second, income derived from employment (and income from other (housing) assets, if any). Households are first divided into those with some form of housing assets and those without any. Those with housing assets are then further subdivided into three types: investors, a small group able to live off the income generated from asset ownership, supplemented in some cases with a wage; outright owners; and the largest group, homeowners with a mortgage. Those without housing assets are divided into two types: renters (further subdivided into three) and what are termed the homeless. Renters are categorized as either living ‘rent free’, as ‘waged renters’ or as ‘welfare renters’.

Outright owners and homeowners with a mortgage are further subdivided into those with a wage derived from employment of some sort, and those without. Each of these categories is then further subdivided into those with additional income derived from the ownership of investment properties and those without. So, to take an example, homeowners with a mortgage on their primary property are divided into four different types: (i) those with no income from wages and no income from investment properties; (ii) those with no income from wages but with some income from investment properties; (iii) those with income from wages but no income from investment properties and, finally, (iv) those within income from both wages and investment properties.

Overall, the schema generates fourteen distinct ‘asset-based class’ positions. However, Adkins et al. argue that:

While the scheme is classificatory … it also recognizes that these classes exist in relation to one another: positions in the asset-based class scheme therefore concern the abilities of classes relative to each other to own assets and to benefit from asset holdings. Renters who are dependent on income from labour, for example, are likely to be servicing the mortgages of landlord investors and hence providing the conditions of possibility for investors to enhance their asset holdings and asset-based capital gains. (Adkins et al, 2020: 62)

They also make the interesting claim that ‘[i]t captures how the population as a whole is incorporated into the economy of assets and demonstrates how positions within the hierarchy of asset ownership overdetermine the wage relationship’ (Adkins et al., 2020: 64, emphasis added). Now, the history of the concept of overdetermination in social and political theory is a complex one ⁹ – perhaps now even considered rather archaic – but it is not likely to have been used innocently here. What conceptual work is it doing in this context? In the social sciences (as opposed to mathematics and/or analytic philosophy) its genealogy likely starts in psychoanalysis, but it was later adapted by Marxist theorists, particularly Althusser (1979), to refer to the idea that social phenomena are the result of multiple, often interrelated forces, rather than a single, linear cause. In the hands of post-Marxist theorists such as Laclau and Mouffe (1985), it became conceptually emblematic of positions that no longer viewed the ‘economic’ as ‘determinant in the last instance’ and which were more accepting of more pluralistic (cultural, ideological, political, technological and so on) explanations of structural change. Given the conceptual and political trajectories that Adkins, Cooper and Konings have all followed, we might suppose that their use of the term aligns, at least in part, with the Laclau and Mouffe tradition of usage. So, given their critique of employment-based models of social class (the ‘wage relationship’), we might interpret their use of the concept in this context, as a slight analytic obfuscation of their argument that asset ownership is now at least as significant (likely, more so) than employment in determining inequalities.

In the next paragraph on the same page, they are perhaps rather less ambiguous about what they are proposing. It is worth quoting at some length to better understand the form and functioning of the notion of overdetermination that they have in mind:

It is important here to reiterate that we are not claiming that income from wages has become unimportant – it manifestly has not, and indeed for those without assets it may well be an increasingly precarious lifeline. The point is rather than income from employment is less and less itself a gateway to a middle-class lifestyle and increasingly important primarily as a determinant of one's ability to participate in the logic of the asset economy … our asset-based class scheme depicts a logic within which other sources of inequality are increasingly played out…our claim is that other sources of inequality are increasingly absorbed into and refracted through the logic of the asset economy. (Adkins et al., 2020: 64–65)

This then is a bold reconceptualization of the ‘new class realities’ of the 21st century which, although largely based on observations from Sydney, Australia, is claimed ‘as exemplary of a dynamic that has unfolded across the Anglo-American economies’ (Adkins et al., 2021: 548). Certain aspects of the approach are analytically appealing: the shift of the unit of (class) analysis from individuals to households (with helpful resonances of the arguments of feminist economists such as Raworth (2017)); the notion of the Minskyan household as a sensitizing concept able to effectively integrate a sociology of family and kinship with the dynamics of contemporary housing markets and financialization processes; and a much-needed reintroduction of ‘housing classes’ into the analysis of social and economic inequalities (Ruonavaara, 2024). However, other aspects of the approach are less satisfactory and will be discussed in the next section.

Some critical reflections

We might begin by noting the observation made by Bev Skeggs (2015) that most attempts to reimagine class analysis in the last few decades have ended by being theories of social stratification that are more concerned to understand the fracturing of the middle class than they are with coming to terms with exploitation, domination, dispossession and devaluation of working-class subjects (however conceptualized). Although more coherent than many, it is clear at the outset that the schema under discussion here falls within this tradition of work. Although little read or cited today, the framework offered by Frank Parkin (1983) in his bourgeois critique of class theory, with its emphasis on processes of social closure, was perhaps one of the most important precursors to this trend. In this framing of class inequalities, it was the proactive (and increasingly strategic) agency of the middle and upper classes that was foregrounded in understanding emerging patterns of social and economic inequality in general; the working classes were defined in terms of their exclusion from middle and upper class-making practices rather than any autonomous actions with which they might engage. One feels this tradition of thought at play here – a theory of social stratification largely driven by the actions of households with strategic capacity to survive and prosper when presented with the complex affordances generated by hyper-financialized (and increasingly ‘rentierized’ and ‘assetized’) capitalism, whilst those households unable to manage these ‘new realities’ become ever more impoverished. To be clear, this observation is not intended as a critique of the schema per se, but rather, it is simply to note the tradition of thought within which it is best located and thus the terms within which it might be most reasonably evaluated.

Within this context, an initial issue, already hinted at above, relates to the extent to which the schema overstates the significance of the ownership of investment properties by households. Although it has been reported by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) that about one-fifth of Australian taxpayers (almost 2.5 million) owned at least one investment property in 2022, ¹⁰ with a figure closer to one-third in New South Wales and possibly as high as 50% in Sydney (Adkins et al., 2021: 558), ‘[e]xtrapolating from such an obviously atypical local market seems fraught with risks’ (Christophers, 2021: 10). In England, for example, in 2021/22 only some 3% (2.1 million) of households reported owning (at least one) second property, but of these one-third were used as ‘holiday homes’ rather than being let out in the private rented sector (ONS, 2023). So, although the model may have analytic utility in Sydney and, possibly, some other Australian cities (Ryan-Collins and Murray, 2023), the claim that it is prefigurative of class dynamics across other ‘Anglo-American economies’ may be an analytic and spatial stretch too far. A second issue might initially appear to be a minor quibble, but it turns out to be rather important for the overall coherence of the approach. In their schema, those households identified as ‘renters’ are defined as those without housing assets. In most instances, this will indeed be the case. However, the complexities of the contemporary dynamics of individual housing histories means that, empirically, it is easy to think of (certainly not an exhaustive list of) episodes and instances where those renting their primary abode might also have other housing assets from which they derive an income (sometimes to fund the rent). For instance, one may move jobs from one end of the country to another and decide to rent a property close to one's new place of work and rent out an existing (owned or mortgaged) property in the area where one used to work. Another example might be an existing renter who inherits a property but decides to rent it out rather than occupying or selling it. Then there is also the issue of what has come to be known as ‘rentvesting’ (Haddow, 2019) which really blurs the renter/asset-owner distinction. In Australia, in particular, this is a popular tax minimization/wealth generation strategy, especially for Millennials, which involves buying an investment property in a slightly cheaper housing market such as Brisbane or Adelaide and then renting oneself in Melbourne or Sydney (Cruickshank and Pini, 2024). There is also the issue of the global corporate elite (about which more later) who often rent (for the sake of flexibility and convenience) at the very top of the housing market (often subsidized by their employers) but who may own properties in various locations that they choose not to live in (or live in for only part of the year) (Burrows and Knowles, 2019). Finally, the advent of ‘shared ownership’ (Wallace, 2012) – hybrid schemes, increasingly popular in the UK, where one pays a mortgage on only part of the property value and rent to a social housing provider on the rest. – adds additional fuzziness to the distinction. ¹¹

A third issue pertains to the static nature of the current classification. The asset-based class schema only considers asset ownership (or the lack thereof) at a specific point in time. However, proximity to assets is often crucial for life chances. ‘Upward mobility’ (assuming there is some ordinality between the 14 categories) is significantly influenced by access to assets. For instance, there is a substantial difference between a current renter who has financial assistance from family or a guarantor for an upcoming mortgage and one who does not. Cook's work (2023, 2024), as previously noted, advocates for expanding the Minskian (sic) household concept to include broader networks – considering asset ownership within family networks rather than just individual households. This approach provides a useful example of how the schema could be refined to make it more dynamic.

A fourth issue is likely more substantial than those already discussed. Christophers (2021) in his critique of Adkins et al. (2021) focuses on the central role of asset ownership under conditions of what he terms ‘rentier capitalism’ (Christophers, 2020), arguing that income from assets exceeds labour income for only a minuscule fraction of households, showing that employment remains the dominant income source for most households. But his objections are more profound than just this observation. He argues that the very processes that Adkins et al. (2020) describe at the household level that relate to the emergence of the asset economy have had an even more profound impact on the world of work and employment. For him, it is the corporate ownership and exploitation of income-producing assets that have most strongly affected class and inequality (rather than those held by households).

Rentier capitalism for Christophers (2020, 2021) revolves around income derived from owning or controlling scarce assets, rather than from productive activities. A rentier, often a corporation, profits from this exclusive control. In such an economic system, overall incomes are dominated by these rents and economic power rests with rentiers. This system emphasizes ‘having’ over ‘doing’ and is driven by ownership rather than entrepreneurship. In his conceptualization of the present conjuncture as rentier capitalism, Christophers (2020, 2021: 11–12) identifies seven main asset categories that generate income for rentiers: property assets (land and buildings); financial assets; intellectual-property assets (patents, trademarks, designs, copyrights); natural resources (hydrocarbons and precious metals); platform assets (digital platforms intermediating trade); long-term service contracts; and infrastructure (telecommunication, energy, transportation services). Ownership of these assets is, he argues, mostly corporate, with individuals and households only holding property and personal financial assets, such as pensions, in any significant proportion. Even in the property domain though, it is corporations who dominate commercial markets, but they are now making significant inroads into the residential sector as well with huge levels of corporate investment into new ‘build to rent’ schemes (Nethercote, 2020) and companies such as Blackrock and the Blackstone Group hoovering up large swathes of the private rented sector (Christophers, 2023a, 2023b).

Christophers is of the view that Adkins et al. (2021) severely underplay the role of these corporate assets in the reshaping of employment-based class inequalities. For him, the clustering together of different occupational groups into distinctive class categories found in the earlier class schemas discussed by Adkins et al. (2020, 2021) – such as that of Olin Wright (1985) – is, he agrees, outdated and in need of fundamental revision, but in a very different way to that suggested by them. He argues that the emergence of the asset economy has not just impacted the functioning of household reproduction, but has, at the same time, led to major employment restructuring, such that incomes from certain types of work in corporate sectors managing substantial assets reflect the rents generated by those assets. Employment-based class location is increasingly structured around these rent-generating assets and these changes are at least as significant, if not more so, than the differences in the household ownership of assets foregrounded by Adkins et al. (2020, 2021).

Christophers (2021: 14–21) identifies four distinct types of employment in rentier corporations in relation to the generation of asset values that deliver incomes far more than other types of work and, as such, are generative of significant new employment-based cleavages absent from the Adkins et al. (2020, 2021) asset-based class schema. First, rentier companies rely on creating valuable assets to generate income. Individuals who contribute to asset creation are highly compensated. For example, in major oil and gas companies securing extraction rights is crucial. In property companies, acquiring land, often from the public sector, is similarly rewarded. The ability to create assets is key, as demonstrated by companies winning long-term service contracts. ‘Rainmakers’ who secure and renew these contracts are highly valued and compensated based on the value of the assets they create. Second, those able to perform asset value are highly prized. Capitalism is future-oriented, with investors looking for evidence that a company's assets will generate future income. For oil and gas companies, for example, this means having proven reserves. Accountants play a crucial role in certifying the existence and value of assets, providing the confidence investors need. This role is essential in rentier capitalism, as highlighted by the significant number of accountants in the UK. Third, employment that involves the protection of assets is also valued. Lawyers are vital in protecting the value of assets. Intellectual property law, for example, ensures companies can profit from their inventions by securing robust patent protection. Lawyers involved in patent protection and extending its duration are thus highly valued. Finally, those who help companies maximize income from assets by reducing external constraints are highly compensated. Lobbyists and tax professionals are key in this regard. In the UK, tax lawyers and accountants help companies minimize tax burdens through strategic profit allocation. This is especially significant for digital companies, which can easily move profits across jurisdictions.

So, contract makers, specialist commercial accountants and lawyers, lobbyists, tax specialists and similar occupations all thrive under rentier capitalism. Workers involved in maintaining the day-to-day operations that keep these assets productive – those ‘sweating’ the assets – are less well rewarded. These roles, the majority of those employed, essential for generating ongoing income from assets, are typically lower paid and hold lower class status compared to those with more direct, strategic relationships to asset creation, value performance, protection and rent maximization. For Christophers (2021: 14) then, ‘class is still substantially about the division of labour. Only, what increasingly divides workers in rentier capitalism is their respective relations to rent-generating assets rather than to the means of production.’

This is a powerful critique, although not one without its own analytic problems (Cox, 2022; Karakilic, 2022; Zacares, 2021). Perhaps most significant for us here is that, rather like Adkins et al. (2020, 2021), its claims to spatial generalizability are highly questionable. Zacares (2021: 51), for example, argues that the analysis is constrained by a certain ‘methodological nationalism’, in which London (rather than Sydney) is subject to unwarranted extrapolation. Certainly, the importance of sectors of the economy that endure outside of even the most liberal definitions of rentierism – manufacturing, the cultural industries, petty bourgeois trades, education, health care, what remains of the rest of the public sector and much more besides – at the very least complexify the nature of the new employment cleavage that Christophers claims to identify. Even so, the global tendency towards rentierism is clear enough, and so tied up with the emergence of the asset economy, which so concerns Adkins et al. (2020, 2021), that some revision to their asset-based class schema might be necessary. Thus, rather than just being concerned if a household has income from wages – from whatever source – a more nuanced schema might consider if the source of that employment-based income derives from (i) asset creation, value performance, protection, and/or rent maximization as opposed to (ii) the simple ‘sweating’ of assets within the rentier sector and/or other forms of employment currently beyond its reach.

The problem with adding ever greater intricacy to the schema, often for good analytic reasons, is that we end up with myriad categories of such complexity that it becomes unclear what the resulting classification is for. As we have argued, much like the GBCS, the result is more about stratification than a relational form of class analysis (Skeggs, 2015). This is not to say there are no relational aspects to the schema (one household's rent is often another household's income from asset holdings), but overall, especially if we were to take seriously the necessary amendments implied by Christophers (2021), we might be left with almost 20 different categories. Some categories contain a very small proportion of total households, some have ordinal characteristics, but most are nominal. The schema could certainly be empirically operationalized to map out a population and, like contemporary geodemographic schemas (Parker et al., 2007), serve as a valuable descriptive resource (Savage, 2009b). Additionally, it may sensitize researchers to the issue of asset ownership and prompt them to surface this in their research. Specifically, researchers might be encouraged to routinely ask about asset ownership in addition to the more usual questions about education, employment and so on. Its functioning as a schema with ontologically causal powers is, though, less clear. As David Lockwood (1988) so brilliantly articulated many years ago, the test of the utility of any form of class analysis is its possession of (at least) some form of sociological purchase on explaining other social phenomena. Does the positioning of a household in one (asset-based) class category rather than another allow us to better understand dynamic differences in some other sphere: political interests, consciousness, action, beliefs, life expectancy or anything else?

Conclusion

We have seen how Adkins and her co-authors critique traditional class models focused on work and employment, arguing they are outdated in the present conjuncture. Influenced by Bourdieu, efforts have been made to incorporate economic, social and cultural capital into class schemas, but these attempts are viewed as inadequate. Instead, they emphasize the ‘asset economy’, where household assets, particularly home ownership and private pensions, are seen as crucial in determining life chances. As part of this, they develop the notion of the ‘Minskyan household’ to highlight the proactive and speculative nature of household asset management today, contrasting it with the supposed stable Keynesian household of the Fordist era. Under financialized neoliberalism, they argue, the basis of social reproduction extends beyond wages from employment, unpaid domestic labour and welfare services to include strategic asset management. This shift, they argue, necessitates a new form of class analysis that incorporates household assets and their management alongside traditional employment. Their asset-based class schema classifies households by their housing assets and income sources, suggesting that asset ownership increasingly overdetermines employment-based class positioning. Their approach attempts to capture how asset ownership interacts with labour market positions, showing other inequalities are increasingly refracted through the logic of the asset economy.

Although the schema has some strengths, we have identified several problematic issues with it. First, as Bev Skeggs notes, recent ‘class analyses’ are often more analyses of ‘social stratification’ than anything else, often with more of a focus on middle-class fragmentation than on working-class exploitation. Adkins and her co-authors' schema follows this trend, emphasizing the strategic actions of the middle classes while the working classes are defined by their exclusion. The model also likely overstates the significance of investment property ownership outside the specificities of Sydney, and certainly when compared to places like England. The distinction between renters and owners is also blurred by phenomena such as ‘rentvesting’ and ‘shared ownership’. The schema is also rather static with the existing classification largely ignoring the dynamics of access to assets. Expanding the schema to include broader household networks might provide a more accurate representation of asset-based mobility. Finally, Brett Christophers argues that corporate asset ownership has a more significant impact on class inequalities than household assets. He identifies four employment types under conditions of rentier capitalism – asset creation, value performance, protection, and rent maximization – that generate significant income disparities, reshaping class structures. While Adkins and her co-authors' schema highlights important trends, incorporating corporate asset dynamics is essential for a more comprehensive understanding of class under rentier capitalism.

All things considered, this attempt to combine employment-based class analysis with the emerging dynamics of the supposed asset economy – to construct a new set of sociologically useful ‘asset classes’ (for those who appreciate a perhaps not very subtle play on words) – has certainly been an analytically productive exercise provoking all manner of engagements and critiques across the social sciences. ¹² But perhaps, in conclusion, we should briefly return to the origin story of the schema, to the work of sociological Hayekian Peter Saunders, and consider what, if anything, is at stake in his (partial) rehabilitation for contemporary sociological discourse. The most general question must be about the degree of analytic flexibility we now seem to possess in the operationalization of concepts that were previously deeply grounded in broader theoretical frameworks with which we might otherwise have philosophical or political objections. One cannot help but reflect that the impressive academic journeys both Adkins and Savage have followed over the last few decades were influenced to some extent by their early career experiences working with Saunders on the sociology of owner occupation in the 1980s. Indeed, it might not be entirely unfair to consider much of their work on housing, class and so on, over the years, as a prolonged attempt to reconcile themselves – as political progressives and sociological materialists with a residual attachment to Marxism – with substantive sociological conclusions they felt broadly content with that were, nevertheless, grounded in philosophical and political discourses with which they felt profoundly uncomfortable. Certainly, this paper concludes that the asset-based class schema developed in The Asset Economy and elsewhere becomes more intelligible when this back story is surfaced.