Abstract
There is a passage in Savage et al.’s Social Class in the 21st Century that sums up rather nicely why the subject of class vexes, energizes and divides so many. Savage describes the topic as a ‘lightening conductor for anxieties…between economic realities and beliefs…’ (p. 7). The fascination with class comes in many forms, but it is this sense of anxiety about status, about engagement with the world, with homes, post-codes and so on that has generated an obsession with classification particularly among the ‘middle reaches’. What exactly class is today is the question that runs right through this wonderful and, at times, disquieting book.
Rather than provide a breakdown of the chapters as an overview, Savage et al. ask us to re-configure the traditional categorizations of class as ‘working’, ‘middle’ and ‘upper class’ that were intended to reflect class relations between workers, managers and owners from the Victorian age. While this is consistent with numerous other studies, in using the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) as their starting point, Savage et al. establish an intriguing set of propositions around how we might better understand class divisions through the lens of culture. For make no mistake; this is a book not about class per se but about class divisions, inequality, the rapacious rise of government policies designed to discipline the ‘precariat’ and the at times vicious and calculating public discourse on ‘benefit cheats’, fuelled by a cynical but ruthless media. Culture is playing its part in class inequality. Culture – that opaque, misused and misunderstood word – is invoked throughout this book as offering a logical frame to guide us towards a more nuanced sociological explanation of class development and class forms. And overall it works as a conceptual tool because culture, how we feed it, respond to it or deny its presence and influence is inextricably linked to economic and political capital from where the traditional lines of working, middle and upper class were drawn.
Pierre Bourdieu – the greatest sociologist of the second half of the 20th century, says Savage – is our guide through contesting class boundaries. Bourdieu’s influence in sociology is immense and profound because essentially he argues that it is simply not enough to define class through the variable of economic capital. With rigorous detail, the authors of Social Class make the point that what we inherit from our ancestors is more than property, savings and the like. Instead, cultural inheritance (educational qualifications, cultural taste and cultural preference) has a symbolic power that determines how some social groups come to be more legitimate than others. Crucial to the argument of this book is how cultural capital is recognized, the forms that it takes and the effects that this recognition, or lack of it, has on people’s perceptions of their class. Essentially, then, this book is a study of how we talk about class; and how we talk of class is generative of how we view taste, cultural engagement and where we ‘put people of a different class’. This is fascinating, particularly because it reinforces the emotional quality of class. We are served numerous honest views from interviewees (namely, the well educated) on the value placed on cultural participation. Does cultural participation come naturally to the well educated, the established middle class or the elite? Or do they have to work at it? And while I agree with the authors that there is an ‘emerging cultural capital’ that is ‘fast-moving, hip and fashionable’ (p. 125), I can’t quite shake the feeling that cultural confidence conveys not only a sense of sophistication but also envy and judgement. There are numerous examples of this, but what came to mind for me was the band Pulp’s hit single ‘Common People’ or those ‘Trailer Trash Parties’ (aren’t they fun!?) that suggest a middle-class anxiety around being happy, being irresponsible and being deviant. Savage et al. hit us hard with how class, historically sanctioned and institutionalized in the education system, is also about feeling good about oneself by looking on with both envy and loathing.
Cue the GBCS which appeared on the BBC’s website in 2013 and was picked up as ‘the kind of fun thing to do when checking your Facebook’ (probably because it took about 20 minutes to fill out and produced a ‘class classification’). As a social scientist, I was struck by the ways the authors painstakingly take the survey apart and provide the epistemological and ontological thinking behind its clever and simple design. I cannot recall a similar sociological study that has grown from an internationally publicized survey – the largest survey of social class ever conducted in the United Kingdom. Readers will be fascinated by the attention to detail given in the take-up of the survey and the distribution and disparities found at the local levels. In and of itself, the take-up of the survey reflected the marked geographical divisions in why some people are interested in class and others are not. As Savage notes, ‘it is the more affluent who seem to be more interested in the topic of class, even though they might also be sceptical of the survey results’ (p. 11). And on the same page ‘…Of the 161,000 respondents, not a single cleaner or worker in elementary (basic) services or plastics processing answered’. The book offers a superb methodology and analysis of how the GCBS questions were calibrated. For students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, the book will provide a rich and relevant insight into how to produce rigorous data from survey research and how to marry together online digital engagement with more conventional modes of data collection. I refer here to the inclusion into the study of one of the UK’s leading researchers of the precariat, Lisa McKenzie, who lent her ethnographic skills to interrogate why the precariat had not engaged with the survey. The methodological richness of this book is certainly a key strength.
The first key finding is that in the United Kingdom today there is a clearly defined wealth elite at the top and the precariat at the bottom, alongside huge numbers of people located in five middle-class structures that are fluid and mobile in their orientation. The second, perhaps more significant, finding is that Britain is facing new mountains of inequality fuelled by a ‘housing aristocracy’, regional, national and intra-city divides and the elite educational and professional institutions that are affiliated to political parties (and no longer to occupational classes). The ‘cultural class analysis’ fundamental to the framing of these findings reveals extremely interesting things about how classifying processes themselves are necessarily morally loaded and inherently hierarchical and proliferate a politics of stigmatization. This is somewhat ironic, given the GBCS is itself a survey that seeks to classify! But this misses the point of this book, which is to place under a political microscope the ways in which we discourse on class and how we positon ‘our own class’. Sadly, it is this politics of classification that has led to the precariat becoming invisible in modern Britain today.